1. He never converted anyone. Even though he tried, many times, particularly in his youth. He was shy, stumbling over his words in the mall between Zumiez and Hot Topic, wishing he could be anywhere else. But the Big Church Conference in the Big City had sent them out to Evangelize unto the world. He wondered if this was how salvation really worked. Cold-witnessing in front of an Orange Julius. He left early. Went skateboarding instead. He preferred a church of the streets.

2. His parents would not let him buy anything from Walmart or Best Buy with that shimmering “Explicit” label on the plastic cover of the CD. Yet he secretly recorded mixtapes of Dr. Dre, Snoop, and Eminem from the FM radio station, even while claiming to listen only to “Christian” music. It was just much better.

3. He once played a game with his youth group on Halloween called “Underground Church.” They smuggled handwritten passages of scripture to each other in the dark woods on a moonlit, snowy night. (It always snowed in Colorado on Halloween.) They had to evade the secret police, you see. The country had been taken over by a communist society that no longer allowed the Bible to exist. Christians had to go underground. Afterward, they went to the rec hall to eat candy from plastic orange pumpkins. Years later, he would come to realize how deeply serious some of these people were about this scenario occurring. How this fear would lead to their legislation and election of others claiming to promoting the white-Christo-nationalism they more or less believed in. How they would ignore the very teachings of Jesus to make this world a reality.

4. He never felt the Holy Spirit. Could never understand the emotional experience many had within the church, at conferences or worship sessions—the smoke and the lights and the impassioned speakers. He thought there must be something wrong with him. A hard heart, like Pharaoh. Diamonds of doubt in his chest.

5. He went on many mission trips. To Uganda, where he took photos with African kids in front of straw mud huts. He painted the outsides of indigenous churches in the Four Corners. Did he/they ever acknowledge their cultural whitewashing and culpability in native stolen land and assimilation? Not really. He road-tripped to New Orleans to help rebuild the city after Hurricane Katrina. He took the moldy walls out of Louisiana schools and, at night, wandered down Bourbon Street. He saw a topless woman riding a mechanical bull and felt simultaneously tantalized and ashamed. He traveled to Haiti. What was that saying about the good intentions?

6. He was a virgin until he got married. It would later become his biggest regret about marriage. The fact he’d held out and waited, did what the elders called him to do, beat himself up and felt ashamed for those years of sexual angst, masturbating, dry humping in back seats. How, in the end, it all mattered very little.

7. He was a janitor at the church for a year, in college. He cleaned the toilets and the floors with a vacuum backpack, Ghostbusters-style. He wiped the smears of brown off toilet seats and raked the yellow leaves. After the janitorship, he became an intern. He really believed in Church. Until one day the doubt and questions began to grow. He stumbled upon a non-dualistic reality. A messier, grayer one. Yet no one else liked to talk about this reality. A reality of racial injustice, gender and sex fluidity, class inequity, and white nationalism. There was money and power involved, you see. It was like a lot of things: you start something and then spend the rest of your life maintaining a machine you’re not sure should exist in the first place.

8. He misses church now. He misses the community. He misses the sacrament. The belief that you were doing something God-ordained, for the Kingdom. He misses those feels. He misses zeal. He wants to travel back in time now, tell himself that the container itself is not as important as the things and people inside.

9. He still believes in a God—a more mysterious, abstract, universal “God.” Even though many of his other exvangelical  friends do not. He does not know why or how he still believes. The same way he cannot explain why, to him, cilantro tastes like toothpaste.

10. At night he prays. But now that he is unsure, it hurts less when he hears nothing in return.

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