What made a self-proclaimed liberal atheist Jew decide to go to church?
My Sundays needed structure. No, I think my attraction to the church grew out of repulsion. I grew up thinking of myself as a born atheist, bristling at public expressions of faith, at being shoehorned “under God” by the Pledge of Allegiance. Berkeley was very accommodating of that attitude. For the most part, I didn’t have to deal with religion if I didn’t feel like it. And so from the vantage point of my little sliver of experience, I thought of our country as a pretty secular place. The violent realization I had when I moved to Virginia for graduate school was that this is a very Christian country, with around a quarter of Americans self-identifying as evangelical. And in spite of my smug self-conception as a tolerant person, I had this calcified, unrecognized prejudice against evangelical Christians. Their politics angered me, their culture seemed silly. Most of all their vocal efforts to see the world converted to their views made me, frankly, afraid of them. Around the time I was
