At 19 or 20 I would not have written this article. Like many young people at the time, I was transfixed by the New Atheism of Dawkins, Harris, and Hirsi Ali. Religion was a scourge, making the world worse in every conceivable way. Recommending the Bible would have been like recommending The Lords of Elder Zion, a pointless recommendation for intelligent readers and a dangerous suggestion for gullible ones. After all, I had read the Bible several times throughout my Baptist upbringing and didn’t think myself any better for it.

But I was better for it. Throughout the years, I’ve come to realize, as both a reader and writer, that the religious education of my youth has been a tremendous advantage. From early childhood, I was exposed to epic poetry, metaphor, frenzied apocalyptic visions, philosophical dialectics, and ancient Near East history. Moreover, my family’s old-fashioned congregation preferred the King James Version, which is written in Early Modern English, an extinct historical dialect that couldn’t be further from our East Texas twang. The stark difference between what I read in the Bible and what I heard all around me taught me early on the first rule of writing: literature is a language unto itself, produced and consumed in a manner distinct from the conversations and communiques of everyday life. To put it more bluntly, I learned that one should not write how he talks if he wants to do it well. For example, someone might plainly state

God created the sun and moon.