Camp Constitution, the conservative camp for kids which featured a “climate realist” as a speaker this year, won’t return to its Rindge site in 2018.
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, which owns the Toah Nipi Retreat Center, contacted Camp Constitution Executive Director Hal Shurtleff, to inform him that InterVarsity was focusing on its mission to serve only church or church-related groups.
“I completely understand,” said Shurtleff, who has been holding his camp in Rindge since 2008. “We have the utmost respect for (center Director) Greg (Greg Hodgson) and his staff at Toah Nipi, and I consider them friends.”
After the conversation, InterVarsity spokesperson Christy Chappell Belkin said Shurtleff made the decision to relocate the camp to the Lakeside Christian Camp and Conference Center in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
The camp has a Christian component to it. Every year, Rev. Steven Craft, an ordained Baptist minister from New Jersey, speaks at the camp. Several of the classes, taught to children ages 5 to 15, feature experts on religion.
The camp also includes conservative speakers, like Tea Party activist KrisAnne Hall, who spoke in 2014-16, and Willie Soon, a Smithsonian Institution scientist who hosted a class titled “The Climate-Change Hoax.”