The fact that I eventually left my denomination also illustrates that religious people experience coming to our beliefs no differently than other people do. Some religions teach that we learn to share their tenets through divine action, but I’m talking about how it feels getting there. You arrived at your deep belief in human rights, in class struggle, in science—the lawn-sign sense of the term—more or less the same way I arrived at my left-of-center Christianity: sloppily. We all muddle through life with pieces of a thousand incompatible discourses wedged in our skulls. They come from upbringing, education, friends, popular culture; they are forced on us, malignantly or benignly, by corporate or state or family power; we are drawn to them by disposition or by experience or by the fascination of what’s difficult. Gradually, from a combination of happenstance and persuasion, we discover our deepest commitments.