This article in GQ is a good read.
The author spends a weekend on assignment at a major ‘christian’ rock festival called Creation.

Once you get past his hate relationship with the RV he winds up having to drive, he meets up with some guys from West Virginia and it gets interesting and introspective.

He had a brush with evangelicalism in high school, so in covering this crowd he speaks the language enough to fit. But I like that he understands he doesn’t, that his doubts are as real as faith itself.

The rain stopped. It was time to go. Two of the guys had to leave in the morning, and I needed to start walking if I meant to make the overlook in time for the candlelighting. They went with me as far as the place where the main path split off toward the stage. They each embraced me. Jake said to call them if I ever had “a situation that needs clearing up.” Darius said God bless me, with meaning eyes. Then he said, “Hey, man, if you write about us, can I just ask one thing?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Put in there that we love God,” he said. “You can say we’re crazy, but say that we love God.”

He isn’t kind to the commercialized aspects of the sub-culture and has some hard words for mediocrity.


One Response to “Upon this Rock”

  1. 1 howard 

    I went to Creation three straight years, in my late teens-early twenties. He’s got a pretty accurate picture of what I remember. The drive to Mt. Union, PA, was about four hours for us, truly into the middle of nowhere.

    There are a lot of pretty cool people to meet at a place like that, and it can be as good, or as bad, an experience as one makes it out to be — or in some cases, as your neighboring campsite makes it out to be. But the incessant marketing of Christ can be unsettling, though many attendees might be so drenched in the atmosphere of it that they don’t notice anymore.

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