It's hard to say, really. Intellectually, most of the questioning I did regarding the validity of faith and the validity of religious teachings centered around the science denialism of the only Christians I knew anything about. When I was 16, I thought you had to believe nonsense to be a Christian. I thought you had to accept that the Earth was only 5 or 6,000 years old, that Noah's flood literally happened and carved out the Grand Canyon, that biological evolution doesn't really happen, etc.

There was no way I could accept that kind of obvious nonsense, and I'd never experienced a religious tradition that didn't require that kind of willfully ignorant mindset. I didn't realize some Christians were actually educated, intelligent, and rational.

So, when I realized I could not force myself to believe obviously false things things, I understood that I had to be an atheist.

If I'd had experience with Christians who did not deny science, who were not Biblical literalists, my thinking might have gone in a different direction, and I might not have ever questioned faith. Today I'm convinced that faith itself (in the religious sense of some sort of force that informs people of truth without objective evidence being involved) is meaningless, just a word people throw around to justify belief in fantasy.

But had I known Christians who relied on facts and evidence instead of on faith, had I known Christians who didn't believe the Bible was literally true, and had I known Christians who embraced reasoning and science — then I might not have ever stepped foot on the road that led me to dismiss the validity of faith entirely.

Sure, the moral condemnation of my sexual orientation got to me badly. Rejection of my humanity and moral goodness got to me badly. But if I hadn't already dismissed the religious foundations of that condemnation, I might have been inclined to believe the youth pastor, and I might have gone to that conversion therapy camp.

Because if something is true it's true — regardless of whether we want it to be true.

But because I had rejected faith and rejected religion already — by realizing I had no valid reason to believe anything about gods or spirituality, or anything else taught in church — I never faced that question.

I never once considered that the youth pastor's ideas about homosexuality were true. He insisted to me that the Earth was 5,000 years old and that the wine Jesus drank in the New Testament era was unalcoholic (🤣) grape juice.

So I knew for sure my youth pastor was a typical conservative Christian — an ignorant, uneducated fool I could safely dismiss without fear he might be right about anything.