Though nominally a protestant congregationalist Christian by baptism, I was raised in a non-practicing household. My mom herself is nominally Christian and my dad professes a belief in God, though is outspoken against organized religion. Like many Americans who reside in the New England, I did not attend church (except for a brief period several years ago), my family did not pray before dinner, and there never any pressure, or suggestion at all, from my parents to do any of these things. That said, American culture being what it is, for many years I passively accepted Christian as being what Americans were.

As I grew into my teens, things started to shift at a gradual pace. As I learned more about scientific discoveries, the less it seemed that God had anything to do with the world. That was the first thing to go, which led to several years calling myself an agnostic. From a strictly philosophical perspective, I do still retain elements of that position, but I live my life with the assumption that there are no deities.

The shift to solid atheism came sometime after 2009 as I continued to learn about how the universe operates and it became clear to me that it operates very well on its own. There are problems and inefficiencies of course, but that only confirmed my leanings further, showing that the universe wasn’t the perfect creation that many religious teachings claim.

Now accepting the “atheist” moniker, I wasn’t precisely “closeted” but I wasn’t fully open, either. I liked to call this my “openly quiet” period, where I might comment on something here or there, which when correctly parsed would show my true leanings, but I didn’t ever declare myself as an atheist.

It’s hard to explain why this was the case. After all, I live in New England, where hardly anyone actually cares if you’re religious or not. Unlike parts of the south, we don’t greet each other with “Hey, what church do you attend?” There is little peer pressure to be religious and one isn’t ostracized for not believing in God. Our church attendance has been a joke for decades and now membership itself is hemorrhaging.

Maybe it’s my nature. I tend to be non-confrontational, sometimes to a fault. Even though New England is very non-religious compared to the rest of the country, a super-majority of its residents are still believers and I wasn’t really looking to rock any boats.

A couple things changed this for me. One was the rapid coming out of gays and lesbians all across America. Now, I would never compare my situation to their own – like I said, non-practicing household – but I admired the bravery they displayed for showing themselves as who they were: regular folks. In particular, I give most of the credit to Ellen Page, who came out during a speech to the Human Rights Council in February 2014. I think watching this big Hollywood actress have a tough time getting through the speech helped me relate to my own situation. She works in one of the places in America probably most accepting of her and still took a while and a highly nervous speech to come out.

The other big reason was seeing reports of the oppression of atheists and prosecutions for apostasy in countries outside the United States, particularly in the Middle East. I felt that I just couldn’t do a good enough job advocating for better conditions for them and standing in solidarity with them while still in my openly quiet state. It was just hypocritical for me to sit here safe in New England not showing who I was while they were facing execution for being open.

All that said, it still took me another year and two months before I fully came out. On April 23, 2015, Openly Secular held their first Openly Secular Day. I figured that was as good a time as any, so I did it.

Fast-forward a year later, and though I was now open, I still felt I could do a better job, particularly in knocking down some of the old preconceptions about atheists that a lot of Americans still hold. A comment by a Facebook friend and fellow atheist prompted me to setup Free Market Atheist.