I began avidly attending the Christian youth group in my Littleton, Colorado neighborhood a few months before the Columbine shootings in the spring of 1999. I was only 13, but I’d already been baptised twice by that point: once in a Catholic ceremony to please my Dad, and then again in a Mormon Temple at the insistence of my Mom. Both baptisms happened within a year of my 7th birthday.

After a terrible divorce that dragged on for years, my parents each decided that my siblings and I should be baptized into the religion of their upbringing. My Dad, who was raised Catholic, decided he’d give Mormonism a try in a move to please my Mom’s conservative family. A few years after the marriage went south, he decided he was definitely Catholic again and that my siblings and I should be too. And so, every weekend from the time I was 7 to 12 years old, we bounced from Catholic mass to Mormon service; from my mom’s spotless house in the suburbs to whatever friend’s basement or apartment my Dad happened to be renting that month. I am aware now that we were used as ammunition in my parents’ war against each other, and that’s probably why I clung to the things I did so desperately in my youth. When your family is broken, it makes sense that you would try to cobble together a new one out of the materials around you.

My neighbor Chris was the one who first invited me to youth group. Imagine how awkward you were when you were 13. Now imagine someone much, much more awkward. 6-ft tall, braces, unfortunately-bleached hair and perpetually unsure of what to say and where to stand. I had no idea how to live in my own body back then, so I thought the best thing to do was to stay as quiet as possible. For some reason, I had it in my mind that I wouldn’t live past 15 or 16. Some dark fate was patiently waiting to have its way with me; I was sure of it. I had no friends, so when Chris offered me the prospect of his company, I jumped at it. He was the first person I ever really trusted and something about his honest nature won me over immediately. He skateboarded, so I skateboarded. “I’m going to this thing at my church tonight,” he said. “We can skate on the stairs there.” My friendship with Chris led to other friendships, and I began to feel at home at the youth group.

Later that summer, I was convinced I heard God talking to me in my bedroom. I remember feeling loved, understood and called to something. I’m tempted now to write off the whole experience and claim that a high of happiness from finally attaining friends and a sense of belonging caused me to blindly follow my new church’s urging for non-believers to accept Christ into their hearts, but I think it’s more complicated than that. Whether what happened that day occurred within the confines of my mind or not doesn’t matter because the experience was vividly real to me. In a single afternoon, I absorbed the unshakable belief that there was a God who knew and loved me. Can you really call it faith when you’re completely convinced of something? The next day, I announced to my family that I’d become a Christian. I scheduled a 3rd baptism, this time in the religion and location of my choosing.

I loved the portable God the youth group would preach about. It was a God who listened and loved completely; an omnipotent force vaster and older than the entire universe itself that could shrink down small enough to fit inside your breast pocket. It was a God that could intervene between you and death if you could find enough faith to let it to. I took my portable God everywhere. I told it all my secrets.

For the next 5 years and throughout my time in high school, God and the youth group became the center of my life. I started going to youth group on Sunday nights and then for bible study on Tuesdays. It wasn’t long until I found myself hanging out in the church youth building every afternoon after school. I learned to play the guitar and joined the church band. My friends thought I was funny, so I traded in my silent demeanor for one more raucous and bombastic. I had learned to adapt. I was never cool, but everyone knew me and I knew everyone.

Everyone in our youth group idolized the youth leaders, and I dreamed about becoming one and working at the church after I graduated from high school. You were only asked to be a youth leader if you were attractive, well liked and spiritually pristine. “Jesus didn’t want to hang out with the flashy, popular people,” they’d tell us. “Jesus hung out with the dregs of society. If he were here, he’d want to hang out with the losers; the kid stacking chairs after service when nobody sees. That’s how you store treasure in heaven, guys. You should ask yourselves if you’re someone that Christ would want to hang out with if he were here walking around today.”

At home, my mom would tell me that I was spending too much time at church and that I needed to spend more time with the family. My response to my mom’s concerns always touched on the fact that I was a good, solid kid who was staying out of trouble. “I don’t do drugs, I don’t have sex and I’m a good person. You don’t have to worry about me,” I would tell her. The church is my real family, I told my portable God. “I don’t like this new church you’re going to,” my Dad warned. “You spend too much time there. You’d better get confirmed by the Catholic church or I’m afraid for your soul, Patrick!” Considering myself to be the moral leader of my family, I saw the concerns of my parents as nothing more than obstacles to my happiness and spiritual fulfillment. When I was 15, I wrote a letter to my older sister living in New York explaining that I was concerned about her “decision” to be a lesbian and that she should try to seek God and his forgiveness; an act that remains one of my largest and most embarrassing regrets to date.

In the years after Columbine, the youth group ballooned from 50 kids to over 300. An intangible urgency seemed to penetrate everything we did back then. You heard this a lot from Littleton residents, but it was absolutely true that Columbine High School was the last place in the world you’d expect for a massacre to happen. This was years before Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech and the thought of kids murdering other kids inside a suburban public high school was unfathomable. Everyone in Littleton knew someone impacted by the shootings, and a girl from our church named Cassie Bernall was killed.

Columbine happened while I was still in middle school, and I went to another Littleton high school near my house my freshman year. Cassie was a few years older than me, so I never met her. After the shootings, the news started reporting that one of the shooters asked Cassie if she believed in God and then shot her for saying yes. Cassie’s mom wrote a book about it called She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall. Over the next four years, our church traveled to major cities all over the US to give away copies of the book to anyone who’d take them. “Walk up to people and just tell them, ‘This is a book about my friend who was killed at Columbine’,” our youth leaders enthusiastically instructed us on a trip to New York City in the Summer of 2000.

“This is a book about my friend who died at Columbine High School for believing in God,” I said while approaching a bookish man in Central Park. “I read about this last year,” he said, backing away from me slightly. “I’m sorry about your friend, but this didn’t happen. They were just shooting people at random whether they were Christians or not. What you guys are doing out here… it isn’t right.” He walked past me, leaving the book in my hand.

I hated the man for what he’d said. Yes, I lied when I said that Cassie had been my friend, but why was he going out of his way to tell me this? My church was heavily invested in making sure we knew that the people who didn’t follow Christ would hate us for our devotion to God, and I was sure that the man represented the world and its disdain for me and everyone who followed Christ. Though the early accounts of Cassie’s martyrdom were discredited by major news outlets just months after the massacre, I didn’t accept what the man said as truth until I was well into my twenties. Later that day, we went to the top of one of the World Trade Center buildings. I leaned my head against the glass and looked down, wondering what it’d feel like if I had to jump.

The church taught us to believe that a lust for anything other than God was perversion, and I really believed it. I loved my portable God and I wanted to do right by him. “You can have all the sex you want,” our carpenter-ish youth pastor used to tell us, “once you’re married.” I hated the idea of sex. I didn’t understand it; what it meant and why I wanted it so much despite my best efforts to put it outside my thoughts. I didn’t understand why I had to engage in an act as permanent as marriage just to experience it. I found it easier to deem it a toxic threat than to try to see my sexuality as something positive.

I’d decide that I liked someone and would go out of my way not to look at or talk to her out of fear and resentment, taking note with joy and annoyance whenever she’d walk into the room. Like many conservative Christian churches, ours taught a message of all-or-nothing abstinence before marriage. When I was a 16, a pretty senior in one of my classes wrote me a note explaining that she thought I was funny and cute, and that she wanted to sleep with me before leaving Colorado for the summer. Normal high school boys would’ve jumped at this opportunity, but not me. I threw away the note and didn’t talk to her for the rest of the year.

Guys in the youth group were encouraged to read I Kissed Dating Goodbye, a book arguing that unmarried Christian men should court girls rather than date them. The book preached a similar message to the one I was hearing in church, claiming that masturbation and premarital sex were covert ways for Satan to gain a foothold in our lives, and that God would give us everything we needed to remain pure in our young thoughts and actions. I liked the categorical nature of these teachings and was more than happy to put sex in all my bad categories. Years after I finally left my church and religion altogether, a friend told me that a group of young guys from the youth group were researching chemical castration online; a sure-fire way to drown out every sexual feeling with pristine, medicinally-induced white noise. The hatred and fear of my own sexuality still loomed large in my thoughts for many years after I stopped believing that sex was a curse to be avoided. I couldn’t see it right away, but a deep shame had taken residence in the inaccessible corners of my mind. Guilt, not Satan, had gained a foothold in my life.

I’m still good friends with most everyone I knew from my youth group days, and it’s interesting to see us now as adults. It’s like we all experienced everything a normal person does in high school, just years later. Many of us succumbed to the world and its vices in our twenties rather than our teens: drugs, premarital sex, and drinking. I eventually drank alcohol, tried pot a few times and then a long, long time later had sex out of wedlock on a rainy March night when I was 24 years old.

I remember the night I finally lost it. The kiss. The offer. Whole body shaking on the walk up the stairs. The freedom and relief of it. The subsequent terrible relationship that I stayed in for more than a year because I didn’t have enough experience to know better. I haven’t asked around or anything, but I don’t think it’s normal for a consenting adult to shake out of fear when they have sex for the first time. After it was over, it felt like — and I truly remember thinking this that night — like I was finally joining the human race. I doubt I’ll ever feel so much relief and ease again in my life.

Chris was the first one of us to leave the youth group. He told me that God didn’t want him there anymore, and I was shocked. When the youth leaders heard the news, they took me aside after the service one morning and cried. One of the youth leaders blamed his departure on his strained relationship with his alcoholic father. A few months later, I left too. In the spring before my high school graduation, my friend Ryan died in a car accident. In the wake of his death, everything began to seem small to me: the church, its teachings and the categorical world I’d curated for myself. Sometimes our youth pastor would pace around the stage and say, “I’ve got some really profound lessons I could teach you guys, but you’re just not ready for it.” One night, in lieu of the normal Sunday night sermon, a different youth pastor talked for 45 minutes about how he flew to Hawaii to meet Scott Stapp, the lead singer of Creed.

No one could articulate it at the time, but my friends and I began to realize that there was something off about our church. A rumor had gone around Littleton that our church was a cult, and I finally understood why when I left. Sometimes you need to be far away from something in order to see it for what it really is. I graduated, moved to Seattle for a few months and began feeling spiritually desperate and anxious. Not sure of what to do, I signed up for classes at a Christian university in northern California.

The Christian college I attended was the kind of place where people would walk up to you and say, “Hey bro! You’ve been on my heart lately. Can I pray for you?”, and then they’d lay their hands on you and other people would lay their hands on you and then everyone would start praying out loud right there in the middle of campus even if you were late for class and didn’t want to be touched. Students were required to adhere to a strict curfew even though they were adults. Being found in the dorm room of someone from the opposite gender was a serious offense. I agreed to these rules because in my mind, limits and boundaries were tantamount to faith and righteousness. I needed rules. Ever since I’d left my church in Littleton, my faith had begun to creak, fracture and break apart like an old wooden ship in a hurricane. Christian college was my Hail Mary Pass, my last chance to stave off my doubts, questions and anger about what people did in the name of God.

“Hey, Pat McCrotch. Looks like your boys are losing,” said my college roommate while watching coverage of the 2004 election. By “boys” he was referring to the democrats. We never talked about it, but he sensed that I was one of those liberal kids who didn’t like George Bush and the war in Iraq.

“You know man, I just hate how ‘cool’ all the liberals think they are. It’s like, you’re not cool unless you hate George Bush or something. Bush is a good Christian, and he’s just doing what’s right for the country. Of course people aren’t going to like him for doing the right thing.” Choosing not to waste my energy on a useless argument, I responded with a “hmmmm” sound and left the dorm.

On a walk around the drab campus, I prayed. I asked my portable God to help me fight my body and its impurities. I asked it to help keep me company, and for guidance. I prayed for the faith, fortitude and clarity to do the will of Christ and I apologized for being such a disgusting, wretched human being. Mid-prayer, my thoughts began to float off to some other place. I was finding more and more that the emotional well of prayer was running dry for me. The dramatic inner ritual of self hatred, pleads for forgiveness and a promise to do better and was beginning to wear me out. It didn’t feel genuine anymore. Without the emotional payoff or prayer, I couldn’t keep from questioning the nature of my relationship with God. I had begun to ask myself questions I couldn’t answer. Why would God specifically design a person to be gay and then later condemn them for it? Why are there children who die of cancer? Suffering is understandable if it leads to growth or good, but what about when it doesn’t?

Late one night with some friends at a Denny’s near campus, I casually mentioned the odd religious makeup of my family: Mom was now agnostic, Dad was still staunchly Catholic, and everyone else ranged from casual Christian to atheist. My friend Josh looked down at the table and sighed. “Pat, you know what this means, right? Your family….they’re not saved. They’re going to hell unless they accept Christ fully like you have. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that. But that’s why being a witness is so powerful and important. You’re the light of your family.” I was stunned. The version of God I’d constructed for myself was a force filled with love, patience and understanding, not a terrifying entity with a penchant for sadistic punishment. If God was love, why would he punish my family for not being Christians or Christian enough by throwing them in hell forever? Where is the lesson to be learned in that? My church was conservative, but not “Your-family-is-going-to-hell” conservative.

“That’s a lot to think about,” I said, looking down and stirring my coffee. Everything began to seem absurd to me. Maybe God and conventional religion were really just mirrors; powerful vehicles for the things you already believed to be sent back to you renewed and unshakable.

Shortly after the beginning of my second semester, I decided to come back to Colorado to finish my degree at a public university. I began to finally admit to myself that I just didn’t believe in God anymore. Those were dark times. Without a God, I had no identity; spiritual or otherwise. My faith had been my shield, and without it I felt vulnerable and deeply sad. It’s weird to go from thinking you can cheat death to accepting the finite nature of your own life. “Dying is the one thing we all must do,” as my sister says.

The last time I remember praying was when I was 22. I was drinking with some friends downtown, and every time I left the table or looked away they’d fill my glass up to the top with vodka. I knew what they were doing, but I pretended like I had no idea. It was the beginning of summer, and after being dropped off I ambled toward the lake near my house through the tepid night air. “Y’know what?,” I slurred aloud, “I tried to be what you wanted. And I was fuckin’ good. Really good.” I fell down on the grass and laughed. “Don’t you have anything to say? D’you even miss me?” Everything was quiet other than the low hum of my own shifting thoughts. The night, God and anything else that might’ve been listening was indifferent to me.