Further update: I’m going!

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Update: half a day later, and I’ve raised over half the target amount. Seriously wow - thanks so much to everyone who’s helped so far, and it’s great to know other people like this idea too.

If you haven’t heard of Soul Survivor and you’re reading my blog, you should have by now. Founded in the 90s and taking place annually since, Soul Survivor is a five day evangelical Christian festival which caters to an audience in their late teens and helps them ‘get to know and follow Jesus better’. The festival is big business, drawing in tens of thousands in an average year – it is, if you’ll forgive the analogy, the Mecca of Christian youth recruitment in the UK, and numerous similar events have been set up since its inception.

While figures on British religious observance tend to vary, Christianity in general has seen better days. Less than five percent of people attend the Church of England’s services every week, about two fifths told YouGov last year that they weren’t religious, and of course we attack the basic freedoms of Christian homophobes by not letting them adopt. Despite this, Soul Survivor and organisations like it are bucking the trend: evangelical projects which target the young specifically, also including NewFrontiers and the Alpha Project, are growing in number and success. In a few decades’ time, their graduates may just be our religious mainstream.

It matters, then, to know what’s going on there. Yes, Soul Survivor is obviously a great few days for those people who go – but does it, like those other new organisations, conceal a dark heart behind its smile? Both NewFrontiers and Alpha mimic the reactionary theology of Catholicism’s beastlier primates, the former denying its women the chance to preach, the latter obsessed with original sin. I have heard, too, from friends who attended Soul Survivor that its more charismatic contingent collapse often to the floor, quivering in the grip of the Holy Spirit.

I don’t know, but I need to find out. So I want to go there myself this summer.

Two years ago Adam Rutherford did the Alpha Course as an atheist, keeping a column in The Guardian about it. The series was popular because it gave unbelievers a worm’s eye view of what the course entailed. That’s what I want to do at Soul Survivor, but I need your help.

This link will take you to a donation page. If I raise the £100 I’ve specified there, I’ll buy a ticket to Soul Survivor and head there in July; every day, I’ll write a new blog post daily about what it’s like and tweet everything that happens to me in between, from prayer sessions to hymns involving blood to celibacy. (‘Stay dry in your tents’ is, I suspect, a many-layered piece of advice.)

If the idea of giving your money to a Christian organisation bothers you, think about this: every summer every year, Soul Survivor sells out. If we don’t do this, and I don’t turn up armed with iPad and copy of God is not Great , someone else will be there in my place, and the organisers will have made no less money. And that person won’t be an atheist blogger, who’ll report about what goes on at the festival – they might gullible, or emotionally vulnerable, or easily led, the perfect targets of evangelism. If you send me, you’re putting one of your own in the ring.

As far as I know, no one’s done this before, and I think we need to learn more about what these festivals involve. But I don’t want to do this if no one else thinks it’s a good idea. So if you do too, consider making a donation. It doesn’t have to be large: twenty people giving £5 each will see me there. And trust me, godless comrades and potential investors – send this blogger among the Christians, and he won’t disappoint you.

Alex Gabriel