Tom Flynn

Thomas W. Flynn (August 18, 1955 – August 23, 2021) was an American author, journalist, novelist, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, and editor of its journal Free Inquiry.

He was also director of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum and the Freethought Trail.

Acknowledging that he had become an atheist in 1980 while residing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he visited Milwaukee's downtown library, looked up "atheism" in the card catalogue, and found the so-called Dresden Edition of The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll on the open stacks.

Reading Ingersoll's florid Gilded Age speeches in defense of agnosticism and atheism confirmed him in his identity as an atheist and kindled his desire to become a public activist for unbelief.

While working as a corporate and industrial filmmaker and later as an advertising account executive, he began to do volunteer work for the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism (CODESH), publisher of Free Inquiry, which was based in Buffalo, New York, where he resided after 1981.

In 1984, he resolved to stop celebrating Christmas, saying it was no longer "the birthday of anyone I knew."

He stopped celebrating the holiday in 1984 and has found that it is very difficult to escape from.

"What struck me... was how arrogant society was with promoting this holiday. There is a lot of pressure... put on people who do not feel this is 'their holiday', we shove it down everybody's throats."

Flynn's goal is to raise consciousness and persuade the "Christian majority to live and let live".

Currently, most Christians "strongly demand that everyone pay lip-service to their sectarian birthday holiday."

In 1989 Flynn joined the staff of CODESH, later an affiliate of the Center for Inquiry.

The book's beginnings came from an installment of a column in the Secular Humanist Bulletin in 1992.

The essay attracted national media attention including more than a score of local and national radio reports during the 1992 holiday season.

It was as a consequence of this publicity that Prometheus Books offered Flynn a contract for the book.

Flynn was the author of two published satirical science fiction novels whose themes include the media and religion.

Much of Flynn's work addressed church-state issues, including his 1993 book The Trouble with Christmas, in connection with which he made hundreds of radio and TV appearances in his role as the curmudgeonly "anti-Claus", calling attention to what he viewed as unfair treatment of the nonreligious during the year-end holiday season.

He edited The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, a comprehensive reference work on the history, beliefs, and thinking of men and women who live without religion.

In an autobiographical chapter in Flynn's 1993 The Trouble with Christmas, Flynn stated that he was born in 1955 in Erie, Pennsylvania, the only child of a moderately conservative Catholic family.

He believed zealously in the teachings of the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church, beginning to question its teachings only after many church doctrines and practices were revised in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, which affected parish life when Flynn was a young adolescent.

He earned his bachelor's degree at Xavier University, the Jesuit university in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the school's emphasis on philosophy and theology gave him the tools he needed to pursue his religious questions at a more serious level.

Over several years of inquiry he rejected his Catholicism, then his Christianity, and ultimately his theism.

The book received ongoing media attention; in 1994, Flynn was the only on-screen expert in A&E Network's first Biography segment on Santa Claus who was not a Greek Orthodox priest.

He was billed onscreen as a folklorist.

In 2000 he became the editor of Free Inquiry.

Galactic Rapture, published in 2000 by Prometheus Books, concerns the rise of a consciously fraudulent false messiah on Jaremi Four, a ruined, quarantined world.

In a 2006 Point of Inquiry podcast, while discussing an increase of the nonreligious in the United States with host DJ Grothe, Flynn stated, "Over a period from the late 1980s to the dawn of the 21st century, a number of polls using a number of different methodologies had continued to show a steady rise, an approximate doubling in the number of people who did not claim traditional religious affiliation."

Later in the podcast.

he added "What we seem to be witnessing pretty clearly is a growing polarization of society. The fundamentalist religious right has been growing very widely. Apparently, the secularist left, if we can call it that, has been growing pretty strongly too, and most of this growth has been at the expense of the center."

In this book Flynn summarized the history of the holiday from an atheist perspective, arguing that the Santa Claus myth is harmful for child development, and urged atheists, secular humanists, and other nonreligious Americans to push back, at the same time making themselves more visible during the Christian holiday season, by refusing to celebrate all aspects of the holiday, religious or secular.

His critique was still controversial in 2007, when editor Dale McGowan published a point-counterpoint debate on the Santa Claus myth in his handbook for nonreligious parents, Parenting Beyond Belief: on Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion.

Flynn argued that early immersion in the Santa myth predisposed children to accept absurd religious teachings in later life; McGowan argued that the discovery that the Santa myth was untrue prepared children to reject religious dogmas in later life.

Both agreed that the subject demanded further research by the child-development community.

Speaking to Point of Inquiry host Robert M. Price about the putative "War on Christmas," Flynn states that retailers have found "there is a lot more religious diversity... [they discovered] a lot of people with money to spend that aren't Christians."

Therefore, retailers changed from greeting customers with "Merry Christmas" to "Happy Holidays," to the disapproval of conservatives.

He added that as "the Christian dominance of the culture continues to decline, there's going to be a little more emphasis or openness to the idea that some people are doing other things on December 25".

Flynn told D.J. Grothe on Point of Inquiry that he does not hate Christmas.

In 2009 he was named executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, as the former CODESH had been known since 1996.

He contributed a new Introduction to A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White and blogged on The Washington Post's On Faith site during 2010 and 2011.

He blogged regularly on the Center for Inquiry's blog Free Thinking.

He was also the author of several anti-religious, black comedy, science fiction novels.