Are You There God? It’s Me, Lily

I learned from the stories they told me about their own childhood that religion had once been a tremendous force in their lives whose influence they had both fought hard to escape.

The Repentagon trained me to feel at ease in odd, insular, extreme environments, a skill I wouldn’t give up for anything, and Christianity formed my deepest instincts. It gave me a leftist worldview: a desire to follow leaders who feel themselves inseparable from the hungry, the imprisoned, and the sick.