The Geeky Atheist

This week has been interesting. Although my wife and I came out to my parents back in March, we haven't mentioned anything to my wife's parents. On Saturday, they flew in to visit us for 9 days. After doing a cursory tweet about a slip-up I did tonight, I wanted to expand on my thoughts of when to come out of the closet as an atheist.

A little background. My parents were much less fundamentalist than myself or my wife's parents. My wife's family is fairly fundamentalist, centered around Pennsylvania and Virginia. These are the same group of people that we heard call Obama the antichrist, amongst many other things. While we did civilly talk politics tonight briefly, I don't really want to delve into that.

A couple of reminders for those stumbling across my blog for the first time. My wife and I deconverted recently and both were calling ourselves atheists by January of this year. We married just over 3 years ago, when both of us were fundamental, young-earth creationists. More about that here.

A few interesting things came up tonight:

• My stepdad mentioned to them that it was so nice to have a daughter-in-law that was a believer. I didn't ever know he said this to them.
• They said how nice it is for my wife to sing and me to play the piano at church (I did this as an atheist last Christmas). My wife and I are trying to schedule the Thanksgiving trip such that we just can't quite make it to church, "darn."
• They were asking me about some details they hadn't heard from me about what I was looking for when I met my then-to-be wife on Match.com.

The last one is where I made a small slip up. In passing I used the phrase, "I was a Christian." This is what I tweeted about:

GeekyAtheist: Slipped up a little with the in-laws tonight. In the middle of a conversation, I said, "and I was a Christian." They didn't catch "was."

A few interesting comments came in, and I realized what I then tweeted: "Trimmed tweets trigger terse thoughts." Thus, I decided it was time for a blog post.

The basic response I go was about coming out of the closet to them. While I am trying to be more and more open and never lying about my true convictions, I try to avoid the subject with some people. My in-laws are some of those people. It's not for fear about debating them -- it wouldn't be much of a debate, they are emotional people and would probably explode and not be able to actually discuss it. It's purely for the only reason I think religion has any merit. For some people, their faith that a guy in the sky is keeping an eye out for them is the only thing keeping them going. My in-laws are some of those people.

My father-in-law has been struggling in the job market for the past couple of years, but after getting a decent job last fall, he was laid off back around March again. He does several interviews every week, but nothing seems to come through. He has hopes that an interview he has lined up for Tuesday after they travel back will be a bit more fruitful. They wanted to support their child in her career and came out here to support her, and had to sacrifice a lot to do it. They are the type of people that won't take a handout, so our pitching in is more subtle -- I've been doing a lot of cooking, and leaving very little opportunity for them to pick up any of the tab.

But to them, God is a support structure. The last thing I would do to them is shake their support structure by asserting there is no God. While I obviously feel that I'm right, I don't think this is an opportune time to express our convictions. Since we only see them two, maybe three times a year, it's not that hard to structure our visits such that we can avoid being at church on a Sunday (not because we wouldn't sit through it, but purely because they always expect us to perform). Also, it's been surprisingly easy to deflect or avoid comments about God. For example, a friend from high school that I didn't really feel like debating the other night had this conversation with me:

me: just go with who's successful and do what you love
me: it'll work out
him: yeah
him: and the most important thing
him: stay in God's favor
him: one thing about being back in X... I've been cleaning up my life a little bit at a time
him: and that's probably the best thing for me
me: Yeah, X was a nice, laid back place to be
me: I don't know if I could live there anymore though
me: too remote

While I will definitely come out to him one of these days, it's fairly easy to avoid the topic at all. And the interesting thing about believers is that they just assume you are a believer, especially if they knew you were in the past. That's why my "was" comment earlier didn't ruffle any feathers. That's why my complete avoidance of the God subject in the chat above didn't raise an eyebrow. That's why I don't think I'll have any problems avoiding the topic.

If they do find out, it's not the end of the world. This is who we are, and we are proud of who we are. We are happy to talk about it, or to not talk about it. The only thing we ask is that we are respected, and we will continue to respect those that respect us with few exceptions.

So what does everyone else think? Anyone else in a similar spot?