(RNS) — In 2006, the Reverend Barbara Brown Taylor published “Leaving Church,” a memoir of such quiet, luminous precision that it felt less like a departure than a deeper conversion into the world. It was a mid-life reckoning with a vocation, written by a woman who had stayed in the room long enough to earn the right to turn out the lights.

Two decades later, the leaving-church narrative has been downgraded from a high-stakes spiritual crisis to a mandatory merit badge for red-state kids who self-sort into blue metro areas and dream of being writers.

New York publishing still handsomely rewards the best versions of this genre. But the sheer volume of lesser entries has created the fantasy that rage pays. It rarely does for long.

If you listen to the current crop of “deconstruction” memoirists — many of whom are barely out of their twenties — you would think that a sexually conservative household is a crime scene rather than a typical American Christian upbringing.

It’s a trope that validates a certain brand of progressive politics by pathologizing a standard-issue past. It requires a permanent, patriarchal enemy to stay fueled. And, it turns out that nothing is more eternal than God the Father.

Enter Taylor Tomlinson.

In her latest Netflix special, Tomlinson — who has become a cultural release valve for young-adult female exasperation — manages a feat of surprising grace that the angrier “exvangelicals” consistently miss. She is diagnosing her own formation without martyring herself.

“I have religious trauma,” she says. “Anybody else?” The crowd roars knowingly.

“It just means you grew up in church, you’re not religious anymore, but now when you kind of feel good, you feel kind of bad about it.”

What Tomlinson understands — and what the most earnest deconstruction essayists often don’t — is that a religious childhood is simply not that interesting as a tragedy. Millions of us grew up going to church; millions of us don’t anymore. To treat this as a unique, life-shattering adversity is a luxury of the bored.

There are people whose experience in religious settings involved real abuse — sexual violence, the psychological toll of conversion therapy or the trauma of familial estrangement. Their stories deserve justice and sustained attention, not trendiness. Yet today’s online exvangelicals tend to treat a far milder experience — a strict youth group, awkward abstinence lectures, a sheltered adolescence — as if it belongs in the same moral category.

I, too, once felt the pull of the indignation loop. While my upbringing felt oppressive to my twenty-something retrospection, I eventually came to see mine as mainline with evangelical inflections rather than a series of escapes from a sinister fundamentalism. Eventually, the posture of grievance becomes more exhausting than the church ever was. What Tomlinson captures is the relief of finally admitting that while the theology may have been clumsy, it wasn’t always a conspiracy. Age brings a realization our parents weren’t monsters — they were just trying to hold back the tide with a very small broom.

For her part, Tomlinson occasionally jabs the irreligious even as she jokes about God.

“I don’t think I’m smarter than religious people,” the agnostic Tomlinson says.

Comedian Taylor Tomlinson in her Netflix special, “Prodigal Daughter.” (Photo by Todd Rosenberg/Netflix)

“I hate it when atheists talk down to anyone who believes in God. I’ve believed a lot of stupid shit in my life. God’s not even top three, okay?”

But the content of her latest special reveals the outworking of a long, personal process familiar to many who grew up evangelical.

“I love talking about deconstructing faith and purity culture and abstinence and all that,” she told Rolling Stone in a recent interview under the predictable headline, “How Taylor Tomlinson Survived the Church and Lived to Tell Jokes About It.”

“I had a lot of anger about it in my twenties, because I felt like it had really f—ed me up.”

“If you watch jokes that I tell about growing up in church when I’m younger,” she says, “they’re a lot angrier.”

Therapy, Tomlinson contends, helped her “get to a place where I could talk about it in a way that feels lighter and sillier and not as furious.”

Her comedy functions as a superior kind of memoir because it requires timing, humility and the immediate presence of an audience. You cannot be a humorless deconstructionist on a comedy stage; the medium demands that you find the absurdity in the shared human condition.

Tomlinson offers jokes in a refreshingly gracious key. There is edge and even sacrilege. But most are just funny.

On self-promoting religious celebrities: “Every time I see a pastor on a book tour, I’m like, ‘Hey, man, weren’t you already promoting a book?’”

“Now there are cool churches who accept queerness and don’t paint it as this horrific sin,” Tomlinson, who is bisexual, tells Rolling Stone. She praises her uncle, who is a progressive pastor, her aunt and her cousins: “They are really great examples of Christianity done right. They are loving and nonjudgmental and progressive.”

But in spite of palatable options she cheers — including the Grand Rapids, Michigan, church where the Netflix special was taped — Tomlinson, like most upscale young liberals, remains a former Christian.

The irony of the moment is that the institutional incompatibility between faith and modern identity has, at least logistically, been solved; there is a “cool” LGBTQ-affirming congregation in nearly every coastal and college-town zip code. Yet for many, a welcoming liturgy cannot bridge the gap created by a non-welcoming family. And the more affirming the theology, the emptier the pews.

The show’s title, “Prodigal Daughter,” of course, comes from Jesus’ parable about a longing, loving father who welcomes a wayward son home over the objections of a dutiful, faithful older brother.

Tomlinson, the eldest of four, says, “It’s a story about how Jesus was an only child.”

Time will tell whether the 32-year-old Tomlinson will move toward or away from God in the unfolding of her own life.

For now, she criticizes institutional religion — often with no shortage of real teeth — but she does so without needing to “cancel” her own history.

(Jacob Lupfer is a writer in Jacksonville, Florida. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)