… As someone who was raised in a functionally non-Christian family and became a Christian in college, I have something like an anthropological take on those of you who were raised in the faith. But X strikes me as one of those people who just can’t get past his conservative-evangelical upbringing: there’s so much about it that he hates and wants to repudiate, but whenever he tries to throw it away it ends up sticking to his hand, so back in his pocket it goes. This gets repeated with slight variations for decades.

I think it’s a matter of wanting to retain absolutely everything that’s good about an evangelical upbringing and discarding absolutely everything that’s bad, but life doesn’t work that way. You’re going to end up keeping some things you wish you could lose and losing some things you wish you could keep. Sad but inevitably true.