I attended a Christian school very much like that through the 8th grade. I’m forever grateful that my parents divorced and my mother could no longer afford to send us to a private school.

I’m gay, and as a boy I struggled a lot with my religious upbringing. And while my public high school was not exactly gay friendly, it was not overtly toxic and hostile like my former Christian schools had been.

Ironically, the anti-science positions of my Christian middle school teachers created a crisis of faith that soon prompted me to drop my Christian identity, at least to myself.

I say ironically, because I could have reacted very differently to my sexual orientation struggles, internalizing a lot more self-hatred and so forth, if I had continued to be credulous about the rest of the experience.