Ye of Little Faith

The closest thing to a Bible that my atheist father ever gave me was a copy of Atlas Shrugged. “This will teach you how the world works,” he said on the morning of my eighteenth birthday. My agnostic mother, who’d always disapproved of his embrace of Objectivism, looked away as I turned Ayn Rand’s 1,000-page tome over in my hands. Over the next several months, I read it secretly, so as not to upset her. (She’d be glad to know I was never fully convinced by its arguments; my dad, I hope, would just be happy I gave it a chance.)

According to None of the Above: Nonreligious Identity in the US and Canada, my irreligious upbringing makes me a “cradle none,” different from the “nonvert,” who was raised religious but apostatized later in life. I am also an “inactive nonbeliever.” I don’t attend organized gatherings in service to my non-­belief, but “involved seculars” do. “Inactive believers” have faith in God (so much so that they can skip organized...