"I shudder to think of the person I would be if my family hadn't left the Church."

It truly terrifies me to think of the person I might be today if my family never left the church.

I grew up in a religious family. The kind that prayed every night before dinner, swapped bedtime stories for bible readings, and went to church every goddamn Sunday. The kind that made a pact to “go straight to God, don’t look for Mummy and Daddy” in the event that the world suddenly ended.

But compared to my extended family? We were the religious pariahs. The heathens who didn’t fully embrace God. The soft relatives who didn’t take a strong enough stance on homosexuality as sin.

I felt extreme enough in my household. Wait till you hear about my cousins.

They spoke in tongue, arms raised to the sky as they sang out to the Lord. They planned holidays around Christian camps and Christian rock concerts.

They spoke hatred fluently, and would deliver the most judgmental comments without a blink of the eye. They lacked empathy, despite their stubborn commitment to “goodness”.

But worst of all? They rejected their own child for the sin of being gay.

Imagine my cousin, knowing she was a lesbian every time her parents said this: “Being Gay is strictly against the bible, and really, it’s just as bad as being a pedophile.”

I didn’t grow up in the Bible belt of America either. This was my life in suburban Australia.

Thankfully — Oh God, thankfully! — by the time I was 14 we simply stopped going to church. We didn’t pray anymore and we certainly didn’t read the bible. We let it go. We couldn’t be part of a club that endorsed ex-communicating a member of our own family because of who they loved.

My parents had made the call. Religion was getting in the way of teaching us how to be open-minded and empathetic people.

The decision to reject the church riddled my parents with guilt and my extended family made it clear we were sliding down the scale of morality. To them, we were bad people. But I knew it then and I know it now: The Church was making otherwise good people bad.

An explosive new study has revealed that my parents instincts were right. Journalists and academics around the world are talking about the results: that people raise better children if they walk away from God.

The 40-year study was supervised by American Professor Vern Bengston and included the cross-generation studies of agnostic, atheists and spiritual families.

Overall, the findings showed that not believing in God creates more tolerant children. They’re less likely to be racist, less likely to be sexist and more likely to be empathetic on the whole. It’s a pretty big claim to make. But in my experience, I’d have to say it’s true.

Especially when religion leads you to reject your own flesh and blood for being gay.

Read more: Watch: Ellen DeGeneres passionately shuts down anti-gay Pastor.

When my cousin came out we had already left the church.  She knew where we stood and how the rest of the family felt. So she came to us for help. As news spread throughout the family that my cousin was gay, whispers started.

“Did you hear? Jess is a lesbian, such sad news,” one would say.

“Why would Jess choose to be gay?” another would question.

To my cousin’s credit she laughed off those comments; they were spoken in such ignorance, she couldn’t take offence. But when they began to accost her and attempt to change her, it stopped being funny.

It built up to a point where my Dad declared he would never set foot in a church again – if this is what it meant to follow God, to reject your own.

It was an event that scared the hell out of us.

Before we left the church we had believed it was wrong to be gay.

Before we left the church we would have rejected our own flesh and blood.

Before we left the church we were confined to the rules of a book.

Before we left the church, we too would have have allowed these 6000-year-old fictional stories to be our moral compass.

Can you see now, why I’m so grateful to my parents for the decision they made when I was 14? Imagine the person I could have been.