Well said! I grew up in the same world you did, implicitly trusting religious leaders like Jerry Falwell. I met him once and played basketball with his son. I thought I had died and gone to heaven to meet Moses or something.

When I discovered I was gay, I found myself listening to intense moral condemnation, constantly, from the pulpit, from the people I looked up to as heroes.

To say that did a number on my head is quite an understatement.

This was nothing like voluntarily choosing to abstain from watching movies! It wasn't even like deciding to throw away my comic book collection, which I did when I was 10 or 11 years old because the church had decided that comics are too "wordly" for good Christian kids.

Instead, I read Chick tracts, comic-like works produced by the infamous Jack Chick. In those comics, people like me were depicted as depraved, ugly, sadistic, and literally possessed by demons or Satan himself.

I became a very sad and depressed child and adolescent. Even after I intellectually rejected Christianity at the age of 16, I didn't get better right away. I tried to kill myself when I was 18.

Today, when I read about conservative Christianity in the United States, when I experience how angry and mean spirited it is, I remember my childhood and the tendencies I saw even then that led to where we are now.

What really gets me is how this form of Christianity — this angry, persecuting, condemnatory Christianity — is the dominant, majority form of Christianity in the United States today.

Will that end up destroying Christianity here? Probably not, but I should think that it will seriously impact the number of people willing to participate.