Some people homeschool their kids. For safety, say, after a bullying incident. For convenience, if a family has odd schedules. For religious reasons, to have the opportunity to teach your child a moral code or faith based history.

I was never homeschooled. But now, I’m home-churched. For many of the same reasons. But mostly because I just don’t fit in any more.

I grew up completely flanked by the church. I went to both Sunday School and the regular service each week. I had teachers act out The Best of the Bible on a flannel board. I sang songs with catch phrases: “Yes, Jesus Loves Me!” “The B-I-B-L-E, that’s the book me!” And I sang songs about Bible verses. I memorized verses for points, and I used those points to buy new Bibles, or even better, to buy a nice quilted cover for my Bible. When I got a little older, memorizing verses got me patches to sew onto my Bible Beanie that I wore to my Wednesday Night groups. I got even more points (and thus even more patches) if I brought a non-church friend. Sometimes I got enough points to earn a trophy that I proudly displayed in my bedroom.

Every summer and winter I went away to church camp, where different people taught us Bible stories, and told us how much better our lives were when we did only what God wanted us to do. We took Creation Hikes, where we could admire God’s handiwork. We sang songs about the Bible and memorized verses. We prayed a lot, and had calls to “rededicate our lives to the Lord,” where most of us would stumble up the aisles, crying, and confess our sins of doubt and lack of faith to one of the counselors who would pray over us and ask God to forgive us and restore us as His children. We’d float on that high for a week or two after camp, and then it would fade and I’d get grounded for pretending that my brothers hit me just to get them grounded and out of my hair.

When I got older, about junior high , I got even more involved in my church. I stayed for the 3rd Sunday service to volunteer in the nursery, or teach kindergarten classes. I joined the Worship Team and lead the songs twice a week, raising my hands and closing my eyes with my sincerity and passion. And as our youth groups started getting hormones, we had a lot of Bible Studies on why God hates sex, unless you’re heterosexually married. But not just sex. Just to be safe, don’t kiss a boy lying down because you don’t have any internal judgement and you won’t be able to stop yourself. And if you DO have sex, you’ll get pregnant. And when you do get pregnant, you CANNOT have an abortion.

It sounds horrible, but I loved it. My friends were in church. My family. I had a built in social network and I fit in. I was liked. I was a leader. I was known at my public school as The Christian Girl. I didn’t cuss. I wore kitchy T-shirts. I prayed before I ate lunch. I might have been teased a few times, but not much. Shocking, I know. Not all of my friends at school were Christian, but I was OK with that, because I knew that God would answer my prayers and change their hearts.

And then things changed. I grew up. I went a little crazy in college and couldn’t reconcile the pain I was in with the God I once knew. For a while, I was severely depressed, because surely, if parts of the Bible aren’t true, then the whole thing must be not true. It was all or nothing. I couldn’t simply choose to ignore the parts that felt hollow or empty. There was no interpretation of the Bible. There was The Truth. And then suddenly, there was no Truth and I was so very, very lost.

Towards the end of college, I was beginning to find my way to a middle ground, to some sort of reconciliation with who I was before and who I wanted to be. The contradictions in the Bible didn’t bug me, I enjoyed having the freedom to come up with different applications of the Bible to my life. And when all else failed, I could simply rely on that whole “Jesus changed the rules” thing and attribute all those pesky laws and traditions to religion pre-Jesus.

It hasn’t been until recently, maybe 6 months or so, that I’ve really felt that I just don’t fit in with Christians. Not only that, but if they knew me and what I was really thinking, then they’d probably prefer me not to bring my bad ju-ju to their house of worship. It’s hard to pin it on one thing. Part if is because when I was raped last year, I had been attending a church for months and still had no one to call for help, or even just to talk. Part of it is that I’m just too damn liberal now. I want women clergy in my church. I want gay clergy. I want open Communion - not this “you have to be a member or at least baptized” garbage. I want moral discussions about the environment, about Darfur and human rights, about the atrocity of homelessness and hunger. I want to be taught lessons from other faiths and religions, because it’s time Christians acknowledge there are things worth learning outside the walls of fundamentalism.

Instead I get sermons about spreading the world of God to Godless people. Or stories about women who had abortions and later realized their terrible mistake, came to Christ, and now battle daily feelings of guilt and self loathing. I get admonished not to be “unequally yoked” in friendship or marriage to someone who isn’t a Christian.

When I go to church now, I just sit there feeling more and more angry. So I decided to stop banging my damn head against the floor and, you know, just stop going already. And I have to say, I feel much better. I feel at peace and I feel like I’m more in touch with the important aspects of my faith. I’m not giving up on God or Christianity in its most idealistic sense. And I wouldn’t say that I’m giving up on church, either. But until I can find one that I can walk out of feeling refreshed and challenged, not judged and angry, I don’t plan on going back.