He said he liked my shoes – black Chuck Taylor high tops, neon pink trim. Our first assignment was to do a profile on another student. We’d chosen each other. I liked his blue eyes, dark hair, Ken-doll perfect face, but in my profile I wrote about his academic achievements. In his profile he wrote about my shoes.
***
I was seventeen, part of a special band of homeschooled evangelical youth being groomed to Take Back America. We would be the generation to win the culture war and give God the glory. To do this, we would need to be rigorously trained, which is why the best and brightest of young Christian writers had gathered to attend journalism camp on a Baptist college campus in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Our teachers were professional journalists from World magazine, whose purpose was to counteract the insidious liberal bias of such publications as Time or Newsweek, while simultaneously legitimizing the serious academic nature of right-wing Christian journalism. We wore suits (men) and skirts (ladies). We took impeccable notes, learned about the dangers of plagiarism through a screening of Shattered Glass, and we were told that there was no contradiction between writing objectively and writing with a Christian bias.
***
In our downtime, we could wear what we liked. Thus the Chuck Taylors, along with my collection of rubber bracelets and other items collected from Hot Topic. I had a green care bear t-shirt, and once I caught the boy staring at my chest. “I like your bear,” he said, and to me this was the highest form of flattery.
I was the kind of kid who was not exactly cool, but not exactly uncool either. At this camp there was another girl who also wanted to stand in the glow of the boy. She followed me like a leech. I was embarrassed by her, sure that she was using me to climb up the ladder of cool, when I still had so many rungs to go.
The three of us snuck into an empty building on campus one night to watch Se7en on the boy’s laptop. We found a dark common room with a couch. He sat in the middle. The volume was so low we had to press against each other. Around us, the building stretched away on all sides, echoing empty halls that made my skin prick. When a counselor discovered us halfway through the movie the boy slammed the laptop closed and we slunk away in proper shame.
***
He said he’d kissed a lot of girls. Just dropped that casually into conversation. Once he’d kissed a girl he didn’t know in an elevator. I had kissed zero boys. Maybe he would kiss me. I had a sort-of boyfriend back home in the real world, but so far he had failed to provide any kissing. We were allowed to have telephones in our dorm rooms, so when my parents dropped me off they ran to Wal-Mart and bought me a generic plastic phone with a cord. The first time my boyfriend called, I spoke to him for a few minutes while hovering in my doorway, listening to the laughter of other students in the hall. Next time I just let the phone ring.
***
We spent a lot of our downtime in the dorm hallways, sitting on the carpet, leaning against the walls in rows, just talking to each other. Once we made a massage chain, everyone working to position themselves between the right people. I wanted his hands on me. I wanted, for once, to receive and not to give.
On the last night of camp we were joined by one of our teachers, Bob Jones IV, descendent of the infamous founder of Bob Jones University, a wildly conservative college known for banning interracial relationships right up until the year 2000. This Bob Jones told us he had abandoned his birthright as university president because he was too liberal for his family, opting instead to become a writer. He sat casually on the floor, answering all of our questions like he was one of us. I was in awe. His rebellion was small, but to me it seemed like a giant leap, an act of intense bravery.
***
There was another girl at the camp who smiled like she had a secret. Her eyes were huge and dark, and she wore delicate dresses: she was Amelie in living form. She listened to bands like Mazzy Star, the kind of music I’d never even heard of. The boy loved this about her. Long after camp was over I bought a Mazzy Star CD and listened to it over and over in my bedroom, trying to find the magic in it, but I could never convince myself to like more than a song or two.
Once the boy discovered this girl, he was gone, slipped right between my fingers. I knew it for sure on the day we practiced photojournalism on the streets of Chattanooga. The assignment was to document people working in the city. She and I trailed the boy all over downtown. She barely spoke, just kept smiling that mystery smile, like she didn’t much care about any of it. I struggled to find a theme for my project, forced to take pictures of whoever the boy found interesting, trying to snatch snapshots that could be my own, then running to catch up with the two of them. I resented him for reducing me to a girl without her own point of view, but it was too late to find another partner. When they put our photos up on the projector that night I looked down at the table as mine clicked by, hoping nobody would notice their half-heartedness.
***
A year later, when I walked into studio art class in my first week of college at a small liberal arts school in South Carolina, there she was. Just as serene and large-eyed as I remembered, but she didn’t remember me. Her paintings were good, mine adequate. I was still copying other people. I was too afraid to ask for her friendship, but I did get the Facebook version.
I found the boy on Facebook, too, because he was friends with her. A few years later I sent him a message. I had just transferred to a different school and changed my major. It felt like anything could happen. At the time he was a student at Patrick Henry University, dream school of all evangelical homeschoolers, called “God’s Harvard” in a book by Hannah Rosin. He was between girlfriends and happy to talk to me. Ride the train up and meet me in DC, he said, where we would drink red wine and smoke weed. I pictured us falling into each other in a drunken glow, starting a whole new life. I never took the trip, but he did send me a mix CD. He wrote on it in sharpie: “This year will be different. Things will change.” And it was true.
***
These days, we get to know the rest of the story. The internet does that for us. I’ve seen photos from both of their weddings. As far as I know, nobody who attended that camp has stormed the capitol or changed the course of American history.
But there was another girl from journalism camp, one I didn’t pay much attention to at the time, who also found me on Facebook. We didn’t know each other at all, but I watched her life unfold like a story. Soon after high school she was pregnant. She did not get married. She did not settle down. She moved to Alaska, where she raised her son on her own, tramping through the snow with this child like a happy elf in his brightly colored winter clothes. To me it looked a lot like bravery.
Tags: bob jones university, christianity, journalism, leanna moxley, summer camp
Everyone has that Amelie/Mazzy Star girl in their life. The girl you aspire to be but can never quite figure out how to be, until one day you realize that it’s braver and more fun to be your loud-laughing, dick-joke-telling, honestly-enthusiastic self. It took me about 30 years to figure that out. (Mazzy Star girls are 1. a naturopath in AZ and 2. a bartender in SF.)
I was enjoying this piece a moderate amount until I got to the last paragraph and then BAM! FEELS AND TEARS!
By the time fbook rolled around, it was too late for me to find all my Christian summer camp friends and crushes. They’re mostly buried deep in my memory. The boy whose AOL profile I obsessively checked for three straight summers? I only just now remembered his last name by chance. (Googling “Jeremiah his dad was the camp speaker he was shy and had really blue eyes and was from Arizona” does not get the best results.)
I don’t think I had an Amelie Mazzy Star girl, but it took me years anyway to stop feeling like I was not as good or pretty or creative or whimsical or popular or dramatic or not-shy or (fill in the blank) as almost everyone I met. It might have been some time late in college, when I started to see being smart and engaged and passionate as a personal asset and not as a socially crippling weakness.
By the time fbook rolled around, it was too late for me to find all my Christian summer camp friends and crushes. They're mostly buried deep in my memory. The boy whose AOL profile I obsessively checked for three straight summers? I only just now remembered his last name by chance. (Googling "Jeremiah his dad was the camp speaker he was shy and had really blue eyes and was from Arizona" does not get the best results.)
I don't think I had an Amelie Mazzy Star girl, but it took me years anyway to stop feeling like I was not as good or pretty or creative or whimsical or popular or dramatic or not-shy or (fill in the blank) as almost everyone I met. It might have been some time late in college, when I started to see being smart and engaged and passionate as a personal asset and not as a socially crippling weakness.
Thanks for sharing. I had to comment, because 1. I go to Patrick Henry College, 2. I study journalism, and have heard Marvin Olasky, and part of our curriculum was his book, 3. close friends have done the World Journalism Institute, and 3. in highschool I’d been several different Bob Jones summer camps.
I feel like I have to say there is an alternative to the disillusioned Christian narrative. My faith and community doesn’t restrain me from being quirky. From being a writer. From seeking truth. Perhaps it was different in an earlier time when you were there, but I always heard emphasized, in Marvin’s classes, that the truth was something we shouldn’t be afraid of, nay, must *embrace* as Christians, especially if we were to reach anyone else at all. The value of being a good, truthful, artist first, was something instilled in me at PHC.
Maybe it’s because my parents were never as strict, (I actually was more sold on living fundementally ‘if it was true” than they were) I guess I sometimes read these articles and think, “is wearing skirts, not listening to some pop music, and generally not being exposed to R-rated movies the problem?” I mean, I’ve watched R-rated movies, (heck my Mom and I watched Bridget Jones’ Diary together, my Mom not realizing it was R-rated, and we laughed at all the swearing and then promised to not do that again, even if we really enjoyed the humor.) and I also really LOVE skirts, even if I also really LOVE my jeans.
I also know secular people who don’t listen to pop music because they think it’s a degrading experience, (heck Socrates didn’t like the pop music of his day.) I know Christians (who go to Patrick Henry College, ooooohhhh evangelical fundie place) who are huge Lady Gaga fans. I’m not. To be honest, I don’t think it makes them “more enlightened” if they are. But like you with your Mazzy Star cd, I’ve tried to like some of it, and had varying experience. I freakin love Morcheeba, and Daft Punk, and had “Wrecking Ball” (unfortunately, ugh) stuck in my head at work all yesterday. Sometimes it’s a matter of taste, and I think that’s fine.
But no matter where I fall on the “pop-culture slider”, though, (I burned my way through Orange is the New Black, and I LOVE The Toast.) I genuinely believe, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
I believe Jesus’ love is every bit as transcendent, paradoxical, and complex, as today’s life. I believe if more people read Ecclesiastes, they would see the heart of a post-modern poet in Solomon, who simply wrote about the rhythm of life, and it’s seasons, and it’s contradictions (is it better to just enjoy life, or be aware of how futile everything is?) and yet, he came back to the fact that the only way to fulfillment while we are dust in the wind, here on earth, was to “Fear God and keep His commandments.” I believe in things like sin, restitution, good and evil, that Jesus brought absolution for sins, and also that a narrative of creation and destruction and redemption echoes around the whole world.
It feels to me, after reading several different articles like this, like there’s are only 2 acceptable narrative choices between “committed, intense, fundie” and “cool, chill, ex-fundie who only survived their experience because they tapped into the core of who was truly alive around them, i.e.: the underground.”
If there is no middle ground, then I shouldn’t exist. (My favorite book is Jane Eyre, because it’s the story of a passionate, complicated, intensely artistic woman, who won’t betray her principles for her heart [run off with Rochester] and won’t betray her heart for her principles [go to India with St. John as some sort of Christian sacrifice]) I hope that I’m able to strike that balance as well.
I’m sorry, I know this is *your* story, and has nothing to do with me or my experiences. I just felt like I could share my little fragment that is similar from yours and yet different as well. Thank you for writing a piece that didn’t have that judging vibe to it, and allowed for the middle ground in your own story.
I wish you the very best in your writing and living. 🙂
(one tiny note about the whole BJU interracial dating thing: I wasn’t aware of the “since 2000” part, but I know the policy has been looooong defunct at BJU and no one I’ve ever met, involved with the school, has ever done anything but laugh in incredulity at that old policy.)
Danielle, I thought this comment was really well written, and in light of Mallory’s “Men Apologize” posts, want to really encourage you to share your story with the rest of us Toasties! Seriously.
Also I will say as an agnostic woman of color who was actively looking at colleges in 2000 (I finished HS in 2001), I can’t imagine too many things that would make me nopetopus away from a school like “we had an interracial dating ban well past the 1960s.” It’s nice that people can laugh at it now, but that is definitely the one major thing I associate with BJU. There are plenty of other schools that have a legacy of segregation and racism to contend with, but 2000 is much too late in my book to have something like that as a formal policy.
Wow, thanks for your kind comment, rkfire. I have to admit I posted, and then went and rued the day I thought commenting on a blog was a good idea, and braced myself for virulent replies.
🙂 I should have trusted the Toasties more.
I appreciate your perspective and I agree that the policy is horrifying. I’d had always previously understood that it was some policy in the 50’s or 60’s, that was long dead, (judging from my experience visiting the school during summer camps, where there was a friendly atmosphere and diversity amongst the students) but I agree that it’s totally unacceptable to have it on the books, as you said, until 2000. (btw, I’m totally adopting “nopetopus” as a verb because it’s fabulous.)
Thanks again for your kind words. I have batted around the idea of writing my story up and blogging it, or, in my wildest dreams, submitting it to the Editors Of Note, or Toastmasters (oh my GOSH can we call Mallory and Nicole the Toastmasters??) but never seriously thought of doing it, so it’s really encouraging to hear that the anxious story of that most uncool thing, a *believer*, could be interesting to anyone else!
I grew up super Catholic, and while I’m not so much anymore, a lot of stories of people of faith really resonate with me. I’d love to hear your story, whether it’s published on the Toast or on your own blog or something. Keep writing!
Religious summer camp – the first place I had a full fledged, several hour long panic attack. I don’t have fond memories. All of the other kids seemed like Amelie girls to me. I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but I think part of it was the stress of frantically trying to copy other people, hoping it would be enough. The alternative seemed even more firghtning.
Make this a camp in Arkansas in 2000, and I could have written this. Not as well as you, but god. Identify so hard with every last sentence here.
This is absolutely wonderful. The ability to zoom peoples’ stories out to satisfy our curiosity – digital narratives? – using the internet is one of my favourite things about writing at the moment. It happens in Goon Squad, and in The Interestings, and I dig it. Also, this post is everything about being a creative teenage girl (really everything important) in one small post – it’s so short and it does so much so well, with such ease. Love it.