Of all the songs we sang when I was five, ten, fifteen, “Jesus Loves Me” is the one that has stuck with me. For a long time, its reasoning, so neatly encapsulated in the line “For the Bible tells me so,” worked for me. I accepted it with a childlike faith. How could it not be true? Why should it be more complicated? But as I got older, the Bible felt more and more like reading someone else’s mail—interesting, no doubt, but ultimately secondhand and indirect. The truth I had grown up with, the teaching that had been fed to me, it wasn’t necessarily that I thought it was false, but I longed to
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