An Old Fashioned Camp Meeting, South of the Dixie Line

It's something I say quite a lot, but I'm always surprised by how quickly you pass into another cultural zone when you cross just over the Mason Dixon.  Not many miles to the south, you'll find this old camp meeting grounds in a clearing in the woods.  

It's just a large barn-like structure called a "tabernacle," where revivalist meetings are held for a week in the summer.  The tabernacle is surrounded by humble little one-room cottages.

One of the wooden shutters on the side of the tabernacle was loose, so I was able to point my cell phone inside and get this interior shot.  I wonder what the picnic tables at the front of the room are for.  Do camp meeting revivalists celebrate the sacrament while seated at tables, like the old-time Calvinists once did?

Painted large on the sides of two of the buildings were the words, "Holiness Unto the Lord."

A few of the cottages were duplexes, and I did find one with the door ajar--the one on the left side of this photo.

Of course, the urbex motto is, "Leave nothing, take nothing, break nothing."  It doesn't matter if the building is abandoned (which in this case it was not), nothing inside of it belongs to you.  I just wanted to look around.

Someone will be back here in July to tidy up and make the bed.  Then they'll gather at the tabernacle for some hellfire and brimstone preaching and god-only-knows what else.  My philosophy of religion is this: If it makes you kinder and happier, then it's the truth.  If it makes you meaner and angrier, then it's a lie.  I hope this little camp meeting accomplishes the former in people's lives.

My guess is that it makes some people kinder and happier...but that it does the opposite for others.  Just a guess.  We tend to take from religion a lot of what we bring to it.

I grew up in a little sect that had camp meetings--though they were a lot more sophisticated than this place.  I remember them fondly, and I've always wanted to repurpose the camp meeting movement for religious progressives.  Something like the Rainbow People but a little more distinctly Christian.  Communion at picnic tables would definitely work...

Behind the administrative building, a narrow gravel lane meandered down the hollow and into the forest.  I followed it to this old rock quarry, which was pleasant enough in the sunlight, but which would surely be a spooky place on a dark day.