There was something incredibly appealing about people who loved God so much that they believed it would solve every other problem in their lives, as these boys did. Soon enough, I found myself singing along to the catchy praise songs with my eyes closed and my hands in the air. If something promised to fix my self-hatred that easily, why not let it?

The fact that I had a Jewish father was a problem. I don’t think anyone in the youth group knew this about me, unless they stopped to consider my last name, but I felt I wouldn’t fully fit in with them until I eschewed this part of myself. Until then, it was another aspect of myself to hate.

Our youth group leader had a girlfriend who styled her hair in that choppy, angular cut popular in the early 2000s: one diagonal line from bang to tip, flat-ironed to death. She wore barbed-wire chokers and hot pink T-shirts with skulls on them.

When we went on Christian camp overnights, she stayed with the girls, giving us talks from her top bunk about the sacredness of sex and the importance of maintaining our virginities for our future husbands. At that point in my life, sex was such a terrifying prospect that I was grateful to someone who told me not to do it.

That winter, we drove around singing Christmas carols to anyone who would listen. I cared a lot about what our group leader’s girlfriend thought about me being genetically half-Jewish, because in the car, I asked her if she believed my Jewish grandfather, who had died when I was 6, was in hell.

She thought about this for a moment. She couldn’t have been more than 20 years old.

“You know,” she finally said. “I’d like to believe he had a moment, right before he died, when he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and personal savior,” she said. She patted me once on the knee for good measure.