Rob Blackhurst

Every March, American students leave their university campuses and head off for Spring Break – a weeklong recess that marks the unofficial end of winter

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Some use this time selflessly - to build schools in Mexican slums or dig wells in Africa – and an even smaller number have the college library to themselves. But for most Spring Break is a tradition synonymous with drinking games, booty shaking contests and reckless driving.

The origins of Spring has been traced back to 1936 when a swimming coach at Colgate University in Madison County took his swim team for annual training in Fort Lauderdale. Three years later the city was hosting a Swim Forum for 300 swimmers from colleges across America and, sensing the bacchanalia on offer, other students followed. After the war, the town aggressively marketed itself as a student destination – soon becoming known as "Fort Liquordale". By 1960, when Where The Boys Are, a coming of age comedy about four Midwestern College co-eds on Spring Break was released, it was fast becoming as established a rite of passage as the High School Prom. This semi-official status mean most parents, whatever their concerns, feel that it would be unthinkable to ban their offspring from going on their Florida adventures. Most parents confine themselves to a vague-but-heartfelt "Be Careful".

Since Fort Lauderdale has started actively discouraging Spring Breakers, the festival of Bacchanalia has moved to Panama City Beach in the panhandle of Florida. Anywhere between 250 000 and 400 000 students -from mainly Southern and Mid-Western colleges – arrive with heroic tales of thirty-hour drives- and head straight to the beach. Here, the skies are always azure, the sand is like icing sugar underfoot, and the temperature rarely falls below the mid-sixties.

Panama City itself has an air of faded gaudiness – with its tattoo parlours, waffle-houses and cheap motels -despite the best efforts of the tourist authorities to rechristen it as the "Emerald Coast". Its beachfront is lined with high-rise concrete condos usually occupied by the retired. At Spring Break many have the sense to sense to leave town, and the quiet sands that are home to nesting turtles later in the Spring are transformed into crush of suntan lotion, sweat and stale beer.

Within thirty seconds of setting foot on the beach I spot a drunken girl in the US Army's Recruitment Tent attempting to stay astride a Bucking Bronco while drinking beer from funnel. A chanting crowd takes turns to down "body shots" of Tequila. Most of this drinking is illegal, since the Federal drinking age is twenty-one, but the police seem to have given up any attempt at enforcement.

If the police have turned a blind eye to this ritualized mild hedonism, America's young evangelicals have not. For the past thirty years, amid what they refer to as "Satan's Playground", a group of Christians has been coming to Panama Beach to evangelize to their hedonistic contemporaries. The inter-denominational Campus Crusade for Christ –the biggest Evangelical movement in America – hold a bible camp in a beachfront hotel complex, with a clear view of the debauchery a few metres away. They are joined by an even more devout Christian youth organization, BeachReach 2010, who offer free mini bus rides and pancake breakfasts to the heathen Spring Breakers. This, they hope, will detain the students long enough to talk about sin and salvation.

It has been said this Spring Break clash represents the meeting of 'two Americas'. Though America remains religious by European standards - seven out of ten Americans are absolutely certain of God's existence – American Campuses, like American society, are divided into the nearly 30 per cent who describe themselves as Evangelical Christians and the rest.

The rules adopted by the evangelical Spring Breakers are an almost perfect inversion of the average undergraduate lifestyle: drinking is prohibited, students are not allowed to visit the opposite sex in their rooms, and women (though not men) are asked to "honor their brothers in Christ by dressing modestly".

As they gather around the hotel pool at the start of the week, the students seem palpably excited about the challenges the week presents. If they can evangelize here, they can evangelize anywhere. During the opening session of the CCC week, a pastor asks for students to volunteer to be part of a "commando crew" with "spiritual AK-47s" who will take part in "special ops" – which means approaching strangers in nightclub queues armed with a bible. A thicket of willing hands goes up.

Dave Michels, an avuncular organizer for CCC in his fifties, has now been to Spring Breaks for a decade. The students can be hard targets: "There are levels of inebriation where you think that this is getting nowhere because they can't carry on a conversation" he says. "But I can count on one hand the number of negative conversations I've had. We tabulated our contacts and saw that one in six who we interacted with said 'we want to accept Jesus Christ'".

Though it might seem an impossible task to speak to bacchanalian students about the divine, it appears that some combination of free time and throbbing hangovers can make Spring-Breakers receptive to the consolations of religion: "If someone gets here on Saturday and they are drinking constantly – by Wednesday or Thursday there is something inside them that says: 'there's got to be more to life than getting drunk all week long'.

At 10 am the next morning the queue for pancakes is snaking around the block. Holly Hatchett, a Christian Cheerleading Coach from Lynchburg, Tennessee is pouring coffee for those battered by the night before. She is attending her first Christian Spring Break. "It's been a real eye opener for me because I'm really sheltered. It's made me sad, honestly. If you look into their eyes they are not happy. I see some of the girls and I just want to grab them and say, listen, don't drink anymore. There are so many mistakes that are going to be made".

Holly is wearing a yellow ribbon for the safe return of the troops – her boyfriend is in Iraq – ("I'm not worried about him. He's got so many people praying for him") and round her neck is a cross, a Jesus fish, and a heart inscribed with "True love waits' to mark her pledge to protect her virginity. "I live in the Bible belt. Everybody goes to church but a lot of people aren't as devout as me. I got saved when I was five at Vacation Bible School. I comprehended then that he had died on a cross for me". Holly, though sincere in her faith, is far from a pulpit-thumping fundamentalist. She radiates laid-back Southern sunshine and does her most successful evangelizing by initiating conversations with men about football "which I watch like a guy".

But are the Spring Breakers really as receptive to the evangelicals as Michels suggests? Kristen Gyorgak, from Bowling Green State University, is discussing last night's antics with her friends. I ask whether they have been bothered by the beachside evangelism: "Some of them are beating you over the head with it. They say: "Jesus loves you – he'll forgive you for what you've done this week. But it's worse on our campus. There's one guy who shouts "repent" "repent" and I say: 'I'm just going to class'. Indeed, American students, acclimatized to the strong religious presence on their campuses, are far less surprised than their European equivalents would be when their fellow students approach them bible-in-hand.

Britney Alack from Tennessee Tech University, wiping tables, is what Evangelicals call a "new creation" – a convert to Christianity who in previous years lived the full secular Spring Break experience. She has found a God "that is loving but also wrathful" through the highly organized regime of bible reading and "discipleship" – one to one mentoring – on campus. "It's not [easy for] me to do this because I know what they are thinking when people did it to me last year. I couldn't do it without God," she says. "I was trying to make guys happy or to make friends happy through drinking, the partying. But it wasn't fulfilling. I was trying to get away from this little good girl, goody-two shoes image but it was the least fulfilling thing I had ever done in my life."

In the evening, Panama Beach's streets are jammed with traffic. Finding a taxi is nearly impossible. The Christians' free mini-bus service, which any student can order, proves as popular as the pancakes. It is organized with military precision: BeachReach has even invented an I-phone App that tracks its minibuses using Google maps. Inside the buses, the atmosphere is calm. The evangelizers, instead of talking to their passengers about God, are more concerned with ensuring that THEIR PASSENGERS can remember which condo they are staying in. "When they're drunk they really don't really want an in-depth conversation," says the van's security man with a hint of sadness. The passengers we pick up from outside Pineapple Willy's Bar are polite – and Jewish - so any attempts at evangelism are drawn to a swift halt.

While the rest of the BeachReach crew is out in their minibuses, a group stays back in the prayer room to keep vigil. Here, as soothing new age chords are played and candles burn, students stretch out on the floor like starfishes and call out random lines of prayer in sequence. The names of the students who have been picked up in the vans – sent by their cohorts via text message – scroll down a video-screen at the front so that they can be prayed for in real-time. BeachReach claims that their prayers were once answered in spectacular fashion: a call to close the bars was followed by a power cut in a large area of Panama City –forcing drinkers home early.

At the end of the Spring Break season, Dave Michels tells me that Campus Crusade for Christ attracted a record 3,000 students to proselytize. According to their own statistics, they initiated spiritual conversations with over 25,000 people: one in five of the people they approached wanted to talk about God. And their spiritual catch was bountiful. 1673 students agreed to "Trust Jesus' and become Evangelical Christians on the beach. "Spring Break was wilder than ever because of the number of people that were there", he says "But many of the Spring Breakers on the beach thanked our students for having initiated a spiritual conversation. Our students had gone there expecting people to be mad at them – and they found just the opposite".

Angel Ellis, the organizer of the pancakes and van-rides, is more conservative about the BeachReach hit rate. They served breakfast to 12,000, picked up 11,000 in their vans, but reckon that just twenty-seven made a decision to follow Christ. They also glimpsed the dark side of Spring Break. This year two students died in Panama City falling from their fifth-floor balconies. And her volunteers ended up ministering to the friends of a student who had been raped in a nightclub: "We are a presence in the city of hope and light – and they do turn to us,"

But, whatever these performance indicators say, the spiritual stakes are so high for these students that, even if they had converted only one sinner, they would be back next year. As one told me over breakfast: ""It doesn't matter how good a life you've lived. I can sit there and donate a million dollars to Haiti and work for years to rebuild it – and in God's eyes, according to Isaiah 64, that's "filthy rags". It doesn't mean anything if God will say he never knew you".