I covered yesterday‘s hostage-taking, and once edited a story about a woman’s addiction to TLC’s baby programming, so it was fascinating to see soft-focus baby world and national crime come together in one messy, scary afternoon in Maryland. The siege ended with some shaken-up but unharmed eco-conscious employees and one dead gunman, James Jay Lee. Lee was shot by a police sniper when he reportedly raised his handgun to a hostage.

Lee (who, it must be said, bears an unfortunate resemblance to Jon of “Jon & Kate Plus 8″) had been staging confusing and poorly attended “Save the Planet” protests in front of the Discovery building for years. He was arrested in 2008 for flinging a bag of money around and causing a mini-riot. Ultimately, he was motivated not just by an obsession with Malthus but by the cable channel’s longtime commitment to shows like “A Baby Story,” “Babies: Special Delivery,” “House of Babies” and, of course, “Babies, Babies.”

On his list of demands, Lee’s No. 2 was: “All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it.” No. 10 was: “Stop all shows glorifying human birthing on all your channels and on TLC.”

Obviously, Lee was a lunatic, and in spite of his copious writings about overpopulation and immigration and Discovery’s weapons shows, no one really knew exactly what he was talking about. But if you spend hours reading his diatribes (as I did yesterday) you can see that his central preoccupation was that babies are an abomination. He took issue with Discovery’s seeming celebration of fertility, as on shows like the Duggars’ “19 Kids and Counting.” (He seems to have missed the point of watching those multiples shows, which is not to envy but to gawk.)

What is true, though, is that those shows also make no sense whatsoever to people who have not been pregnant or been around pregnancy or babies. They seem scary and intense and cryptic. Also, gross.  Before I was pregnant I flipped by those shows a couple of times and was baffled by the panting and the drips and the obscure talk of “meconium.” Now that I’m four years post-childbirth, I am bored by those shows, as bored as I am by talk of required college courses, which I studied for, passed and forgot about long ago.

But in those months of pregnancy I found it hard to turn away. I was fascinated by how different each birth was, and each pregnancy. The women who seemed so calm and then fell apart with the first contraction. The seemingly neurotic who became eerily cool during transition. For those months, I was in on a cosmic mystery that was playing out on these shows. Maybe they were too melodramatic or sappy or lame, but they were talking about what I was thinking about. We understood each other.

Lee, as far as we know, did not have children. He found children repellent, because overpopulation threatened the animals. “Nothing is more important than saving them,” he wrote. “The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.” Of course, the squirrels!

So he didn’t get those TLC shows, and we didn’t get him. And in the end, the whole crazy showdown proved, reassuringly, that one maniac with an earmarked copy of Daniel Quinn’s “My Ishmael” is no match for the human desire to keep the species going. Lee is dead now. And babies are still being born every few minutes on TLC.

And yet, I decided to go off the drugs anyway, and to resume my acquaintanceship with the Voice. Yes, it’s lousy, and its friends are worse: The Emotional Roller Coaster. The Shame. The Social Anxiety. But I have made peace with them because of one cherished member of the entourage: the Libido.

Two years ago, I was overwhelmed by the responsibilities of a stressful job and a small child. When I started crying, I found it hard to stop. I made an appointment with a psychiatrist and told him I thought I was having panic attacks.

“There’s no crying in panic attacks,” he said, echoing the “no crying in baseball” cliché. “You’re depressed.”

Hearing that just made me cry harder. But I took the prescription, and enjoyed two years as an ultra-sane, extra-productive member of society. I raised my kid. I kept my marriage functioning well. I wrote two books. I kept the house reasonably clean. I saw friends. I was a multitasking advertisement for SSRIs.

I was an antidepressant evangelist, even, until the drug’s emotional protection started to feel more like a dirty windshield than shining armor. My husband complained about how placid I was even during fights, how it was like I was floating above events rather than being a part of them.

The official word was that maybe I didn’t need them anymore. My therapist said the brain benefits from its time in the SSRI bubble, and forms new pathways and new ways to cope with stress. It learns, he said, what it feels like to be happy, so it’s easier for it to go to that place even in the absence of the pills.

When I forgot to take a pill one day, I decided to go cold turkey. Big mistake. Three days in, I had vertigo, what’s known as “brain zaps,” and nearly fainted on a subway platform — all phenomena of “discontinuation syndrome.” (Discontinuation syndrome is eloquently described in this New York Times article by science writer Bruce Stutz.) But once I started tapering gradually, the brain zaps and other unpleasantness slowly went away.

And what was left was desire. I suddenly remembered what it was like to actually want to have sex. And not like, “Sure, why not?” a few times a week, which is what my sex life had become. But actually wanting it. Thinking about it at inappropriate times. Lusting after people behind counters. Having more fun in bed, and a whole lot faster (those who have been on SSRIs will know what I mean).

Along with thinking about sex all the time, I was writing a lot. I started keeping a journal (longhand!) again for the first time in probably 10 years. I started discovering new music and really being into it. I stayed up late just to read and write, and not for work, but for fun. It was like the feeling of falling in love, but not with anyone in particular — although my husband was the beneficiary of the sudden nymphomania.

And still now, a few more weeks in, I feel extra-engaged with the world, for better and worse. I snap at my son and husband way more than before. If the kid won’t stay in his bed at bedtime I can get so annoyed I have to go into the other room and take deep breaths until I calm down. But I also hold them closer and laugh louder at their jokes. I’m back to getting crushes on strangers. I blush more. I reloaded my iTunes with the Replacements. I bawled at “Toy Story 3.”

As an amateur student of brain chemistry, I wasn’t surprised that I’d been quasi-neutered by Celexa. Helen Fisher, Ph.D., the author of several popular books, talks about how antidepressants inhibit our ability to feel romantic. “An estimated 70 percent of patients taking these medications suffer diminished libido,” she writes in “Why We Love,” “And these drugs can often induce apathy, what psychiatrists call ‘emotional blunting.’”

When I went on the antidepressants, I figured a little muting would be fine. In fact, faced with an emotional meltdown, some detachment from reality sounded like a pretty great idea.

And when the lower-libido side effect kicked in, I didn’t think feeling a little less sexy mattered that much. I was in my early 30s, a mother, and was still regularly sleeping with the same man I’d been with for almost a decade. Who was complaining, right?

But there’s a difference between getting things done and savoring them. In those two years, I never stayed up until 2 a.m. just to read a novel. I never cried at a sad movie. I never looked forward to sex all day: the euphoria of it. The intimacy of it. It’s a natural counterpoint to the agony of self-recrimination, because it lets the self take a break.

Maybe emotional volatility and sexual enthusiasm always go together, or maybe it’s just me. Yes, I worry that my depression will return and trading sanity for sex will seem like a bad bargain. But as long as the lows aren’t crippling, I want to try to ride them out. Antidepressants save lives all the time, and I know for a fact how good they can be when you’re trying to climb out of an emotional pit. But now that I’m out, I want to see if I can throw the rope away without falling back in.

The author Lev Grossman has a great essay called “Writing and Antidepressants: A Match Made in Purgatory,” in which he says of his rush of feeling after stopping his meds, “My brain was having ideas and making connections and generally hyper-functioning … All the little blinking lights were on. I don’t think they’d been on in a while.”

That’s how I feel now: like the lights are on, and blazing — some that should probably be off, sure, but also the ones that must be on for anything as complicated as desire to flourish. It’s not like I’m having a better time right now, but it feels like a more real spiritually gratifying time. Being off antidepressants has meant appreciating the value of discomfort. Sex is messy when it’s done right. And maybe so is life.

Ada Calhoun is the author of “Instinctive Parenting: Trusting Ourselves to Raise Good Kids.” For more, see adacalhoun.com.

When the hip-shaking-children scandal broke, I tried to muster some righteous indignation. I said to a dancer friend, “I guess those costumes are kind of trashy?”

“Those girls are great dancers!” he insisted. “Those are standard dance outfits! You can’t dance like that in a tent!”

And so was quashed the only real qualm I had. Minus the shock of those ridiculous costumes (further Web surfing confirms they are standard dance competition wear), the video just didn’t bother me.

But you know what did? The coverage: all those smug puns about “booties.” The 19th-century-esque pleas for temperance. “Can’t we just let little girls be little girls?” wailed nearly every commentator. No, really, almost every article contained that line. 

Then on Sunday, Peggy Orenstein grabbed that dead horse and throttled it with “Playing at Sexy” in the New York Times magazine. She rehashes the video and its offenses, then cites it, alongside teen sexting and some upcoming Mattel dolls that are part of a “Monster High” collection, as evidence that tween girls are hypersexualized, that teen girls are dissociated from their bodies and so will forever be incapable of enjoying sex, and that all girls, everywhere, should put on some decent clothes and stop all that vulgar thrusting.

That column had every trope familiar to this discussion: grudging admission that “the girls were spectacular dancers”; the bikini slam (their clothes “would make a stripper blush”); even the requisite over-dramatic analogy (the dance was “a 12-car pileup of early sexualization”).

And that did it. I am now officially furious on behalf of these dance competition girls. Here’s what’s wrong with the argument that these kids are horsemen of a sexual apocalypse:

It’s a-historical.

“Moral panics about pornified girls bubble up regularly these days,” Orenstein writes. These days? As opposed to the halcyon days of … never? In every era, there are moral panics about girls; they all project the same tone of hysteria and the same cultural amnesia.

As the sociologist Mike Males has illustrated, particularly in a couple of fantastic Op-Eds for the Los Angeles Times, “for adults, today’s kids are always ‘the worst.’” Even our hallowed grandparents! “Back then, they were not called the ‘greatest generation,’” Males writes, “but a new and frightening ‘lost generation.’ To look at the 1930s press, scholarly assessments, and official declarations, never had young people been so violent, mentally disarrayed, drugged, lazy, promiscuous, criminal, and hopeless.”

Orenstein writes of a magical time coming of age in the ’70s when “Young women felt an imperative, a political duty, to understand their desire and responses, to explore their own pleasure, to recognize sexuality as something rising from within. And young men — at least some of them — seemed eager to take the journey with us, to rewrite the rules of masculinity so they would prize mutuality over conquest.”

I asked a friend of mine if that was true, and I was just born 10 years too late for this glorious sexual epoch. “I think I’m around the same age as her,” my friend said, “and I don’t know what planet she was on. 

It’s racist.

Why are there no Op-Eds when black girls dress or dance this way? If the problem is really with girls wearing these outfits, or dancing in this manner, why is it that the hundreds of YouTube videos of black 8- and 9-year-old girls doing their best “Single Ladies” (I just watched a bunch, some from dance competitions and some to the very same song) aren’t cause for alarm? Why aren’t their parents called to the carpet on morning television? Are they not relevant to the discussion for some reason I don’t understand?

And I’m no cultural studies expert, but the indignation over how (white) kids today like to dance (too much gyrating!) sounds an awful lot like the outrage over the effect “black music” had on white America in the 1950s. There is a lot of fear in the discussion of these dance competition girls: fear of sexuality, sure, but also, I think, fear of how diverse pop culture has become.

It doesn’t give the dancers their due.

When I interviewed the co-choreographer of the “Single Ladies” dance, JaQuel Knight, for Time.com about the fact that babies and toddlers seemed to love the Beyoncé video, he said about the video’s inspiration, “We often went back to our childhood days, when our parents would ask us to dance for all the relatives at the family cookout. They weren’t the best steps on the planet, but the feeling, emotion and passion of the steps in that moment were incredible.”

So let’s break this scandal down: This is girls playing at adults who are playing at being kids playing at being adults. These girls are enjoying the music and the moves. Why is it that we never talk about their talent or their achievements, only about how they look, whether it’s to praise them or to decry them?

It ignores all the good news.

The truth is that girls today — far from being slutty, female-chauvinist-pig Bratz dolls come to life — are doing great. If you talk to teen girls (and I have a small army of teen and tween goddaughters and nieces whom I adore), you know that they are super-driven and expect a lot out of themselves and of boys. They plan on contributing to the world, and they don’t even think twice about being the equal of boys on every level.

You don’t need to look past the Billboard Hot 100 to see a ton of great role models for women. Three of the most powerful people in music — Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift — are all women who control their own image, make their own work and do things on their own terms.

I have seen all three in concert in the past year. At every show there were thousands of young women (and some men) celebrating a message of — yes, that old-fashioned word! — empowerment.

Beyoncé, with her all-female band, told her fans never to put up with any mistreatment from men. A roar of agreement went up from Madison Square Garden.

Lady Gaga, a Mister Rogers for the “Glee” era, told her fans they’re special just the way they are.

Taylor Swift at the Nassau Coliseum in May had those girls whipped up into a frenzy of ambition. She grew furious when acting out a scene about men doing her wrong. Reader, she threw a chair! And behind her was a video showing a silhouette of men over which was written, again and again in red script, THEY SHOULDN’T DO BAD THINGS. “Tay-Tay” is the leading icon for 9-year-old girls right now, and she wears boots with her longer-than-knee-length dresses.

It’s a teen girls’ world in many ways. As I wrote in the L.A. Times in March, this year’s Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards revealed the dominance of (really good and positive) teen girl culture. Case in point: the mega-hit TV show “iCarly,” which is all about adventure, friendship and humor, and — because this is apparently all that matters — yes, the girls cover up.

While we’re at it, Miley Cyrus did not “strip” for Vanity Fair. All you saw was her back. And she did not “pole-dance.” She held on to a pole attached to an ice cream truck while it moved her from one part of the stage to another.

Cyrus’ new “I Can’t Be Tamed” song and video are not awful because she is acting sexy in them; they’re awful because the song is a watered-down version of Britney Spears’s “Womanizer.”

Those girls in the dance competition are great dancers. But we can’t talk about them as dancers, because all we can see are their bodies and their clothes. And isn’t that what we’re telling our kids not to do?

But no, we’re looking at their bodies and we’re seeing evidence that Kids Have Gone Bad. At the tender ages of 8 and 9, these girls are the new Elvis the Pelvis.

Fortunately, just as we now find it hilarious that people tried to shield their children’s eyes from the King’s hips, I predict all the hysteria around these girls will feel quaint in 20 years.

Of course, when these girls are parents themselves, they will be just as horrified by something their daughters are doing — hyper-driving their space-cars in foil miniskirts, say.

It’s just how we are, how we’ve always been, and probably always will be with girls: judgmental, scolding and afraid.

And that, not five young girls’ choreography, is the real shame. 

Ada Calhoun is the author of “Instinctive Parenting: Trusting Ourselves to Raise Good Kids.” For more, see adacalhoun.com. 

It was ridiculous, this sleep training, horrible. “Remember, when he cries during this process he’s not unhappy, he’s angry at you,” a fellow mom had told me by way of encouragement. This did not help.

The crying went on for what felt like hours. And then … it stopped.

“Was he dead?” I wondered. “Can half an hour of crying kill a child?” But the reality was something different: For the first time in seven months, he fell asleep without being nursed.

The next night, same drill — anxiety, tears, frustration — but he cried for a shorter time and then fell asleep. The night after that, he went down without a peep. And thus began a bedtime pattern that still holds to this day, that brought happiness and much-needed rest to our little family. 

And yet, in certain circles, what we did is considered child abuse. Attachment parenting advocates like, most famously, Dr. Sears say letting babies cry is bad for family relationships and may actually damage infants’ psyches. Go to his Web site and you can read a handout titled “Science Says: Excessive Crying Could Be Harmful to Babies.” Steel yourself, ye sleep trainers, for talk of “harmful neurologic effects that may have permanent implications on the development of sections of their brain.”

Luckily, there are other sleep experts (besides the famous Dr. Richard Ferber, who gave us the sleep-training euphemism “Ferberizing”) ready to defend the practice. Dr. Marc Weissbluth, author of “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child,” and one of the most popular modern advocates for cry-it-out sleep training, argues in his books and on his blog that not teaching your kid to self-soothe is way more harmful. “Crying is hard,” he often says, but “sleeplessness is harder.”

Is it any wonder that there is such a glut of products catering to new-parent sleep anxiety? For your crib, perhaps you need a white noise machine, a giant hand-shaped positioning pillow, a vibrating mattress, a mobile that plays soothing rain-forest noises? Or perhaps you need to hire a “sleep training consultant” or “baby sleep coach”?

Yes, those are real jobs; Google it. The first one I found charges $500 for a consultation with written sleep plan, plus 14 days of phone support, which I imagine goes something like this:

Parent (child crying in background): “This suuuuucks!”

Soothing voice of sleep coach: “Just keep at it.”

And who needs to pay for an expert when there are so many people online eager to give you advice?

An article on the attachment-parenting site Mothering.com claims: “Babies who are left to cry it out alone may fail to develop a basic sense of trust or an understanding of themselves as a causal agent, possibly leading to feelings of powerlessness, low self-esteem, and chronic anxiety later in life.”

Oh, is that all?

“Some people like to neglect their kids at bedtime,” writes one similarly minded poster on a Babycenter thread about sleep training. “I’ll parent mine.”

Burn!

On the other end of the spectrum you have “baby management” proponents, like the controversial advocate of Bible-based parenting, Gary Ezzo, author of the Babywise series, about which Salon ran an influential piece in 1998. Ezzo advocates for a parenting and sleep plan that is directed by the parents, not the child, which means firm scheduling and an acknowledgment that tears are part of being a baby.

So who’s right? The stakes are high. “Babies who can’t self-soothe quickly grow into preschoolers who won’t sleep unless there’s a cuddly parent in their bed,” writes Melissa Rayworth in a Babble article called “The Sleepless Generation.” “That leaves parents and kids exhausted, and marriages strained as couples either sleep separately or share their bed with one or more elbowing, teeth-grinding, frequently awakened offspring.”

The ironic thing, of course, is that most of us, myself included, gravitate toward books and blogs that confirm our own parenting style, when in fact we could all stand to take a lesson from the other camps. My friend who never cleans her house, who is totally overwhelmed and exhausted, I encourage to plan out her days more rigorously, to go to a Container Store already. My friend who is super meticulous and almost Stepford Wife-ish I tell to loosen up on the gourmet meals already and let the house go to hell.

When it comes to parenting, the hippies could stand to set some boundaries. The schedulers could stand to relax a little. But neither is apt to indulge in any books that don’t reinforce their own worldviews, especially when it comes to something as emotionally fraught as crying and sleep.

When my husband and I first started talking about sleep training, I was against the idea. I couldn’t bear the thought of listening to my son cry without picking him up, even if it would be beneficial in the long-term.

So when I went to the bookstore after getting almost no sleep the night before, I wasn’t ready to pick up a book by Weissbluth or Ferber. I grabbed Elizabeth Pantley’s “No Cry Sleep Solution.” ”No crying” sounded great to me, as did “solution.” The word “gentle” was in the subtitle, too. Wuss that I am, I thought I’d hit the jackpot.

But Pantley just reinforced my feet-dragging. I came to resent her and her self-assured softness, exemplified by one of her more beatific promo pictures, in which she sits on a bed with her husband and their four children, all of them wearing matching blue and white cloud pajamas. For real: Check it out.

And the book just patted me soothingly and told me I was right — that I should just journal the problem and make charts about my baby’s sleep patterns.

When I tried to convince my husband we should go this route, he just stared at me. “Do you actually think that’s going to work?”

What I needed was some hardcore advice to balance out my natural sappiness. You don’t need books that fit in with your “philosophy.” You need books that balance out your instincts, show you the other side. It’s like religion, or politics: Everyone needs a devil’s advocate so they don’t get wedded to an extreme position.

My best friend, a mother of three, was there with some tough love: “Dump him in his crib,” she said. I protested that I couldn’t handle listening to him cry, that I worried he would be emotionally damaged and hate us forever, that he would somehow explode from the stress.

Her response? “Dump. Him.”

I thought about her children, how they’ve always seemed well adjusted and happy and — in all the 18 years I’ve known them — well rested. Our pediatrician and my parents told us the same thing, if in slightly less graphic language.

So I did what they said and it worked out better than I could have imagined.

These days, I look at the vehement “anti-CIO” message board posts with a little more perspective. I remember how scared I was of just one or two nights of tears and I remember how upset I got reading the accusations of neglect and child abuse that followed anyone’s request for advice on how to sleep train.

Now with some authority I can cry BS on at least one of the many horrible things the anti- camp says will happen: that by sleep training you will become “desensitized” to your child’s cries.

First of all: You don’t.

Second of all: Wouldn’t that be a shame?! It seems healthy to get to the point where you don’t completely freak out when your kid cries. I wish I didn’t have that crazy, primal, the-sabertooths-are-coming alarm go off whenever I hear a wail.

And now that my son is 3 1/2, it’s amazing to me that I was so scared of letting him cry those couple of nights. There have been so many tears since then: over the TV being turned off, ice cream falling off the cone, playground fights. What’s another hour, especially one that serves an actual purpose? Those two nights of agony nearly three years ago were almost insignificant — except insofar as they saved our life.

Ada Calhoun is a writer in New York City. You can buy her new book, “Instinctive Parenting,”  on Amazon. 

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.

Barry Kosmin at the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College says it’s ridiculous that, in a city like New York, where there is a church on every corner, anyone would hide their religion. He says he was at a conference in Seattle recently where atheists complained about having to hide their lack of beliefs. “Everyone’s paranoid!” he says.

But if you’re in a place like New York City — or Austin, Texas, or Portland, Ore., or Los Angeles — the “new atheists” surround you. In October 2009, the atheist organization Big Apple Coalition of Reason (COR) started a poster campaign to celebrate non-belief. “A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?” reads one such poster. A similar campaign in London led by the bestselling author Richard Dawkins reads, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Writers like Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Victor J. Stenger — and, of course, performers like Bill Maher — get loads of press mocking the dummies gullible enough to believe some guy a couple thousand years ago was God’s son. But come on. It’s like shooting Christian fish car magnets in a barrel.

I’ll give the atheists a lot: The Creation Museum is a riot. The psychos shooting up abortion clinics and telling gay couples they’re going to hell are evil, and anyone of faith has an obligation to condemn them. Abominable stuff has been done in God’s name for centuries. The Bible has a lot of crazy shit in it about stoning people for using the wrong salad fork. Up with science and reason!

And yet, atheists are at least as fundamentalist and zealous as any religious people I know, and they have nothing good to show for it: no stained glass, no great literature, no great art, no comfort in the face of death. Just dissipated Christopher Hitchens sounding off on “Larry King Live” and a stack of smug books with childishly provocative titles.

A lot of my best friends are atheists, and there’s no reason they wouldn’t be. They find what I get from religion elsewhere, like from music and art. Not long ago, I told a priest at my church that my friends equated religion with horrible things. I expected her to tell me I had some obligation to stop hiding my faith, but she said, pulling a scarf around her neck to hide her priest’s collar, “Those preachers on the subways make me cringe.” She said she prefers Saint Francis: “Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.”

I could reassure my atheist friends that the Episcopal Church is a force for equality and social justice. It ordained its first gay bishop, Gene Robinson, in 2003. It takes the Bible as a mandate to fight hunger and disease and to rebuild after disasters. I believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other politically involved religious groups who take the gospel as an excuse to spread hate and support specific candidates and propositions should have their tax-free status taken away. 

Maybe, though, apolitical Christianity is on the rise. The Obamas are now in office — a good Christian family in the truest sense of the term — and the right wing is more marginalized than it was a year ago. My friend, the young (and kind of ridiculously hot) priest the Rev. Astrid Storm, whom I used to edit at Nerve.com, says she’s sensing more acceptance:

“When I said I was a priest, it was always a conversation stopper,” she says. “Recently someone asked what I did, and when I told him he said, ‘How interesting. There are a lot of exciting things happening right now in the Episcopal Church, aren’t there?’ The diversity of opinion people are reading about in the news — about gay marriage, female priests, poverty issues — are showing how Christianity isn’t monolithic.”

Christianity in the popular imagination is decreasingly linked with evangelicals, agrees John Spalding, founder of the SoMa Review, so it’s freed up people who were once embarrassed to self-identify as Christians. “It’s no longer like, ‘You’re just like Pat Robertson. Leave this dinner party,’” Spalding says.

But faith and religion are hard to talk about; maybe they’re not necessary to talk about. Even though I am a feminist, I’ve always had a problem with the personal being political. It gave me a lot of anxiety back in the ’90s. If I enjoyed a book with a titillating rape scene in it, did that mean I should be stripped of my membership in the Women’s Action Coalition? If I liked wearing Blackberry Revlon lipstick and an off-the-shoulder shirt, was I a tool of the patriarchy?

And now, too, I wonder: When I go to church, am I liable for every monstrous thing every denomination has ever done in the name of Jesus? Am I allowed to get spiritual fulfillment from something that has been, and continues to be, so disastrously invoked by other people? Am I allowed to just go to church sometimes and read the Bible sometimes without wearing a huge cross necklace and checking an official box on forms?

But also, increasingly, I wonder: When I’m getting a ride from some friends and they start talking about how stupid religious people are and quoting lines from “Religulous,” do I have an obligation to point out how reductive and bigoted they’re being, the way I would if they were talking about a particular race? Increasingly I wonder if I should pipe up from the back seat and say, “Excuse me, but these fools you’re talking about? I’m one of them.”