Before you do anything else, you have to read this story in the Ada Evening News from Ada, Okla. Try to ignore the egregious subject/verb agreement error in paragraph 2, and pretend punctuation doesn't matter throughout. This is Ada, after all. For you out of state readers, Falls Creek is the summer camp (town, really) for the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma (SBC). I made a snarky comment on facebook tonight, my status actually:
Man, just saw a church sign that said Falls Creek is next week. Six days to pregnancy, first gay experience, and disillusionment for teens all over Oklahoma! Go Falls Creek!This inspired a friend to forward the Ada story to me. I'm not sure anyone ever got pregnant at Falls Creek, but this is the age of Morning After pills and Plan B, so with all due respect to Congressman Lankford, parents may not know what their kids did at Falls Creek, and some may not ever call. Hear of shame or embarrassment, or, frankly, the inability to nail down an actual date? That goes doubly for gay liaisons. I do know a few gay friends who had a rendezvous at Falls Creek, and no way in hell were they going to go home and confess to SBC parents what had occurred. Seriously, the story says 4-1 ratio of campers to adults, but are we supposed to believe there is no smoking, drinking, or sex at a church camp? This ain't just Falls Creek I'm picking on. It happens all over the country every summer. With that being said, let's turn to the story and our newly elected congressman, who, by the way, used to be a counselor at Falls Creek before he ran for Congress and won. (I'll leave you to decide the quality of those qualifications.)
Let's just make observations in order as they occur in the story. I haven't used this approach in some time, and since I'm two movies and two bottles of wine into the night, it'll make organization simpler.
- Teen pregnancy, high school drop out rates, and illicit drug use high in a state where 1/4 of people are some kind of Baptist and where more than half are evangelical or fundamentalist Christian. It's possible this means we need less Christianity, not more. Just a thought. If Christianity is the leaven that leavens the whole lump, how is it possible that in a state with one of the highest church attendance rates in the nation these issues are problematic?
- Um, it's not statistics that are hurting today's generation; it's behavior. One hopes that camp counselors hope to fight against these behaviors, not the statistics. That would be almost as quixotic as a war on drugs or terrorism, two things Oklahoma Baptists tend to be for.
- 41% of births from unwed mothers is high. What to do? I know. We'll get 'em to sing songs and confess and pray after a sermon in which they're told premarital sex is wrong. We will not discuss safe sex or birth control. That would be sinful, and besides, the sermons are working so far, right?
- Lankford is wrong. Teens definitely enjoy sex. I was a teen once. I enjoyed it, even if I sucked at it. (Ha, there's a pun there...admittedly, it would be better if I was gay.)
- Incomprehensible from our congressman: “The farther we go down this direction, the more chaos there will be in families and in lives and in our own government structure and everything." Everything? Really? Like in our refrigerators and dreams and cars and baseball card collections and libraries? And why will this result in chaos in our government? Will they be getting pregnant and high too? Maybe they should have emailed him the questions in advance.
- Echo of the generation before them: We're scared of black people! Damn Mexicans ruin everything! Women should stay home! We love Rush Limbaugh! Glenn Beck is a genius! God bless George W. Bush! Yeah, listen up, kids. Your parents never engaged in these behaviors, did you, parents? Nope. No sex or drugs for them. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
- Where are they headed? What path are we discussing? If they use condoms and birth control pills, there is no pregnancy in their future. Where will weed take them? To the presidency, if the last three are any indication.
- Complete, unfiltered nonsense from our congressman: “I do think there is a cultural de-emphasis on faith,” he said. “If you have faith, you’re marginalized. You’re just one of those people at one of those churches, and that’s not really mainstream.” Um, what's that, person who was just elected to Congress? You're marginalized? Well, I guess since there are only 435 of you, that's technically true. You are marginalized to the upper margin.
- Do not want to discuss the fabricated statistic that 500-800 have no church background. they do. they may not have been in a while, but they do.
- This is called an exercise in futility. Trust me. I teach college. “They’re geared towards helping the Christian students go forward in their faith. We’ll be addressing to Christian students the cultural things we’re seeing.” The absolute worst human being I had in class last semester, bar none, is a huge Falls Creek advocate. Called it life changing. She was a petulant, pouty, whiny, disrespectful, lazy, lying cheater with a grandiose sense of entitlement. So glad she made it to Falls Creek. Really changed her life. Perhaps she was a murderer before I met her.
- On this, we agree: "There’s a piece of truth out there that we need to pick up.” We probably disagree on what it is, but we agree that it's out there. Pretty sure it's not a summer youth camp, though.
