Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

The challenge of telling one's Christian family that one is an atheist for the first time is not something that anyone should take lightly. This is an anxiety-provoking subject, and while many people report that it went better than they anticipated, there is some real risk involved. The outcome is not always positive, and particularly for teenagers still living at home, the consequences can be devastating. What I've tried to do in this post is offer some tips on how to prepare for the process.

Initial Considerations

For big and possibly scary decisions like this, it is often helpful to consider the pros and cons of making such a disclosure. The idea is that if the benefits clearly outweigh the risks, one feels more confident in making the disclosure. Unfortunately, this is a situation where it is not always easy to assess the risks accurately.

If you are trying to decide if and how best to disclose your atheism to your family, I recommend that you start by asking and answering the following questions for yourself:

1. How old are you, and if you are living in your parents' home, how many more years do you expect to live there?
2. If you imagine your family's Christian beliefs ranging on a continuum from progressive to extremist, where would you place them?
3. If you imagine yourself remaining silent and not disclosing your atheism for another year, how tolerable vs. intolerable does doing so seem? That is, how critical is it that you make the disclosure now as opposed to a year from now?
4. What is your motive for disclosing your atheism?
   

As we look through these and examine your answers, the picture may become a bit clearer. For those under the age of 18, I am generally comfortable with saying that the younger you are the more likely I would be to advise you to postpone your disclosure. For those over 18, the situation changes dramatically (see For the Adult Atheist below).

Considered individually, however, these initial considerations are unlikely to be particularly helpful. Instead, you want to consider their interaction. For example, if you are 14 and expect to be in your parents' home for at least another 4 years, you may want to give yourself a couple more years before disclosing your atheism if you rated your family in the fundamentalist to extremist range of the belief continuum, especially if you also perceive your current situation as fairly tolerable. On the other hand, a 14 year-old in a fairly progressive family who cannot imagine remaining silent any longer may decide to speak out sooner.

For the Adult Atheist

If you are over 18 and not residing with your parents or planning to move out soon, your situation becomes much simpler because your level of risk tends to be considerably lower. Consideration #1 and #3 become irrelevant, leaving you to focus on #2 and #4. Even then, #2 is relevant only with regard to how you might make your disclosure.

Since there has been a tremendous amount written about coming out by LGBT authors, this is a great place to start. Watch the video below and see how easily one could adapt these suggestions to the disclosure of atheism.



For the adult atheist, the power dynamics are vastly different, the risk is lower, and one has far more control over how to navigate the aftermath.

In future posts, we'll look at how to make the disclosure and consider how to cope with the aftermath.

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Tags: coming out, Christian, atheist, atheism, parents, family, LGBT