I write the following near the end of Church Camp:
“Is this a book about church camp or a book about faith deconstruction?” an early reader asks me.
“Yes,” I replied, a lopsided grin reaching toward my left cheekbone. I may not have been asked a yes-or-no question, but sometimes a demonstrative yes is the only thing you can say in response. When my family recently sat around the dinner table with my aunt and uncle, my younger son asked a question of the six of us gathered there: Would you rather have a unicorn horn or a monkey tail? It’s a valid question. I, for one, lean toward the magic of a sparkly rainbow horn poking out from the middle of my forehead, even if there is something to be said about balance and agility and swinging from branches in your spare time. Yes, Uncle Chris declared. Why limit the charm of a single appendage when both imaginary options are valid in and of themselves?
As I go on to write, yes is the only answer I could give. Yes, it’s a book about church camp, but also, and also, sometimes it happens to be about my own spiritual evolution — a change that happened when I walked away from one particular expression of white evangelicalism and ended up feeling like a becoming of sorts.
Of course, this is not what the gatekeepers want to hear proclaimed from the front of the rickety wooden stage at camp.
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