On the Wisdom (or Lack) of Allowing a Teen Skeptic to Attend Falls Creek

The parish stepdaughter wants to go to Falls Creek. For those of you who are fortunate enough to live outside Oklahoma, Falls Creek is the campground operated (owned?) by the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma, the official SBC entity in the state. It's by far the largest youth camp in the state, and I'm sure one of the largest in the region. I've been there twice, and it's bigger than some of the towns I grew up in, much bigger than Bowlegs, OK. 

As is often the case in the middle school and high school years, the parish stepdaughter has a friend who has invited her to summer camp. Many of you will have had similar experiences, or have been the inviter. These are typically not the kinds of decisions about which I spend massive amounts of mental energy. As the hhdw and I are pretty open-minded about allowing the teen to make her own decisions about god, faith, lack of, etc., a trip to Falls Creek is not that big of a deal. Right? Ah, but many of you have never met our intrepid young crusader for the truth, whose gifts of over-generalization and disdain are unmatched in Piedmont High School, save for two of her friends. I am as worried about unleashing her on the kids at Falls Creek as I am about receiving a call from a camp counselor saying, "Come pick up your little heretic."

As part of the pre-camp ritual, Kylie (that is her name, by the way) received a questionnaire to be filled out in advance and returned to the home church. Among the questions, we found this jewel: When the adults from our church pray for you, what would you like them to pray for during the week you are at Falls Creek? Unfortunately, Kylie received a book recommendation prior to filling out the questionnaire, and having nothing else to write on, she wrote just below that question: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. We're off to a roaring good start already.

The more troubling questions were these: Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? Which of these have you done in the past week? Read the Bible____, Prayed five minutes a day___, Memorized a verse of the Bible___. I understand that a youth pastor is going to want to know if the kids accompanying him are saved or not, but even when I was a Christian I would have loathed that question. Personal Lord and Savior? Is that as opposed to impersonal? In contrast to savior of the world? Over against lord but not savior, or vice versa? And accepted? Or acknowledged? Or believed? Or, hell, here's a good idea, do you practice kingdom ethics? The second question isn't all that troubling, except that those are three odd choices out of all the Christian-y things a kid could be doing. Work with the homeless? Support an orphan? Pass out food? Volunteer in your community? Bah!

Our greatest concern is Kylie's utter joy in demolishing the silly positions of her peers. We've warned her not to engage in arguments while she's there, but at the same time, I don't want her passively listening to bullshit either, especially as they will be focused on the unsaved kid in the group. If the pressure builds to convert, I fully expect her to brandish the arsenal we've spent 15 years instilling; that's what reason and rhetoric are for. The question is whether she can do it without saying, "You're a fucking idiot," even to the adults. Or if it will cost her a friendship. Mainly I think she's crazy for going because she'll have to sit through a dozen sermons about teen sex, drinking, rapture, evangelism, devotion, and abortion. Possibly homosexuality. She's liable to say anything just to provoke someone. It's not outside the realm of possibility for her to say, "I'm a bisexual muslim whose had three abortions and an atheist lover, and I think Barack Obama is hot." Not at all. I'll sleep fitfully that week, and wait for the phone call.

Comments

[Leighton]

Posting this on Father's Day was really good timing.

The prayer request response makes me wonder why nobody has ever thought of imprecatory prayer concerning past events. (Or maybe it's that I just watched the latest episode of Doctor Who.) I mean, if god can do anything and stands outside of time as its creator, surely he can alter events in the past, right? How do we know that it isn't because of the ongoing prayers of the faithful for centuries to come that World War II turned out the way it did? It would be the perfect example of prayers answered before they were sent.

I realize that there isn't really a demographic of people who are anxious about the past being rewritten, so this would never catch on. But it seems like this is a fair question for adherents of an omnimax theology.

[Joe]

Leighton, that's why God sent Sam Beckett back in time to right what once went wrong. Keep bringing them in my house and I'll keep knocking them back

[Matt Mikalatos]

If Kylie is lucky perhaps she will be treated to a lecture about being a godly woman and correct clothing to wear as a woman so as not to make men stumble.

[j-fo]

Leighton,
You're comment reminds me of a really interesting song by Dan Bern called God Said No. The song's narrator keeps asking god if he can go back in time and save people like Kurt Cobain, Jesus, etc. He also asks if he can go back in time and kill Hitler with a big powerful gun. God's response is that "no, you'd just screw it up." Funny and sad.

[Jason Shepherd]

Being a former pastor and influential in the mental and spiritual rape of many impressionable youngsters I say set her ass free on them. I could have used a girl like her back in the day.

Matt...I kinda prefer it when women dress inappropriately, but that's just me.

[Jessica Campbell]

I hope Kylie is secure in herself not to buy in to the bullshit. It's hard to be immersed in the crap for an entire week- with the message that your life is sad and that you are hurting being repeated, while your regular teenage insecurities and hurts are being exploited and not at least feel kind of badly about yourself. From what it sounds like though their tactics aren't as mature as she is and she'll be able to withstand the pressure to feel badly about herself. The religious stuff is what it is - it's the message of not being a "slut" etc. or all the other social insults that go along with the messages of purity, drinking, abortion, faith - etc. that make me cringe for her. Remind her that the Socratic method is a rather helpful way to get the attention off her and on to the question asker - make them define what they mean - that will get them to leave her alone maybe. And beware of "I used to be bad but now I'm good" camp counselors - they're the worst.

[cheek]

Leighton,
The backward causation question regarding prayer is actually a pretty common topic in the philosophy of religion. Alas, it typically comes up as an "intuition pump" in arguments for the compatibility of human freedom and divine foreknowledge (though in my case they pump an intuition that I just don't seem to have), or as a counterexample to the necessity of the past, a crucial premise in arguments against their compatibility. Alas, very little attention is ever paid in such arguments to current physics' best account of the nature of time, we philosophers being loathe to get out of our armchairs and deal with annoying things like facts.