So a snake-handling faith-healer and a Presbyterian minister walk into a tent revival meeting…

If you don’t get why that’s the setup for a hilarious joke, you might not get the rest of this post, and possibly you won’t understand why I spent a week of rock climbing and camping in the desert feeling like an uptight Presbyterian surrounded by people speaking in tongues and writhing in the aisles. I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I would be working as a camping/climbing instructor for a group of sophomore girls. You can read in that link about my intentions to just model enthusiasm and competence, rather than try to “teach” anything. Things didn’t turn out quite as I had planned.

All the instructors get together for two days before the trip starts to plan the trip and make sure we’re on the same page as far as boundaries and rules (can the girls have their own snacks, do we eat meals together, how do we decide who’s turn it is to clean up the kitchen, etc.). The rest of the staff is all amazing, well-qualified, and fabulous. There are 6 instructors (2 to a team) as well as 2 rock specialists who will be there for part of the time setting up climbs and monitoring big picture site safety. 5 of the instructors and one of the rock specialists are women, one of the instructors identifies as genderqueer, and one of the rock specialists is a man.

The first sign of conflict happens in the first day when one of the instructors points out that the male rock specialist is going to have to really be aware of the fucked-up ways that all these sophomore girls are going to want to interact with him. He is an attractive rock climber in his late 20’s with a South African accent. He says he’s aware of that, and will be careful to be appropriate, but “at the same time, I won’t emasculate myself”. You could watch the hackles go up on the hardcore feminists in the room. This women’s empowerment stuff tends to attract fairly hardcore types (not necessarily feminists, but hardcore climbers, hardcore survivalists, just really intense alpha personalities in general). In this group, 3 of the women had worked together extensively before, two of the three were in a committed relationship (with each other), and all three considered “smash the patriarchy” to be an apt description of their basic platform. Wow. Try being the one man in that crowd, and find a way to not be emasculated.

Instructor teams had been decided for us, and we broke into those teams to get to know a bit about the person with whom we would be sharing responsibility for the physical and emotional safety of ten 16-year old girls in the desert for the next 5 days. I will call my partner Ashley, in part because that satisfies a childish and petty desire to call her something that I think would bother her, but mostly just to avoid using real names. Ashley and I are really different people. She’s a radical feminist, a lesbian in a committed relationship with another instructor on the course, a recovering alcoholic with tendencies toward anxiety and obsessive behavior, and has been running girls’ empowerment and wilderness courses for around 6 years. By the end of the course, I came to respect many things about her, and I learned a lot about different styles but, like the Presbyterian at the revival meeting, there was so much about her style that made me really uncomfortable.

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When I was in high school I went through a rebellious phase that involved regularly attending the local Assembly of God church and trying to bait my mother into debates about whether evolution was a supportable scientific theory. I went to church every week, and “got saved” (at least three times, cuz I was afraid that it wasn’t sticking), and went up for altar calls, and spoke in tongues at summer camp one year, and had a mad crush on the youth pastor (who later dropped out of the church and hit on me). At that same summer camp where I first spoke in tongues, we had a particularly charismatic motivational speaker. One evening, just as he was building up to a great climax, he suddenly stopped and focussed intently on someone sitting on the other side of the stage from me. I couldn’t see who he was looking at, but I heard the speaker say, still holding the microphone up to his mouth, “Is that your wife?” He was pointing at someone that I couldn’t see, but since we were all high school kids it’s unlikely that the boy was sitting next to his wife. I couldn’t hear his response, but he must have muttered that she was not. The speaker, notching it up a level both in volume and pitch, asked, “Are you going to marry her?!” The boy, probably wishing he could sink down below his seat, must have muttered something non-committal.

“THEN GET YOUR ARM OFF OF SOME OTHER MAN’S WIFE!!” the speaker yelled.

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After our first day of rock-climbing with the girls, we all stood in a circle to offer appreciations to each other. As you felt called, you could say something that you were really impressed by or thankful for from the day of rockclimbing. The girls said things like, I really appreciated how everyone cheered for me when I didn’t think I could go any further. After several appreciations, one girl said, “I appreciate Rob’s accent” and all the girls giggled. Ashley stepped forward into the circle, animated and pissed.

“There are girls here who rock-climbed for the very first time today, and ALL YOU CAN THINK ABOUT IS THAT ONE MAN!!” And she says “that one man” in the same way you might say “that turd that the cat knocked out of the litterbox”.

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I thought Ashley’s point was a good and valid one. In fact, I supported her intentions throughout the trip. But her approach made me so uncomfortable, with its roots in emotional manipulation, that I had a rough time playing along. Her approach was all about the emotional build-up, creating a scenario where the participant really starts to see how fucked-up they are, how undeserving, how sinful, (or in this case) how intolerant, how middle class, how brainwashed by society. And when you have people genuinely freaked out, you offer them an amazing solution, you throw out the altar call, you tell them what they need to do to be all right. If this had been church camp, we would have told them that they need to accept Jesus as their lord and personal savior. Since this was about girls empowerment and breaking down cliques within their class, we told them that they should eat lunch with the Asian students and stop acting stupid around boys.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m totally in support of breaking down cliques and not acting stupid around boys. For that matter, I’ve got no problem with folks practicing Christianity. I just don’t think that emotional manipulation is a very effective way to create long-lasting change. And I think it’s dishonest and, well, manipulative. Everything about Ashley’s approach to the week was about creating a situation where the students would be out of their element and vulnerable. They would not be allowed to go into their tents until bedtime; they would not be allowed access to their personal snacks except at one regular time after dinner (this is a big issue when half of the students are from asian countries and the only food we are offering is mac and cheese and pb&j); everyone must wait for everyone to have food at each meal before eating; there will be no downtime or time for personal reflection or journaling; we will run one “trust exercise” after another during times when we aren’t climbing or eating; etc.

There is no doubt that these are effective ways of creating community and breaking down barriers. When you make people emotionally vulnerable, make the group the only possible means of support, and create a situation where people will feel physically unsafe (like rock-climbing), you will have a rock-solid group of supportive girls after three days. But will you have a rock-solid community after 30 days, when they are back in their comfort zones with their pre-existing means of support?

Obviously, there are a lot of charismatic Christians out there, so this must be an approach that works for people.  The emotional build-up and catharsis of it must be effective for people, but I never found it so. That’s why I kept having to get “re-saved”.  The effects never lasted much longer than a few weeks past summer camp. Pretty soon, alone in my bedroom trying to pray, I would start to wonder what was the point of speaking in tongues anyway? If I didn’t even know what I was saying, could I possibly mean it? Why would God care what language I pray in anyway? And actually, while we’re at it, why would God even care if I pray? It’s not like he doesn’t know what I’m thinking, right? And why would God care what I’m thinking, since he already knows what I will do with my whole life? And that doesn’t even really make sense, so maybe this whole thing doesn’t make sense…and pretty soon I had headed down the dark tunnel to sin and iniquity, or at least to wearing too much lipstick and hanging out with the stoners.

These girls have been indoctrinated in the marketing of women’s empowerment from early on. It’s a pervasive part of our culture to give lip service to women’s equality in order to
sell shampoo, or tampons. (”Shouldn’t you be leading a carefree life?”) These girls know how to talk the talk, they know all the right answers, just like I knew how to explain to people how speaking in tongues is a valuable gift from God. But I didn’t believe it, and I don’t think these girls believe it either. And all you get with the emotional approach is people who feel it for a while, but there’s no intellectual commitment to it. The fervor fades. They’ve never seen anyone living it in the long-term.

On the last morning, I offered that if anyone wanted to get up early enough to climb a nearby bluff with me and watch the sunrise, I would be willing to wake people up for that. All but one of the girls agreed, and we woke up at 5am to hike up the hill in the dark and watch the sunrise. We sat, scattered in our own spots, while the sun came up over the far-off and flat horizon, past the freeway and the powerlines receding into the distance.

Afterwards we talked about the things we had seen and heard, and mostly about the things we thought about while we sat. Many of the girls had very interesting things to say, but the one who, unknowingly, had a message for me was the girl from Korea who said, “I mostly didn’t think about anything, I just wondered how the sun would rise. I have never seen the sun rise before.”

My mind was blown. Can you imagine never having seen the sunrise? Not even being sure *how* it rises? I felt really ashamed of how much I take for granted. I didn’t admit to them that mostly what I had been thinking, while we sat, was that I wish something good would happen. All there is is the sunrise and some cliff swallows calling, and I wish something really *exciting* would happen. Her thought made me realize, how freaking exciting is it that the sun rises every day!? How amazing is it that I have the opportunity to sit here on a windy desert cliff and watch it in silence with a group of people whose minds are blown by the simple fact that it is happening!?

And that was the most real thing that happened all week. And I was glad that I had a chance to share with them a real experience, one where a regular person chooses to get out of bed before dawn and experience the real world. Because that is what I believe in. I don’t particularly care about smashing patriarchy, or about who you share your lunch with. But I do care about creating connections, between people and people, between people and earth. If I had to choose something to smash, it would be civilization, and the idea that people need to be coerced into caring about each other and the world, and the fact that people don’t care enough about the sunrise to have ever seen one. I believe in the sunrise.