I grew up in a household where faith existed, but lightly.
We went to church, not out of fear or obligation, but because that’s what families like ours did. It was a large San Diego church. Casual. Modern. Loud worship music. Young pastors with microphones and jeans. It didn’t feel intimate or solemn. It felt approachable. Friendly.
We were Christian in the way most people are Christian when they inherit it: Bible stories, sin and redemption, heaven and hell. VeggieTales. Youth group. Bible study. Scripture framed as truth, not metaphor.
Honestly, I liked it.
I loved the storytelling. I loved the sense of meaning. I didn’t think of it as fantasy, but I also noticed something early on that I didn’t yet have language for.
I was told that Disney movies were art.
Beautiful, exaggerated, symbolic, but not true.
The Little Mermaid wasn’t real.
It was allowed, but not to be believed.
Religion, however, was real.
It was true.
It was fact.
Art was guidance.
Reality was tangible.
Religion was truth.
Even as a child, I felt the disconnect.
I remember wondering how Noah fit two of every animal onto an ark. I couldn’t reconcile the scale of it. The logistics. The reality I understood versus the story I was being asked to accept as literal truth.
And then a quieter, more dangerous question followed: If Noah was real, why weren’t mermaids real?
Why was one story doctrine and the other fantasy?
This is where adults tried their best, and unknowingly did harm. They answered definitively. They had to.
Because admitting uncertainty would have cracked the entire structure, and so instead of saying I don’t know, or this story might be symbolic, or faith doesn’t require certainty, they gave concrete answers to questions that didn’t have them.
I don’t blame them, but as a child, I learned something important in that moment.
I learned that asking questions was dangerous.
That truth belonged to adults.
That belonging required certainty.
And certainty required silence.
By middle school, I had made a choice, even though I didn’t know it consciously at the time.
I stopped asking. I folded myself into the structure instead.
I went to church camp. Youth group. I joined a Christian musical theater group instead of the secular one. I participated fully. Earnestly. I read the Bible cover to cover (more than once).
Adults were happy with me. That mattered.
Christianity, as it was taught to me then, felt safer than uncertainty. Safer than exile. Safer than being the kid who asked too much.
I didn’t believe harder.
I hid better.
There was grace in my church, especially compared to others. I remember attending a Catholic service with a boyfriend once and feeling shocked by the rigidity. My mom whispering afterward, Thank God we aren’t Catholic.
At the time, I believed that.
Looking back, I can see the truth more clearly: the structure was gentler, but it was still a structure.
It still required obedience over inquiry.
Belief over discernment.
And I accepted that trade.
Continued in Part 2.
