The real joke? I totally was.

Inside the church, it’s cool and quiet. I read the Collect of the day in the Book of Common Prayer, which urges us: “While we are placed among 
things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall
 endure.” My recent layoff no longer seems like the end of the world. I take Communion and exchange the peace and listen to the sermon. As I’m walking back up the aisle, I feel reoriented and calmer, the indignities of the week shift into perspective.

These moments are not only sacred; they are secret. Outside, on the steps of the downtown Manhattan church, I think I see someone familiar coming down the sidewalk, and I bolt in the other direction.

Why am I so paranoid? I’m not cheating on my husband, committing crimes or doing drugs. But those are battles my cosmopolitan, progressive friends would understand. Many of them had to come out — as gay, as alcoholics, as artists in places where art was not valued. To them, my situation is far more sinister: I am the bane of their youth, the boogeyman of their politics, the very thing they left their small towns to escape. I am a Christian.

I certainly wasn’t born one. I was raised bohemian in New York’s East Village in the ’80s. I was fascinated by religions but also baffled by them. (If anything, I assumed I was Jewish.) When I began traveling around the world alone at 18, I longed for a religious experience, something that would inspire me to cast my lot with a denomination the way you choose a political party. But nothing really clicked.

I got a taste of the divine at Hindu shrines in south India, and when Mother Teresa grabbed my head and blessed me while I was working for her ministry in Calcutta I felt a kind of electricity rush through my body. Later, when I almost died from amoebic dysentery in New Delhi, I did hallucinate that the Jesus poster on the wall of the clinic moved. But these experiences were no more formative than the Tolstoy books I read on those 24-hour train trips across India.

In college, I majored in Sanskrit and translated part of the Atharvaveda for my senior thesis. I studied Jewish history, Zen and Hinduism with equal interest. The closest thing to my religious sensibility back then was either Pure Land Buddhism (“the world is emptiness … and yet”) or Gnosticism (though my penchant for makeouts kept me from achieving their level of physical self-denial).

When I hit my early 20s I found existential gratification in that feeling at the end of the night, drunk and awake and looking out into the rain while the bar closed and not knowing what was going to happen next. I worshiped at the altar of the Replacements and had romances that only made sense in the context of a Paul Westerberg song. I felt closest to figuring things out when I drank too much coffee and smoked too many cigarettes and stayed up too late.

Sometime later I got married, and the priest with whom my husband and I did premarital counseling had firsthand experience of closing bars, but he also was smart and eloquent and fulfilled. He showed me the best side of Christianity. Not how it’s right or just, but how — and this may sound stupid, but it’s what I think about religion in general — it works.

All of us need help with birth and death and good and evil, and religion can give us that. It doesn’t solve problems. It reminds you that, yes, those challenges are real and important and folks throughout history have struggled and thought about them too, and by the way, here is some profound writing on the subject from people whose whole job is to think about this stuff.

The idea of an eternal community brings me comfort: I like the image of a long table extending backward and forward in time, and everyone who’s ever taken Communion is sitting at it. The Bible at the 1920s stone church where my husband and I were married was filled with the names of people in the community who’d married, been born and died. When my son was baptized in our church in a traditional Easter eve service, the light spreading from candle to candle through the pews of the dark church made me feel, at least for one moment, we were united in a sense of gratitude for new life and awe in the face of the numinous.

Oh, I don’t know. Unless you’re William James or Saint Catherine of Siena it’s hard to talk about any of this without sounding dumb, or like a zealot, or ridiculous. And who wants to be lumped in with all the other Christians, especially the ones you see on TV protesting gay marriage, giving money to charlatans, and letting priests molest children? Andy Warhol went to mass every Sunday, but not even his closest friends knew he was a devout Catholic until his death. I get that.

“[Closeted Christianity] definitely exists in Manhattan, some Democratic corners in Washington, and I’d bet parts of Northern California,” says Amy Sullivan, author of “The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God Gap.” Sullivan says after her book about the Christian left came out, “colleagues in New York were taking me out for these clandestine lunches and leaning across the table and whispering excitedly, ‘Pssst! I’m one of them!'”

The Panel Study of American Religion and Ethnicity asked people how they felt about those outside their close friends and family knowing they were religious. About 2 percent said they didn’t want people to know, and that percentage is higher among people with liberal politics and people, like me, who are part of Generation X.