I grew up going to church but without all the “God” stuff.

That’s how I’ve always described my upbringing in the Unitarian Universalist church, the microscopic religious sect largely based in New England and the broader Northeast that focuses on acceptance of people regardless of personal characteristics or religion. Sermons often center on liberal themes appropriate to their educated, middle-class crowd, like community and the need to take care of one another.

But despite the on-its-face insularity of Unitarian Universalism — a mere 0.3 percent of the American population belongs to the group — my time there was essential for expanding my views of the world by showing me firsthand how people experience and interact with religion.

I’m in so many ways thankful for my childhood, but it’s also fair to say that I was raised in a very particular world. Half my time was spent around my mom’s Yale University faculty, friends and my classmates — all children of Yale faculty — and the other half within my dad’s particular obsessions like 1960s Batman and the evils of right-wing politics. As a result, my world was one of leftism, of thinking about the world in a critical and suspicious way.

Religion was never an absolute fit in that world because my parents didn’t really believe in it. My mom’s side of the family had Jewish heritage — before the 1930s, our family name was “Goldberger” — but they hadn’t practiced for a generation, and we didn’t either.

For the most part, I was okay with that and still am. Maybe it’s just that I wasn’t raised on it, reading Greek myths instead of Bible verses as my main theological exposure, but I could never bring myself to believe in the idea of a God. As much as I like the peace that comes with the thought of a higher power, even a more amorphous one that comes with agnosticism, I find that I’m too political-science-brained with a need for hard evidence to ever buy into the unbelievable assumptions many religions compel.

But even though traditional, God-fearing religion wasn’t a major part of my childhood, for about six years when I was growing up, it was a staple of my Sundays. I’d put on the gray suit my parents got me when my childhood dream was to be a 1950s top-hat-wearing “song-and-dance man” and go to the Unitarian Universalist church.

For the most part, I was bored there. Every kid zones out sitting in uncomfortable pews, listening to people ramble and sing songs about topics that 10-year-olds struggle to care about.

Looking back, though, those Sundays in rigid pews expanded my conceptions of the world beyond the semi-insular bubble in which I was raised. That’s the funny blend in Unitarian Universalism — it’s a very small, particular religion, made up of a lot of people who think in the exact same way, but it’s concerned with ensuring that everyone looks beyond those immediate perceptions with its focus on widespread acceptance.

The most lasting effect from my youthful fling with Unitarian Universalism is rooted in a Sunday school class that involved travel to different local houses of worship and sitting in on their services. I went to a red-brick, fire-and-brimstone Catholic church in the suburbs that promised damnation for those even considering voting for Barack Obama and a downtown, Buddhist temple in a woman’s attic to learn about reincarnation. I spent a Saturday night in a synagogue during the High Holidays and a Sunday morning singing gospel music in a Black Southern Baptist church — or at least the closest equivalent New Haven, Connecticut, could conjure.

It almost goes without saying that each experience was almost nothing like any of the others, but through them all, there was a through line of a group of people, all with fairly similar values and ideas, who just really like spending time together in a house of worship each week. And when I was there, I, too, really liked spending time in those environments, for the most part. I liked hearing choruses of gospel songs, smelling the incense and gazing at the synagogue’s art. When I thought of religion as less of a series of stories I didn’t really buy into and more as this broad series of community links in one space, I “got” religion more than I had before and became more open-minded in general.

Religion is so intertwined with day-to-day life. There are religious symbols at every turn, controversies over religion in each Supreme Court docket and so forth. If I hadn’t spent my childhood bouncing around from Baptist church to synagogue to mosque, I’m not sure I ever could’ve quite understood why.

I haven’t been to a Unitarian Universalist church in around a decade, but I’m glad I did when I did. I can never totally mold my mind to get why, say, the Creationism Museum in Kentucky I visited in high school rejects Darwinian evolution out of hand. But I can understand, on a basic level, why one of my friends might go home earlier on a Saturday night to get up for church in time for Sunday, or why people vote according to how others of their same faith vote. There’s just something nice about the ever-buzzword-esque feel of community one gets from spending time in these places — something I got to glimpse as a somewhat bored preteen.

My time in the church of 0.3 percent of the population filled in 100 percent of my understanding of religion.

Nick Perkins, a senior majoring in political science, is the culture editor.