There may be brief satisfaction in seeing hypocrisy exposed – especially for those of us who have the luxury of living as openly and shamelessly as we please. But it's small potatoes to the sadness one feels knowing that Haggard now attributes his self-destructive behavior to childhood sexual abuse, or watching his wife tell Meredith Viera "sexuality is conditioned."

Yet however unorthodox -- and perhaps still denial-rich -- their continued union may appear to outside eyes, both the Haggards seem to have come out of their very public disgrace a little more humbled and open minded.

On "Larry King Live" last night, Haggard admitted, "I have some thoughts in my life and some processes in my life that just don't fit neatly into the boxes, which I think is true for a lot of people." Not quite a rousing dance on a float during Pride Week, but surely a far more tolerant position than staunch, gritted-teeth "total" heterosexuality.

His wife Gayle added, "I haven't doubted my faith in this process, but I have redefined it." Despite all questions and contradictions she and her husband clearly still struggle with -- and the fact that the lady is out there because she's got a book to sell -- Gayle Haggard seems truly to be trying. So when she tells the world, "I learned so much about the diversity of our human makeup and that all of us are the way we are for a reason," that's a good thing. Because she's got a better shot at convincing her fellow evangelical Christians of that sentiment than a whole lot of us ever will. 

And the people around you are all in the throes of relaxation. As we know, people are at their best when engaged in the endless heroic quest for whatever -- truth, love, literary excellence, supremacy in tennis, a royal flush, the perfect salad -- and relaxation makes them dull. It's true. We're hunters. Once we chase down that wildebeest and devour its hindquarters, we get suddenly stupider.

I'm sitting with wife and child at a cafe at a marina, and the big motor yachts parked in the water bring back the memory of long boring afternoons aboard boats. There is no boredom like that boredom, sitting in the stern of a big expensive boat as it churns through the coastal waters, watching your host, the wheel in one hairy hand and a bowlful of scotch in the other, woofing at you about how much he loves this, meanwhile the sun is beating down, turning your brain to tomato aspic. The conversation deceased an hour ago and the cheese dip has gone bad and the jouncing of the waves is making you very queasy.

And yet -- you yourself have gazed at million-dollar cruisers in boatyards, imagining the euphoria that could be yours. It's a beautiful dream and God forbid it should come true and you become just one more drunk driving a boat.

Some of the people around us at the cafe under the palms look like boat people. Geezer gents and their geezerettes looking a little exhausted in the company of grandchildren, tired of their incessant questions -- e.g., What do we do tomorrow? Why can't we go back to Reptile World? Can I watch a movie now on my iPhone? -- longing for a quiet deck chair and the muffled rumbling of the generator and the burbling of the hot tub. The grandmas sip their Campari and sodas, the grandpas sit back walrus-like, digesting their seaweed and krill, and I know I'm not going to walk over and strike up a conversation with them. I wouldn't know how.

What we talk about up north in December is the existence of God, but I don't sense much theology here in paradise, just a large sense of entitlement. Up north, you talk about God because life is brutal when the wind blows hard on the borderline. You need a reason to keep trudging forward across the frozen tundra.

The fundamental religion of most of mankind is the faith that God has revealed Himself to us and not to the barbarians. Our tribe is the one God chose and so if we vanquish the other tribes and rain fire and destruction on them, we're only carrying out God's Will.

There is a countervailing faith that says that God is in and of the world and has bestowed vast gifts to be shared with others, and that our understanding of God is faint and incomplete and so we should walk softly and not assume too much.

When I'm up north, I naturally tend toward the warrior view, believing myself to be one of the Chosen, the select few to whom The Great Giver of Truth has vouchsafed the sacred secrets, but now, in the suburban tropics, eating blackened grouper under the Southern moon, I am sliding into hedonistic pantheism, slouching down the coast of Florida toward Key West, on a quest to make my wife and daughter happy until the money runs out and we regain our senses and head home. More certitude next week. Meanwhile, Happy 2010, dear reader. I lift a glass of sparkling water to you.

Inside the church, it's cool and quiet. I read the Collect of the day in the Book of Common Prayer, which urges us: "While we are placed among 
things that are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall
 endure." My recent layoff no longer seems like the end of the world. I take Communion and exchange the peace and listen to the sermon. As I'm walking back up the aisle, I feel reoriented and calmer, the indignities of the week shift into perspective.

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."

The world is full of kooky religious extremists. Cameron gets plenty of street cred there for his Living Waters ministry Web site, where he and fellow science revisionist Ray Comfort test whether you are "good enough to go to heaven" (Hint: Don't bet on it) and let "hell's best secret" out of the bag.

But it takes a very special kind of kooky religious extremist to mess with one of the most influential works ever written. Who but the former Mike Seaver would use "common sense" to explain why evolution is just so much random crap? Fossil evidence be damned -- literally! Not since the Vatican got uppity about Galileo has the world seen such umbrage over scientific thought.

The sincerity of Cameron's mission is clear in the enthusiasm he brings to his ministry. And his ardent concern about evolution -- a subject God himself has never issued a statement on -- is genuine. The guy is really, really concerned that we are in the throes of a holocaust of souls here, bless his heart. And anybody who can show up at a college campus and tell students "Darwinism is atheism masquerading as science" may not be super high up on the intellectual food chain, but he's got crazy to spare.

Unfortunately, only time will tell how the extremely premature baby will fare. In the meantime, as OpenSalon blogger LadyMiko put it, "One question is going off in my head like a strobe light: Even in the healthiest of circumstances, how many children can a woman have, before it becomes a danger to her health? I'm not asking this as a judgment, but as a sincere question." Luchina Fisher and Lauren Cox at ABC News asked the same question of Rhode Island OB-GYN Joanna Cain, and learned that "women who've borne more than five children risk hemorrhage and even the loss of their uterus because repeated pregnancies sometimes thin the walls of the uterus." Furthermore, "women such as Duggar, after their child-bearing years, are also at greater risk of incontinence and even uterine prolapse, in which the uterus falls to the pelvic floor."

Vyckie Garrison, a former member of the "Quiverfull" religious movement that's spiritually responsible for the Duggars' enormous brood, suffered a partial uterine rupture during one of her seven pregnancies, and doctors told her that for the sake of her own health, she shouldn't conceive again. But according to her religious beliefs at the time, using contraception or even abstaining from sex when she was ovulating would be defying God's will. In a recent post on her "No Longer Quivering" blog, Garrison reprints a letter she once wrote to a 21-year-old mother of two who wondered if there were any circumstances under which it would be all right for a woman to "abstain during her fertile time." When she wrote it, Garrison was stull fully committed to the Quiverfull lifestyle.

I know you are well aware that often when a doctor tells a woman that future pregnancies might jeopardize her life -- it is simply not true. It is rare that pregnancy is actually life threatening to the mother. In many cases, when a woman's health is severely compromised, infertility goes along with the health condition (i.e. amenorrhea due to extreme weight loss or gain, etc.) -- this most likely is God's way of protecting the woman from the risks of pregnancy during that time. But what about the cases when the woman's reproductive system continues to function normally in spite of her other health conditions, or in the (very rare) case of a woman whose health is otherwise fine -- it is only pregnancy which puts her at risk?

Many would argue that in those cases, a couple ought to trust God to supernaturally close the woman's womb. After all, she cannot get pregnant outside of the will of God -- and He knows whether a pregnancy will endanger her life, so He can be trusted to do what is best for the woman in her situation. Abstaining during the woman's fertile period would be a lack of faith and therefore, the couple should not expect to receive God's protection for the woman's health.

Got that? If you abstain just because some doctor told you pregnancy could kill you, God will get mad and wreck your health anyway -- so what have you got to lose? Garrison adds a postscript written recently, years after she left the Quiverfull movement and her abusive husband, admitting that even that wasn't as extreme as what she truly believed at the time. "I didn't come right out and say that I honestly doubted that for some women, pregnancy is a life-threatening condition. (My years as a staunch pro-life advocate taught me that the 'life of the mother' argument was really only a convenient fallacy promoted by the pro-aborts.)" Chillingly, Garrison says she still refused to believe it after that uterine rupture nearly killed her and her son. Because if God personally authorizes each pregnancy for a specific purpose, why would he greenlight one that would leave a child -- or six or seven or 18 children -- motherless?

Enduring a dangerous pregnancy, then, is simply a test of faith. In an e-mail, Kathryn Joyce, author of "Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement," told me, "What may be more disturbing than these potentially deadly health effects is the response that Quiverfull women might get from the movement's leadership, many of whom emphasize that women's duty to bear many children should be viewed as a 'missionary' calling, with all the risks that traditional missionary work entails." And if you don't survive all those risks? Well, we know God doesn't fuck anything up, so it must have been something you did. Says Joyce, "Other leaders have said that women's health problems during or related to pregnancy are the result of unrepented sin -- in other words, their own fault." And yes, this God would, in fact, punish a woman for sinning by leaving her children motherless. In an interview for Salon, Vyckie Garrison told Joyce that after doctors advised her not to conceive again, her religious leaders told her that if she died doing her maternal duty, God would care for her family."

According to MSNBC, while Michelle Duggar was hospitalized last weekend, a reporter asked what she'd do if doctors told her that future pregnancies might be life-threatening. Her reply was as heartbreaking as it is mind-boggling to most of us: "I don't know. I'm not at that place. I guess we would just cross that bridge when we got there. If there was something that were life threatening for me, that would be a matter of prayer."