Atheist Winter Camp Welcomes Students

Published Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 in Culture & Society

A summer camp aimed at kids from non-religious families is expanding to offer a winter holiday retreat for children and their parents in Florida this December.

The Florida camp is sponsored by Camp Quest, a nonprofit network of sleepaway camps aimed at children of atheist, agnostic, humanist, and other freethinking families.  Apparently, they feel uncomfortable with Christians celebrating the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ or celebrating Hanukkah. If they only knew that God was waiting for them with open arms to shower His love upon them.

In a press release, Elizabeth Spike, camp director at Camp Quest Florida, said this: “Many secular families feel inundated with religion from extended family members and the broader culture during the holiday season. We wanted to create an alternative for those families by providing a winter retreat where non-religious parents and their children could have fun and feel included in a community that shares their values.”

A winter retreat for atheist parents to take their kids? This grieves me. God help them. If they don’t exchange their atheism for faith in Christ they will not find a winter retreat in eternity. Indeed, they’ll find a fiery hell—and that’s not God’s will. It’s not His will that any should perish.

In addition to canoeing, campfires and crafts, the children will be taught “secular ethics.” I have never heard this term before. So I looked it up.

According to Wikipedia, secular ethics is “a branch of moral philosophy in which ethics is based solely on human faculties such as logic, reason or moral intuition, and not derived from purported supernatural revelation or guidance (which is the source of religious ethics). Secular ethics can be seen as a wide variety of moral and ethical systems drawing heavily on humanism, secularism and freethinking.”

In other words, forget the Bible. Man makes his own determination of what is right and what is wrong. Man decides what is right for him. Man’s own determination of what is right for him lead to the need for Jesus to die on a cross in the first place. And He died for the humanists, secularists and freethinking atheists just as much as He died for those who believe.

The press release also offered some statistics: According to the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, 34 million American adults don’t identify with any religion. That number has increased dramatically since past surveys conducted in 1990 and 2001. The survey also reports that younger Americans are less likely to identify with a religion. Among 18-29 year olds 22 percent are non-religious, compared to 15 percent of the U.S. population as a whole.

“We know from the survey data that there is a huge potential demand out there for non-religious forms of community,” said Amanda Metskas, executive director of Camp Quest, Inc. “Those numbers make me confident that Camp Quest’s current growth is only the tip of the iceberg.”

I find the references to winter retreats and icebergs ironically sad. This is such a statement of our culture today: advertising for atheist camps. Christians, we have a responsibility to reach a lost and dying world. I believe we can reach then with the love, grace and power of God. We have a lot of work to do. Let’s get to it.