I was sitting in a circle with my peers on the fall retreat, a Friday night, sometime around 1am. My youth pastor was in our small group. I had been processing suicidal thoughts for months. I asked him whether someone killing themselves could be part of God's plan. I was told that yes, if someone killed themselves it was basically okay with God and/or part of his great plan. I had been carrying that question for weeks. I had waited for a moment that felt safe enough to ask it. That was the answer the institution gave me when I finally did. I was not having a spiritual experience. I mostly knew that then and know that now.
The worst part is my youth pastor wasn't uniquely evil or lying to me.
The other part I've had to sit with is that even if they had been telling the truth even if the feeling was exactly what they said it was I was in no condition to evaluate that claim. And the format was designed to make sure I wouldn't be.
The Format Is the Argument
Youth retreats within evangelical and broadly Christian traditions tend to follow a recognizable structure. You travel somewhere removed from ordinary life. The schedule is full. Sleep is short late nights of worship and early morning programming are standard, not incidental. Physical activity runs high. Meals are communal and emotionally charged. By the final night, participants are exhausted, emotionally raw, and gathered together for the event the whole weekend has been building toward: the moment of decision, of surrender, of feeling the presence of something larger than yourself.
This format is not accidental. It has been refined over generations of youth ministry because it works. Teenagers come home transformed. They report experiences of profound connection, clarity, and meaning. The adults who designed the weekend point to these outcomes as evidence that something real happened.
They are not wrong that something real happened. They are wrong about what caused it.
What Sleep Does to a Teenager's Brain
Sleep deprivation does not simply make you tired. It rewires, temporarily, how your brain processes reality.
Research published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that sleep deprivation lowers the threshold for emotional activation and leads to a maladaptive loss of emotional neutrality sleep-deprived subjects were specifically unable to ignore emotionally charged information the way rested subjects could. The brain stops filtering. Everything feels significant. A separate study in the same journal found that sleep deprivation amplifies reactivity in the brain's reward networks, biasing the appraisal of positive emotional experiences sleep-deprived participants judged more stimuli as pleasant, and the effect correlated directly with activity in mesolimbic regions, the same circuitry involved in meaning-making and transcendence.
A meta-analysis covering 154 studies and over 5,700 participants found these effects are stronger in younger samples specifically, and that sleep restriction produced significant negative effects on adaptive emotion regulation in youth. Teenagers are not just equally vulnerable to these mechanisms. They are more vulnerable.
What this means in plain language is that a sleep-deprived teenager in an emotionally charged room has a brain that is chemically primed to experience feelings as more intense, more meaningful, and more positive than they would be otherwise. The prefrontal cortex the part responsible for critical evaluation, for asking why am I feeling this, what is actually causing this is the first casualty of sleep loss. What remains is raw limbic experience with no reliable apparatus for interpretation.
Into that gap, the retreat format inserts an explanation: this is God. This is what it feels like to be known. This is real in a way your ordinary life is not.
The explanation lands because there is no cognitive infrastructure left to question it.
Consent Is Not Possible Under These Conditions
Youth cannot meaningfully consent to the adoption of a belief system. This is not a controversial claim. We recognize it implicitly in the structures we build around children's decision-making in almost every other domain. A teenager cannot sign a contract. Cannot vote. We build these protections around the recognition that young people, by developmental definition, do not yet have the cognitive and emotional architecture to evaluate long-term consequences of irreversible decisions.
We do not apply this framework to religious formation. In fact, we do the opposite. The retreat format is specifically designed for the moment when a teenager is at maximum emotional openness and minimum critical capacity, and it deploys that window to ask for a decision that will be framed as the most important of their life.
There is a particular cruelty in this for teenagers whose inner lives don't map onto the framework being offered. I am gay. I knew it, in the way that you know things about yourself before you have language for them, long before I had any framework for what to do with the knowing. The retreat format did not have room for that. It had one story about who you were supposed to become in that room, one shape of transformation, one version of being known and it deployed sleep deprivation and music and the weight of crying peers to move you toward it.
When the explanation doesn't fit the person, the format doesn't adjust. The format produces the conclusion it was built to produce, and the teenager who can't quite arrive there is left to interpret their own resistance as failure. As distance from God. As something wrong with them specifically, rather than something wrong with the framework.
For a queer teenager inside an evangelical tradition, that failure isn't incidental. The theology and the psychology are working in the same direction. The tradition has a position on who you are. The retreat format has a mechanism for making you feel it in your body at two in the morning when you have no defenses left. The combination is not an accident and it is not benign.
The adults running these programs have, in almost every case I am aware of, genuinely good intentions. They believe they are giving teenagers access to something true and important. They are not manipulating children the way a predator manipulates with awareness of harm and desire to cause it. They are doing what was done to them, inside a tradition that has defined these experiences as evidence of divine presence for so long that questioning the mechanism feels like questioning the experience itself.
But intentions do not determine outcomes. The structure produces the result regardless of whether anyone inside it understands the mechanism. A well-meaning adult who does not know what sleep deprivation does to a teenager's brain is still running a program that exploits what sleep deprivation does to a teenager's brain.
The Accountability Structure of Youth Ministry
Christian youth ministry, particularly in evangelical traditions, shares an accountability structure with other volunteer-dependent youth organizations: it has almost none.
Youth pastors vary enormously in training, temperament, and theological framework. Some have formal education in counseling or child development. Many have neither. What they share is positional authority within a community that has granted them access to teenagers during the moments when those teenagers are most emotionally vulnerable — the retreats, the late-night conversations, the crises of faith that the retreat format is specifically designed to produce.
When something goes wrong inside that structure, the institution's first response is almost always to locate the failure in the individual. That youth pastor was wrong. That's not what we teach. That's not who we are. This response is not dishonest, exactly. It is structurally necessary. An institution that acknowledged the accountability failure was architectural rather than individual would have to reckon with the format itself. It would have to ask whether the retreat model, as designed, should exist.
This is how institutions survive contact with their own failures. They individualize. The bad outcome gets attributed to a bad actor, the bad actor gets removed or distanced, and the institution continues operating the same systems that produced the bad outcome — now with the additional defense that it has already demonstrated accountability. The system is preserved precisely by appearing to address it.
That reckoning has not happened in youth ministry. It will not happen from inside the tradition, because the tradition has too much invested in the experiences the format produces.
What He Said to Me
I was seventeen. I was suicidal. I was not hiding it I was pushing on the institution, asking it the questions that felt like they had to have answers, and one of the answers I got, from a youth pastor who I do not believe is an evil person, was that my suicidality might be God's plan.
I want to be careful about how I say what comes next, because it is easy to make this only about one person saying one wrong thing. That framing is available and it is not enough.
I was a queer teenager in a tradition that had a clear theological position on being queer. I was suicidal in ways that were not unrelated to that. The youth pastor who told me my suicidality might be divinely ordained was operating inside a theological framework where suffering is always available to be reframed as meaningful — where the pain of a gay teenager in an evangelical community can be described as sanctifying rather than structural. He reached for that framework because the framework was there and he had been given nothing else. The institution handed him a suicidal teenager and a theology of suffering and no training in what either of those things actually required.
I have raised this since with religious people I trust and respect. The response is consistent: that was wrong, that person should not have said that. I understand why that response feels like accountability. It is not.
I was a camp counselor at a secular camp for a full season. In that entire season, across every late-night conversation, every teenager in crisis, every moment of emotional intensity that comes with that work, there was never an occasion where the structure I was operating inside created conditions where telling a suicidal teenager that their suicidality might be divinely ordained was a possible move. Not because I am a better person than that youth pastor. Because I was operating in a framework with different assumptions about what harm looks like, different training about what to do when a teenager is in crisis, and different consequences for getting it wrong.
The youth pastor who said that to me was not an outlier operating against the institutional grain. He was a person the institution had placed in a position of authority over emotionally vulnerable teenagers, with minimal training, inside a theological framework where suffering can always be reframed as meaningful, during a weekend designed to produce maximum emotional openness. What he said was wrong. The institution built the conditions where it was possible to say it and call it pastoral care.
Those are not the same problem, and only one of them can be fixed by removing an individual.
What the Experience Was Actually Evidence Of
I felt something real at those retreats. I want to be precise about what I mean when I say that, because it would be easy to read this piece as an argument that nothing happened — that the experiences were fake, that the teenagers who came home transformed were deceived into believing something that had no basis in reality.
That is not my argument.
Something happened. The feeling of connection and meaning and presence that teenagers report from these experiences is neurologically real. The emotions are genuine. The sense of significance is not manufactured from nothing. It is produced, reliably and predictably, by a specific combination of sleep restriction, physical exhaustion, emotional intensity, communal experience, and deliberate narrative framing — applied to a developmental stage where the brain is at maximum sensitivity to all of those inputs.
The experience is real. The explanation the retreat format offers for it is not the only possible one. And the teenagers inside that format are not in a position to evaluate alternative explanations, because the conditions the format has created have specifically disabled the cognitive infrastructure that would allow them to do that.
That is what I needed someone to tell me at seventeen. Not that my experiences were fake. Not that the people around me were lying. But that feeling something strongly is not the same as that feeling being caused by what you've been told caused it. That there is a difference between an experience being real and an explanation for it being true.
If you are reading this and something in it feels familiar — if you have been in that room and felt that feeling and spent time afterward wondering why the framework you were handed for understanding it never quite fit — I am not here to tell you what it meant. I am here to tell you that the conditions under which you were asked to interpret it were designed to produce a specific answer, and that you were not in a position to evaluate whether that answer was correct. That is not a spiritual failing. That is what the format does.
I had to figure that out without help, after the fact, in the particular kind of silence that follows when you leave a community and realize the framework you were given for understanding your own inner life was never really yours to begin with.
You deserved better than that. So did I.
The institution built something that made it structurally impossible to give it to us, and then called what happened inside it grace.