OK, that entry title is a little misleading. I don't think Amy Tan is a Christian in the "born-again" sense that most of us here would understand, but her father was a Christian and she was raised in a Christian church. As she entered her teen years, she began to stray from the straight and narrow -- for example, reading "forbidden books, including Catcher in the Rye, which I had to buy twice because Christian family friends confiscated it from me."

When Tan got caught reading a book on sexuality, her mother enlisted the help of the pastor. Tan writes in The Opposite of Fate:

The minister, whose son had turned me down when I asked him to a Sadie Hawkins Day dance, came to our house to give me good counsel. He said, "If you can just be patient, if you can keep your virtue, one day, God willing" -- here he swept out his arms, envisioning the heavenly promise -- "hundreds of young men will be lined up around the block, waiting to ask you out!" And I thought to myself, Exactly what kind of fool does he take me for?

Besides the glaringly obvious question of why Christians who can't read Catcher in the Rye are going to dances, Tan's story is sadly familiar. In our rush to defend God, we sometimes twist the whole "all things work together for good" thing into a genie-in-a-bottle kind of Christianity. If you can just hold onto your virtue, God will bring you the perfect spouse, or a hundred boyfriends. It's too bad that Tan's skepticism led her away from the church, but she was right to assume there was something foolish about the pastor's statement, well-intentioned though it may have been.