Broken Trust: My strange and disturbing summer at Adventist summer camp
by Carlos J. Gonzalez | 14 January 2025 |
I’m a native of Brooklyn, New York. I loved my city while growing up there—and I still do. The salsa and beat-heavy music, and the air of innocence on DeKalb Avenue, were a utopia for me.
But for my mother, things were not as good. She struggled with relationships of abuse and cruelty, even during her pregnancy with me. She became pregnant with my half-sister in a relationship with a man who came with his own set of issues.
A woman approached her with the promise of eternal life through joining the Seventh-day Adventist Church. My mother was searching for an answer, and this is where she found it. In 1977 my mother embraced Adventism. All this coincided with her marriage to my stepfather and my half-sister’s birth
While this new faith promised order and salvation, it arrived in a childhood already marked by chaos and upheaval. Rather than providing the stability it promised, this religious transition would ultimately lead to one of the darkest chapters of my young life. I was unable to marry the idea of a supremely loving deity with the cold, calculating, manipulation of my stepfather. My biological father would desert me in 1981 after he and my mother made a mutual decision, without my knowledge or consent.
My early introduction to God painted Him as loving, merciful, and omnipresent—a stark contrast to my lived reality. He was supposed to be my Heavenly Father but, in my experience with fatherhood, God was abusive and abandoned His children.
So while the Seventh-day Adventist church offered promises of divine understanding, I found myself drowning in unanswered questions. At home, where faith should have fostered healing, my stepfather’s verbal assaults and psychological abuse made finding a meaningful relationship with God seem impossible. The church’s teachings of a loving Father became harder to reconcile with the harsh treatment I endured.
Summer camp
Camp Berkshire is an upstate Adventist retreat which offered brief respites from my turbulent home life. I came there with a church acquaintance—a boy known for his bullying tendencies, though he’d never directly harmed me. With its horse ranch, swimming pool, and scattered cabins, the camp provided moments of peace I rarely found elsewhere. In spite of the difficulties I’d had embracing the Adventist church, these retreats gave me space to reflect.
Yet even here, confusion clouded my faith: my father’s relentless abuse and my mother’s silent complicity had left me spiritually barren and aloof.
I remember my first week at Camp Berkshire. I knew camp was meant to deepen my connection with Jesus, who I was told loved me unconditionally as my “best friend.” Instead, what unfolded there would create an even wider chasm between me and my mother’s cherished faith.
Over these forty years, his name still remains a mystery, as does his position in the church—he may have been a pastor, or a layman. At camp, he was our troop leader: a tall man, light-skinned and likely of Jamaican or West Indian descent. Like many Adventist leaders I’d encountered, he carried himself with a dark, authoritative demeanor—in my memory, not unlike I imagined dour Catholic priests of old.
His presence lingers and haunts my memory. There was something sinister in his no-nonsense approach. An early warning sign came during an unsupervised horseback riding incident that ended in my nearly having a fatal accident. But his true nature revealed itself in his treatment of the boys under his care, none older than fourteen. He systematically humiliated and broke us down, reducing even the strongest among us to tears and desperate resistance.
What happened with this man was bizarre. To this day, I still don’t know where his mind was.
His most disturbing ritual defied comprehension: each night, he would strip completely naked before leading us in a prayer circle. The sheer audacity of a trained camp counselor disrobing before children as young as ten raises haunting questions that have echoed through the decades. Why would someone tasked with our spiritual guidance and protection do such a thing? How did he pass any vetting process? Didn’t anyone know?
More chilling is the possibility that other children in other prayer circles may have suffered worse violations, their stories forever buried in silence out of fear and shame.
Denial
The trauma of those prayer circles, layered upon my stepfather’s unchecked abuse, paled in comparison to my mother’s response when I finally told her what had happened at camp: she insisted upon remaining in complete denial.
This maternal betrayal cut deeper than any other wound. My mother wasn’t a bad or abusive person by any means, and I believe she felt she always acted in my best interests. But this was something she couldn’t handle.
The decades that followed brought me battles with depression, anxiety, PTSD, complex PTSD, financial hardship, and social isolation, all overshadowed by the confusing dogma of my Adventist upbringing. My eventual embrace of atheism didn’t erase the questions that still demand answers: in the forty-three years since that summer at Camp Berkshire, what has the Adventist church done to protect its children? How many other violated trusts remain buried in the silence between prayers?
Over time, I’ve made peace with my mother’s failure to believe me and shield me from harm—though the scars remain. My journey has been marked by reruns of that trauma, amplified by the church’s seeming indifference. I’m left wondering: had my mother sought guidance, would she have been told to pray away the problems? Would anyone in the church hierarchy have truly heard my desperate cries, or would they have buried my pain beneath layers of doctrine and dogma?
The institutional abuse I endured has forged me into an unexpected advocate for victims of religious and sexual abuse. While the trauma’s demons still whisper in dark moments, I’ve found power in breaking the silence. Speaking truth has become both sword and shield: a way to battle those demons while protecting others who might face similar trials.
To those still trapped in silence: your story matters, and there are those who will listen.
Carlos J. Gonzalez was born in Brooklyn, NY. He’s a screenwriter and playwright, who also writes on trauma and film history. He currently lives in Connecticut.