I was a summer camp run by the denomination I was raised in. In theory it was supposed to be a nice, safe, moral place to send your kids. In practice it sometimes was. Certainly during the Bible studies and so forth it was okay. But the supposedly "adult" counselors (college age) would either turn a blind eye or actually participate in some very awful practical jokes. Anyone who looked or acted the least outside the average was teased, and no adult corrected them. And the kids were not well-monitored.
And if you looked or acted outside a certain norm, you got teased, including jostled about and even assaulted, while the adults at most sat there like Roo and said "be nice, kids." The fat kids had it particularly bad. The counselors often helped in the abuse.
I thought it was particularly amusing (not) the one night where one kid got buckets of water dumped on him a 4am, drenching everything -- all his clothes, sleeping bag, etc. with the counselor's encouragement, and then was somehow expected to sleep in all that mess. Since I was awake I counted no less than 3 couples having a go out in the woods. At least two of them hurriedly put their clothes back on, separated and tried to sneak back during the ruckus, the the other couple was farther off and didn't bother, but the sounds were rather unmistakable.
That was a fairly typical night.
Of course, the next morning we would all have to get up and act real holy and say grace and read our Bible passages and sing hymns.
The counselors really needed better training and more management from the adults in charge, I think.
My mother thought for years that I had called a week into the camp to be brought home because I was just homesick. It wasn't until this past June that I disabused her of that notion and gave her the full story of everything that went on. She asked me why I hadn't told her then (this was decades ago) and I said I had tried, but she told me to shut up. Ah...parents.
But to try and relate this to Jesus Camp, it was not like that. We didn't have to endure lectures about how awful
other people were. The most we had to listen to was boring sermonettes about how angry God was about how sinful
we all were.
Too bad the people in charge weren't more angry about our sins, imnsho.
Really it was no different than the private HS run by the denomination. As many problems as there were in the public schools at the time, the little angels from the private school were up to more no good, esp. in the realm of drugs and getting started early on that family. Well, that's what you get when everything is a taboo and repressed, I suppose.
I was hurt during a race riot in middle school, and called my brother from the HS rather than Mom. She still doesn't know this. I called my brother to hide the fact that I got hurt, because she would've shipped me off to that nice "safe" school. No thanks. I would've gone to the local Catholic school happily, but she would've preferred her own denomination and would not have listened to me, so I just did my own first aid. I probably should've had some stitches, but butterfly bandages and being very careful to avoid infection did the trick.
