The most meaningful thing I could think to do was to tell the rest of the world how good Jesus was for me, and get them to believe as I did. So I went to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, got involved in the campus Christian fellowship group, joined a small group Bible study, and took my first religion class — Old Testament history.

It was my first brush with academic religion — well, more like a full-scale collision. I believed the Bible was divinely inspired literal truth and a practical guide for living. My professor believed it was a historical document — an inaccurate historical document — and that if there were any truth in the Scriptures, it existed only between the lines.

My grades remained decent because I read every assigned text and did well on the tests. But at the end of the semester I did an extra-credit project to “prove” my theology was superior to his. He tried to dissuade me, but I went for it anyway.

What resulted was perhaps the first time in recorded academic history when an extra-credit project actually lowered an overall grade. His comment to me was something along the lines of, “If this is what you think an academic paper is supposed to look like, you have clearly not learned anything in this class.”

At first I was angry. I was sure he lowered my grade because he was embarrassed to be proved wrong. I wore my poor marks in that class as a badge of honor, a sign that I was standing up for God, and being persecuted for it. But then I encountered a Bible verse I had never really understood before. It was from the Book of Peter (I Peter 3:15). “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.”

My paper was anything but gentle and respectful. I was arrogant and rude. I never even considered the possibility that my professors might know more about the Bible than I did. And while his approach to the Bible might not have been right, I realized something profound at that moment: Neither was mine.

I changed after that class. In the four years I spent at UNCC, I didn’t stop standing up for my faith. I still challenged professors, wrote letters to the school newspaper, gave talks to student groups, and generally tried to sneak in issues of faith wherever I could. But I tried to do it with gentleness and respect. I tried to give reasons for my hope.

And I was often surprised how well my attempts were received, even by professors I viewed as adversaries. A vocal atheist who taught my philosophy class once made the off-handed comment that Paul was a real SOB for saying “If your hand offends you, cut it off.”

I raised my hand. “Sir,” I said, a little hesitantly, “I think Jesus said that.”

He slapped this away. “No, it was Paul.”

I tried to remind myself: Gentleness. Respect. “I think Jesus said it, in the Gospel of Matthew.”

“I’m pretty sure it was Paul.” He did not sound so confident now.

“I think Jesus said it in the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5, probably around verses 29 and 30.” OK, so I was approaching the borders of arrogance, but I also knew that my professor was just plain wrong.

“Maybe it was Jesus,” he said.

After class, as I was leaving, he called me over. I was already wondering if I needed to drop the class now that I was on his hit list. I figured he would say something like, “Don’t ever embarrass me like that again. ”

Instead, he said, “You have something that is disappearing in this country. ” His voice was wistful. “If I mention the parable of the prodigal son, or say ‘Am I my brother’s keeper,’ you know what that means. No one else in the class does. We used to have a common language, but that is a thing of the past.”

The professor and I became friends, and I took several of his classes. I never converted him, nor did he lodge loose my faith, but we had a mutual respect. We often sparred in class, and he usually won, but I came away smarter and sharper for it.

I realized that if I was going to stand up for my faith, I had to read more, and do more work than other people in the class. Jesus did not need any ill-informed half-wits trying to defend him. Standing up for Jesus stupidly made Jesus look stupid.

In English class, we were studying existential literature. Now for me, at the time, the existentialists were The Enemy. But that meant I had to read the text even more diligently than my fellow students, and that I had to know the background and philosophy of the author better than even the professor.

It was a depressing class. As we talked about the short story (Hemingway’s “The Capital of the World”) I could feel a darkness settling. We were all disheartened. But I pointed out that while Hemingway saw life as a futile quest for glory, he also sought glory and his writing was glorious — if sometimes a tad bleak. His life belied his philosophy, I said.

I didn’t mention Jesus or God or the Bible. Instead I spoke about “the hope that I had.” I don’t know if I was right about Hemingway that day, but I know spirits lifted. A few of the class members even thanked me for my remarks.

In my senior year, a traveling evangelist came to campus and gave a fire-and-brimstone harangue in the quad. During a break I suggested he might want to use more sugar than vinegar. “You are not bringing anyone to Jesus,” I told him. “You are just making Christianity look mean and insulting.”

He turned away from me, and started up his diatribe again, but this time he aimed his bile at me. “Mickey Mouse Christians like this man water down our faith, and deny our Savior. He is neither hot nor cold, and our Lord will vomit him out his mouth,” he said, quoting a verse in Revelation. But the real shock came when the group who assembled to heckle the preacher now laid into him with a vengeance — because he had attacked me. People who had previously mocked my beliefs were now standing up for me, and eventually they drove off the preacher. A few weeks later I was offered a job as news editor for our campus paper. “You’ve written so much for us already,” they said, referring to my numerous letters to the editor on faith, “we figured you should probably be on staff.”

When I hear complaints that Christians are being persecuted on college campuses, I want to laugh. Sure there are some nasty people who want to wipe out religion, but most “persecution” experienced by Christians is the result of their ham-handedness in trying to foist their faith on others. They may find themselves ridiculed, but only because what they are doing just looks ridiculous to many people. Standing up for my beliefs never required me to be obnoxious, or an idiot (although I am sure there times when I was both). I got into some pretty heated arguments, but the people I clashed with often became friends.

The important lesson on faith is not “Shut up and sit down.” It is, “Speak up, but do it with respect. And be able to back it up!” Fighting for my faith was a learning process. When I thought I knew it all, I was just a blowhard. But when I listened to my detractors — and respected them — I gained their respect, too.

If Hendrix is a little plasticky-looking and perfect, in that late-’90s network TV way, I still found her an affecting performer, and got caught up in the life crisis faced by Hannah, the character she plays. This movie wouldn’t be very different in execution if Hannah were learning she had terminal cancer, or recovering from sexual abuse, or battling an eating disorder. Or dealing with the fact that she felt “that way” about other girls, for that matter. But “October Baby” is a film made and marketed for the “faith-based” audience of evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics, and it isn’t about any of those things.

Like many similar Christian-aimed releases, “October Baby” is being pushed by an intense viral marketing campaign — at this writing, 33,000 Facebook likes and about 1,200 tweets — supported by a wide variety of family-values and/or religious organizations, from the American Family Association and the Concerned Women of America to Fathers.com and Bethany Christian Services. (It has barely been promoted in New York City, where I live, although it is in fact playing in a big multiplex on 42nd Street.) The filmmakers have promised 10 percent of their profits to the Every Life Is Beautiful Fund, an anti-abortion charity. This is almost exactly the distribution model used by lefty-activist issue documentaries like “Food Inc.” and “An Inconvenient Truth,” turned upside down. Ironically, both kinds of films face exactly the same image problem, in that almost nobody who doesn’t already agree with their message is likely to see them.

But let’s get back to the actual film. The Erwins, who seem to be an all-in-one moviemaking enterprise — they co-directed and co-produced, Jon co-wrote the screenplay (with Theresa Preston) and shot the film, and Andrew was the editor — get right to the point. Within the first 15 minutes, we learn that Hannah has an alarming history of physical and psychological ailments, ranging from epilepsy to asthma to repeated joint surgeries to an unspecified mental disorder. Her shaggy, stern, outdoorsy-looking doctor dad (John Schneider) and perpetually concerned mom (Jennifer Price) inexplicably choose a visit to Hannah’s doctor to break the big news: She was so ill as a child because she was born ultra-prematurely, at 24 weeks gestation. Oh, and she’s adopted; they’ve been meaning to tell her that. Oh, and she was abandoned by her birth mother because she was, and I quote, “the survivor of a failed abortion.”

Say what? I was too amused and distracted by the terrible play in which Hannah is acting when she collapses onstage, leading to the doctor’s-office scene, to bother with much in the way of scientific or medical research. (Here’s her first line, performed in what I think is intended to be a country English accent: “Hello, Desmond. You can dispense with the pleasantries.”) Apparently “abortion survivors” are a big deal on the Christian right, and there are at least a few authentic cases. The implausible-sounding scenario of “October Baby” is based on the story of Gianna Jessen, who was born alive in 1977 after her mother reportedly attempted a saline abortion (at 30 weeks gestation, not 24) and is now a leading pro-life advocate. Abortions late in the second trimester (like Hannah’s in the movie) or into the third trimester (like Jessen’s) were always exceedingly rare and have gotten much more so. And while we’re given a gruesome description later in the film of what this “failed abortion” involved, no one ever explains how or why it happened. So while the bizarre circumstances found in “October Baby” presumably could happen in the real world, the odds are something like being struck by lightning and eaten by a shark at the same time. With a winning lottery ticket tucked in your swimsuit.

But trying to fend off “October Baby” with logic and statistics is to make an ass of yourself, relative to this film’s goals and ambitions. (“The Atoms of Democritus/ And Newton’s Particles of Light,” wrote William Blake, “Are sands upon the Red Sea shore/ Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.”) The Erwins do not make a scientific case against abortion in this movie, God knows, but rather an emotional, spiritual and perhaps magical one. I use that last adjective advisedly. Hannah is essentially a magical solution to a narrative problem: You could ask for no better twist, in an antiabortion drama, than having an aborted fetus return to life as an adult character (especially a really cute one). But unless you’re going to set the movie in heaven or experiment with complicated alternate-universe theories (which might in themselves raise some theological hackles), that’s tough to pull off.

Hence, Hannah and her weird story, which gets weirder the longer you stick with it. Bracketing her absurd back story and, even more so, the acutely painful teen-comedy subplot that plays like a G-rated combination of “Little Miss Sunshine” and “The Hangover,” I got caught up in Hannah’s soapy quest for her birth mother, spiritual redemption and healing, and a fresh start with her childhood sweetheart, Jason (Jason Burkey), an upstanding kid who’s fallen in with the wrong element, as exemplified by his trampy blond girlfriend, Alanna (Colleen Trusler). Actually, it’s unfair to describe the girlfriend as trampy, since there’s no kissing and barely any hand-holding in this movie, and the only discussions of sex come when Hannah assures people that she’s never had any. Still, Alanna is conspicuously fashionable, has pressed and straightened hair, is constantly mean to Hannah and clingy to Jason, and is named Alanna. Tramp it is.

There are a couple of strong dramatic scenes, including a brief appearance by Jasmine Guy, the biggest name in the cast, as a onetime abortion-clinic nurse who delivers several more big revelations about Hannah’s birth, and an ecumenical moment when Hannah, whose family are Baptist, seeks solace and wisdom from a Catholic priest. Hannah does indeed find her birth mom, who’s now a BMW-driving lawyer, and pulls some high-grade passive-aggressive forgiveness on her. There’s one pretty good joke, and here it is: When Jason challenges Hannah to reveal her “wild side,” she protests: “I know you think I’m a Christian home-schooling freak! But I have a wild side! You’ve seen me play Scrabble!” There are also, unfortunately, a whole bunch of terrible transition moments, when Hannah wanders about pensively in some location or other, while a whiny Christian pop song plays on the soundtrack. (Mind you, those kinds of scenes are no better in blasphemous films where the pop songs are secular in nature.)

No truer line is uttered in “October Baby” than when Hannah tells Jason that her father is scary, and he agrees. Tyrannical, hot-tempered and unreasonable, Schneider’s character looks and acts like the Old Testament God, and the other people in the tale tend to give him as wide a berth. In your typical independent film, the mean dad has to be taken down a peg — sobered or bereaved or otherwise humbled into being an object of compassion. But you can’t challenge the authority of fatherhood or its underlying scriptural basis in this kind of movie, of course, so Dad remains an arrogant and abusive jerk almost all the way through, and Hannah (although technically an adult) always gets back in the car when he tells her to. That whole aspect of “October Baby” creeped me out a lot more than the blood-curdling failed-abortion story did, honestly. I’ve seen a lot of movies where crazy and impossible things happen, and you just have to roll with them. Real life is much more frightening.

“October Baby” is now playing nationwide.

An usher guided us to seats up in the stadium’s second tier, practically the nosebleed section. Loud, upbeat music throbbed through the stadium. A woman not far from us clapped to the beat, tears streaming down her face. I stared at her like a child who’d seen the Amish for the first time. Was she really that moved by this song? I wondered whether her sister was sick with cancer or her husband had lost his job. Or maybe she simply felt alone.

When the throbbing music ended – a good half an hour into the service – Osteen didn’t read out of the gospel. Instead, he looked out over the packed stadium and told us, with a fist in the air, that we could accomplish anything we set our minds to. The future was full of hope, he said. “The best things in life are out in front of us!”

To my left, my girlfriends threw their hands in the air with everyone else. “C’mon!” they urged. But I felt awkward and out of place, worried the crowd would pin me for an imposter in this deep sea of believers. Wouldn’t they know I didn’t belong?

Two weeks later, my boyfriend dumped me. The woman he’d connected with the weekend my friends were in town understood him in a way I didn’t, he said. That night I heaved over the toilet, mad at myself for not seeing it coming.

The next Sunday, instead of spending the morning in my now ex-boyfriend’s bed, I went back to Lakewood. I wasn’t exactly sure why I went. I usually dealt with my emotions by running or lifting weights or throwing myself into work, not by praying to someone I wasn’t sure existed. But I felt pulled back toward that uplifting music, and I was too emotionally exhausted to resist.

As I stepped onto the escalator, a greeter handed me a pamphlet, the kind of literature my brother and I would’ve mocked as Jesus paraphernalia. “We’re happy you’re with us today,” she said, looking at me as though she really meant it. I faked a smile.

I could hear the music even before entering the stadium, just like during my first visit with my girlfriends. But this time I was the one alone – and on the verge of tears. Even more than being mad at my ex, I was mad at myself for wallowing over a man when life had something exciting in store for me: I was about to leave my job to go backpacking through Africa, a trip I’d dreamed about for years. Three more months and I’d be on the plane, out in the world, free. Why couldn’t I focus on that?

At the church I’d grown up in, crying would have caused a scene. I remembered kneeling next to my dad at Sunday Mass, just a few days after my grandfather’s funeral, and watching him lean back in his pew to wipe tears from his eyes, then kneel back in position. Catholics were stoic. We repeated the same words every Mass, pausing when we were supposed to pause, sparing our prayers the wrath of inflection, showing neither happiness nor sadness. We showed nothing.

But at Lakewood, emotion pulsed through the crowd. People sang loudly, with both hands outstretched, palms toward their God as if to receive whatever he offered. I put my hands out too, feeling sheepish, glancing around to see if anyone could tell I was a newbie. Soon the whole place was jumping up and down and belting the lyrics, “I’m Still Standing.” (Think worship lyrics; not the Elton John song.) As they waved their arms in the air, I hoped their strength would rub off on me.

Surrounded by people so full of faith and hope, I sensed an escape route for my ache. If I could just let that heaviness out of my chest, believers around me would absorb it, eat it up and digest even the tough parts.

So I let go. With my arms above my head, I let the tears stream down my cheeks just like the woman near me had done during my first trip to the stadium. It was freeing, crying in that crowd, anonymous yet part of something bigger than myself. I was among strangers, yet I felt less broken and alone than when I’d walked in.

I was used to leaving church feeling guilty for my sins from the previous week, for letting my mind wander to sex while Latin words rolled off an old priest’s tongue. But after Lakewood, I felt lighter, like I had handed some of my burden over to … God? Did that mean I believed in Him? Had the energy of this place pulled me here, or was it something bigger?

Maybe this was what it felt like to find God, I thought. In my heartbreak, had I discovered a different kind of love?

I went back to Lakewood the next week. And the next. But I didn’t tell anyone. My friends were still laughing over how a candidate for district attorney had struck a man from a jury pool because he went to the megachurch. “People who go to Lakewood are screwballs and nuts,” she’d told the judge.

Which meant Houston had an awful lot of screwballs and nuts. I was fascinated by the engine that was Lakewood, how the church organized parking for thousands of people, distributed the holy bread to every mouth in the stadium, and manned a bookstore that probably brought in more money on Sunday than most do in a month.

Yet Lakewood felt more motivational than religious – or maybe that was simply what I wanted it to be. Ironically, the secular spirit that drew me there was exactly why some religious folk criticized Osteen: They complained he wasn’t religious enough.

When Osteen did invoke religious images or drift into Jesus talk, I’d tweak his words so they worked for me. He said things were in God’s hands; I heard it as fate’s hands. He said God would send luck my way; I told myself to make my own luck. By performing this sort of calculus, I managed to convince myself that I wasn’t becoming one of those religious nuts.

Until, that is, Osteen mentioned something rather startling. “If you come to Lakewood three times,” he told the audience, pausing to flash his famous supersmile, “we consider you a member.”

My insides tense, I counted the number of times I’d attended. Was it four? Five? Definitely more than three. Oh my God, I muttered. Had I become one of them?

But my discovery was short-lived. Soon I would leave Houston for good, following through on my travel plans. On my last Sunday in the city, I took a break from packing to attend the church a final time. After the usual mix of uplifting songs, the pastor encouraged us to get out of our seats and join one of the prayer partners who were scattered around the stadium. For weeks I’d avoided this part of the service, remaining seated while people around me shuffled through the aisles to share their own personal pleas to God; a friend who’d attended Lakewood told me a prayer partner once spoke to her in tongues. But this was my last chance, and curiosity was on Lakewood’s side. Breathing deeply to shake my nerves, I got in line.

My prayer partner had middle-aged pudge around her middle and warm brown eyes. When it was my turn, she took my hands in hers and said, in perfectly comprehensible English, “What are we praying for today?”

My chin trembled as I contemplated asking her to help my heart heal or give me the strength say goodbye to Houston. But I wanted to look forward, not back. “I’m going on a long trip,” I told her, feeling comforted by her eyes. “A journey by myself. To Africa.”

She squeezed my hands, shut her eyes and prayed aloud to her God – my God? – to keep me safe during my travels. Around us, hundreds of people prayed aloud with their own partner, their words blanketing the stadium with murmurs, a presence that was palpable.

“Keep her safe and healthy and happy,” my partner finished, letting go of my sweaty palms.

As I walked back to my seat, I added my own little prayer, asking Whoever Was Up There to forgive me, knowing my fling with the megachurch, like all good love affairs, would be fleeting. And when the music began again, I lifted my palms to the sky.

But having actually read these books, I can tell you they are not the wild sex manuals the media frenzy suggests — in fact, they are treatises against homosexuality, pornography and premarital sex. None of this is exactly surprising, but amid the sexy buzz surrounding these books, it’s important to underscore just how sexually stunted they are.

Now, I may not be the most impartial judge — I’m an arrogant, unrepentant atheist and fornicator, after all — but throw my sex reporting credentials in the mix and I am specially poised to sniff out the most anachronistic and bigoted sexual beliefs espoused in these books.

Where to start, where to even start? How about here: “Good sex, the best sex, is biblical sex — one man and one woman within the context of marriage,” write the Youngs in “Sexperiment.” Later, they explain that “the act of sexual intercourse — in God’s economy — is reserved exclusively for husbands and wives.” Any other kind of sex is sin. Similarly, “Real Marriage” preaches against the worship of creation, or sex, as a god, which it claims leads to worship of “the human body and its pleasures through sinful sex, including homosexuality and lesbianism.”

Premarital sex is another big target, of course. In a bizarre mixed metaphor, the Youngs explain:

We’re not to make big sex (in the context of marriage) into little sex (premarital or extramarital affairs). There are two options when it comes to having sex. … Think of it as the big bed or the little bed. In our house, the little beds are reserved for the dogs. People don’t sleep there. But that’s what sex outside of marriage is doing is taking sex out of the big bed of marriage and putting it into the little dog bed and saying, “I can’t help it. I know what God wants for me to do with sex. I know he’s reserved it for marriage. But I’m just an animal. I can’t help but do it whenever, wherever, and with whomever. I’m a deer in rut, a hound in heat.”

They don’t leave it at that, though: “God doesn’t want us to experience little sex in the dog bed; he wants us to experience the power and purpose of big sex in the right bed.” Got that? All I’m left with is an image of two adults getting it on in a dog bed with a dejected little pup looking on.

Weird metaphors abound in “Sexperiment,” mostly because the Youngs — unlike the Driscolls — are only comfortable talking about sex in the abstract. For example: “Sex is like a Ferrari. If someone gives you a Ferrari, you don’t trash it. … You wash it and wax it. … You drive it on the freeway.” Just as with the Bible itself, the vague allegorical language leaves plenty of room for personal interpretation and co-optation. Let’s just assume that “wash it and wax it” is a tacit endorsement of porn star pubic stylings and “you drive it on the freeway” means that sex in cars is awesome.

On top of the weird metaphors, there’s weird science. The Driscolls, perhaps unintentionally, invoke an image of God in a white lab coat, the biochemist behind your orgasm. “The natural chemical ‘high,’ what some call a ‘biochemical love potion,’ resulting from sex and orgasm was designed by God to bind a husband and wife together.” And, once again, the Youngs bring up the dog-bed allegory:

If we get out of the big bed, and get into the little bed of sexual sin, the repercussions are so far-reaching that it’s difficult to understand them at all. It doesn’t take a neuroscientist to see that our world is facing all kinds of diseases, brokenness, and confusion. And a huge chunk of that is due to sexual sin – using sex outside of God’s design for it.

Worst of all in the science department is the Driscolls’ handling of birth control. Behold this medically inaccurate passage: “Generally speaking, hormonal birth control methods run the risk of causing an abortion.” (Accurately speaking, hormonal birth control prevents ovulation and fertilization, not implantation. But, contrary to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ accepted definition, some folks think a pregnancy begins at fertilization.) They go on to explain, “As Christian leaders who are admittedly not medically trained, we do not encourage members of our church to use the pill.” Sure doesn’t hurt the congregation count.

Enemy No. 1 of both of these books is pornography. “Sexperiment” spills pages of ink on the subject, but the message throughout is consistent and unwavering: “A husband and wife who see sex and marriage as God sees it also see the math of marriage as 1+1=1. There is no room there for a third party. Pornography is a third party.” “Real Marriage” is similarly one-note: “The purpose of pornography is clearly lust. And throughout both the Old and New Testaments, God repeatedly condemns – as a grievous evil – lust for anyone but your spouse.” But the Driscolls go so far as to compare hardcore pornography to the “Twilight” series:

In the lust category, along with sexual nudity and pornography, we also include women’s romance novels. They commonly entice sinful lust and cause women to fantasize about sexual sin with all the alluring power of visual pornography for men. This kind of sinful lustful fantasizing extends to such things as the Twilight phenomenon, where older women, many of them mothers, openly fantasize about sexual desires they had for the young actors in the film.

They also lump in women’s magazines like Cosmo, which “fills its covers with pornographic article headlines shouting to the world that lust is a good thing.” They suggest that “lusting eyes” start with a sexy magazine and move on “to orgies, voyeurism, exhibitionism, pedophilia, and wherever else a crooked human heart can venture.” (You heard it here first: Cosmo causes pedophilia?) They also deliver this gem: “Sure, the naked people you like looking at are hot … but so is hell.” However, my hands-down favorite line from the Driscolls on the subject of porn is: “Clearly, while not everyone who looks at porn will end up doing such evil things as Ted Bundy, they will do evil things even if less intently or frequently.” Way to be generous, guys!

Ultimately, the Driscolls’ shortlist of sinful sex acts reads like so: “homosexuality, erotica, bestiality, bisexuality, fornication, friends with benefits, adultery, swinging, prostitution, incest, rape, polygamy, polyandry, sinful lust, pornography, and pedophilia.”

I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t edgy – relatively speaking – passages in these books. Most notably, “Real Marriage” performs an exegesis of Song of Songs, the sexiest book in the Bible, suggesting that the text celebrates striptease and oral sex. But this is no secret – scholars have long interpreted Song of Songs this way. To the Driscolls’ credit, they encourage couples:

Make love with the lights on, or by candlelight. Sleep together naked. Undress in front of your spouse. Bathe in front of your spouse. “Flash” your spouse around the house. Pull the curtains and hang out in your house naked. … Have a mirror hung near your bed.

Sounds like fun – if only it weren’t restricted to married, heterosexual couples. They also answer questions that most Christians are too afraid to ask their pastors about whether particular sex acts are God-approved and, according to them, masturbation, anal sex, oral sex, menstrual sex and sex toys are A-OK (again, within the context of straight, married sex). In a slam against the Santorums of the world, they explicitly support non-procreative sex within marriage and give a shout-out to female pleasure: “A woman’s clitoris is a nerve center created by God for only one purpose — pleasure, not reproduction. God also made women multi-orgasmic for the joy of sexual pleasure in marriage.”

It’s wonderful to see influential religious leaders celebrating sex as a healthy, pleasurable act and encouraging their flock to get it on in the name of God. But these authors don’t deserve any praise for sticking to the same hoary rhetoric about good sex and bad sex. Show me a Christian advice book that celebrates all types of consensual, adult sex as communion with God, and then we can talk.

One major factor in the decline of Christianity here: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Arab-Israeli war of 1948 caused hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee or be driven out of their homes, most never to return – and each subsequent war has led to more Palestinians leaving. Today, though Palestinians are often materially better off than other Arabs, restrictions on movement, lack of economic opportunity, unemployment and the constant indignity of living under occupation prompt many to seek out new homes. Palestinian Christians, relatively better educated that Palestinian Muslims and sharing a common religion with the West, have generally been better placed to leave the region.

“Many Christians prioritize their religion over their nationality, thus feeling at home in Western Christian countries as immigrants,” says Ameer Sader, who teaches English and works as a young guide at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Haifa.

“Also, the fertility rate among Christians is the lowest within Israel and Palestine, playing a role, however small it is, in their decline,” he added.

But the exodus is not solely a Christian phenomenon.

“What is often ignored is the huge number of young Muslims who are leaving. And don’t forget there are more Palestinian Muslims living abroad than Christians,” says Dimitri Karkar, a Palestinian Christian businessman. Karkar lives in Ramallah, which has grown with the influx of refugees from other parts of historic Palestine and Israel’s continued annexation of East Jerusalem. Once a small village, Ramallah has become the de facto administrative capital of Palestine, where about a quarter of its population today is Christian.

Another factor: Christian charities and missionaries, who often do valuable work here, also have played an unwitting role in the exodus of Christians.

“I think that an awful lot of well-meaning Christians in the West, whether they are in America, Britain or other places, have poured a lot of money into the West Bank, and specifically into the churches and ministries here,” observes Richard Meryon, director of Jerusalem’s Garden Tomb, which is locked in a spiritual/territorial dispute with the nearby Church of the Holy Sepulchre over the exact location of the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus.

This outside aid, he notes, “is causing a hemorrhaging of Palestinian believers,” because many are given assistance to move to the West to study but, once there, decide never to return. At the same time, he points out, the numbers of foreign believers and Messianic Jews who believe in Jesus are rising.

And not all Christian activity has been “well-meaning.” For example, so-called Christian Zionists are passionately, even virulently, pro-Israeli, and many come to the Holy Land (some on Harley Davidsons) to express their support. They show rather less interest in the Christians who actually live there.

Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich seems to even doubt they exist. In an apparent bid to court the Christian Zionist and pro-Israel right, Gingrich made the outrageous claim that “We have invented the Palestinian people,” as if the Palestinians I encounter every day here are figments of the imagination.

Foreign Christians and pilgrims tend to romanticize the “purity” of Christmas in the Holy Land. “Christmas here is fantastic because there’s absolutely no sign of the trappings of materialism,” says Meryon. “People in England hardly know the difference between Santa Claus and Jesus,” he jokes. Meryon has something of the quintessential English vicar about him, while a group of Singaporean pilgrims sing melodic hymns in the background. “Commercialism has taken Jesus out of Christmas.”

And the guitar-strumming young Singaporean who had led his evangelist group of pilgrims in song seemed to share Meryon’s sentiments. “Being here is incredible. I can see Jesus all around me,” he said, I imagine, figuratively. Lacking any semblance of religious faith and not being of a spiritual disposition, I have never seen Christ figuratively, in all my time in Jerusalem. I have, however, repeatedly spotted a pilgrim fitting his description making his lonely way through the old city.

For obvious reasons, Bethlehem, whose population today is still about half Christian, is a popular pull for local Christians and pilgrims alike, with the highlight for the faithful being the midnight Mass at the Church of the Nativity on Christmas Eve. And, as with Joseph and Mary, those who wait for the last minute often find that there’s no more room at the inn.

But given that the vast majority of the population is either Jewish or Muslim, the run-up to the holiday season in the public sphere is pretty low-key. “You see some decoration around, but Christmas here is a normal time of year,” says Karkar.

This demographic reality inevitably affects the spirit of the season. “On Christmas Day, the majority of people are working, so most Christians work too,” notes Karkar, although he does point out that Orthodox Christmas, which is on Jan. 7, has been made a public holiday for Christians and Muslims alike in the West Bank. “My wife and kids are traveling but I have to keep my restaurant open.”

“Christmas here feels spiritless and meaningless in comparison to the West,” Sader told me. “I’ve had the opportunity to celebrate Christmas in Paris. I felt the religious meaning of Christmas for two weeks long, as the midnight Mass was an integral part of Christmas and the highlight of the celebrations,” adding that he is not a religious person.

Sader’s idealized description of Christmas in Paris might come as something of a revelation to many Europeans, who never see the inside of a church and, instead, make offerings for their loved ones at the altar of consumerism and find the merry “spirit” of the season inside a bottle shared with family and friends.

The reality of Christmas here seems to me to lie somewhere between what Sader and Meryon describe. In a land where people are generally more religious than in the West – whether they be Christians, Muslims or Jews – church attendance is high.

Palestinian Christians I have met in Palestine and Israel insist that, although they may face a certain amount of discrimination from the country’s two major faith groups, especially with the rising tide of Islamic and Jewish fundamentalism, they are by no means persecuted.

“There is no Islamic persecution here,” insists Karkar, who points out that it was a Muslim, the late Yasser Arafat, who not only symbolized national unity by marrying a Christian but also restored the status of Christmas in Bethlehem after years of Israeli-imposed isolation had made it impossible for Palestinian Christians from other parts to visit the birthplace of Christ. Karkar also contends that even the Islamist movement, Hamas, is not “anti-Christian.”

The future of Christianity in the Holy Land will depend largely on whether Israelis and Palestinians will be able to find a just resolution to their conflict. If peace and justice reign, many diaspora Palestinian Christians may be encouraged to return. If not, the decline of indigenous Christianity in the birthplace of Jesus is likely to continue.