But while Chu is gentle with gay people who are working to reconcile their sexualities and their faiths — straining in some cases to do so — he is far less generous to those of us who are no longer believers. For gay people who’ve left organized religion, the condescension that creeps in around the edges of his narrative begins to feel like contempt. Chu bemoans the “decline of belief for gay people,” with a lot of hand-wringing about those who have abandoned the faith. He dedicates the book “to those who have endured.”

The most maddening example — Chu’s most uncharitable and, if I may say so, his least Christian moment — is his handling of a man identified only as Mr. Byers. Years ago, Mr. Byers was the Bible teacher at Chu’s high school in Miami. A married man with a wife, a young son and another child on the way, Mr. Byers was forced to resign after his homosexuality was discovered. His wife divorced him and he moved away. Chu tracks him down and interviews him in a restaurant in Vermont. Mr. Byers opens up to Chu about his past, about the details of his outing and about his current life. When Chu asks about his beliefs now, Mr. Byers explains that he is no longer a Christian but “a pantheist . . . with pagan tendencies and earth-centered rituals.” Mr. Byers assures Chu that he’s at peace.

“I don’t believe him,” Chu writes, “because he doesn’t seem at peace, although that could be because he’s sitting across from a guy who keeps asking him invasive questions.”

Or it could be because Mr. Byers, as we learned on the previous page, gave up his parental rights after his wife divorced him; his wife’s second husband adopted his children, whom he hasn’t seen in more than a decade; his brother refuses to speak to him; and his parents think his lifestyle is despicable. Maybe such acts of emotional and spiritual violence, committed in the name of Christian beliefs, account for the sadness Chu detected.

Chu worries that gay people like Mr. Byers have been “pushed out of the church.” That’s not true for all of us. My father was a Catholic deacon, my mother was a lay minister and I thought about becoming a priest. I was in church every Sunday for the first 15 years of my life. Now I spend my Sundays on my bike, on my snowboard or on my husband. I haven’t spent my post-Catholic decades in a sulk, wishing the church would come around on the issue of homosexuality so that I could start attending Mass again. I didn’t abandon my faith. I saw through it. The conflict between my faith and my sexuality set that process in motion, but the conclusions I reached at the end of that process — there are no gods, religion is man-made, faith can be a force for good or evil — improved my life. I’m grateful that my sexuality prompted me to think critically about faith. Pushed out? No. I walked out.