People who know my faith story sometimes ask me what I would have changed about my upbringing. The answer is complicated. I grew up surrounded by smart, well-educated people. They gave me room to struggle with my doubts. But in the same way some teens feel the urge to sneak out at 2 a.m. and smoke pot with their friends, I felt a growing urge to transgress the boundaries of faith.
I don't have the typical story. My parents were 1970s social-justice hippies who volunteered with the Quakers in rural Kenya for the first part of my childhood and then raised me in the Presbyterian church when we came back to the United States. Despite their best efforts, I walked out the doors of the church at age 23.
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