I was raised in much the same way you were in a fundamentalist Baptist home. And I'm remembering a "loophole" preachers would sometimes point out.

They would absolutely claim, "Once saved, always saved." But, even as they proclaimed that no power could "un-save" someone, they would teach that continued sin in a person's life could indicate that that person was never "saved" to begin with —often citing, "By their fruits ye shall know them."

Being that Baptists are historically Calvinists, I think that idea comes from a surviving streak of belief in the predestination of an Elect few. I mean, most Baptists will tell you they don't believe in predestination, but the Southern Baptist Convention still officially endorses the idea that God chooses who he will save based on his infinite knowledge of how people will behave during their lifetimes.

It's all hugely contradictory/paradoxical, and in my experience few Baptists ever think deeply on the subject. However, many Baptists are quick to claim the related Calvinist idea that some people who think they are "saved" actually are not. They say those people either did not sincerely repent, did not have enough faith when they did, or something along those lines.

My guilt, especially as a gay adolescent male, was intense, but it was worse than that.

Since I had sincerely prayed many times for God to lift the "burden" of same-sex attraction from me, and since my gay sexual thoughts would not go away, I presumed that meant I wasn't actually saved and probably could not be saved, because I wasn't one of the Elect — and so God had never intended to save me.

And all this was decades before conservative Christianity focused even more intensely on sexual sin and sexual "purity" doctrine.

I struggled until sometime in my 16th year to escape an intense fear of hell. Finally, thanks in part to obviously false Baptist beliefs in young earth creationism and other howlers like a literal, global Noah's flood, I realized that the teachers hike had been listening to were just ignorant fools.

I put religion behind me and never returned.

But I feel such intense empathetic pain for people stuck in that kind of ignorant, condemnatory, shame-filled religious world.