My name is Chris Babcock, I’m 18 years old and I’ll be a freshman at Indiana University in Bloomington in about a week. I first learned about the Center for Inquiry after watching the History of Disbelief with my dad, but I didn’t discover the website until I started doing research looking into possibly starting a student club at IU. I was very excited to discover that there is already a very good club in existence, the Secular Alliance of IU, which I’m planning on joining very shortly after arriving on campus. I’m a progressive political activist and was involved heavily in electing Obama last year, and I’m now looking to become actively involved in supporting openly Athiest/Agnostic/Skeptic/Freethinking political candidates for offices of all levels (I’m not saying that Obama is any of those, I know that he is a Christian). While I know that the secular movement doesn’t have to be at odds with the conservative-political worldview (in fact, at their cores I think they have a lot in common), I know that it certainly is for today’s conservatives in America and that the path toward secularism at the federal level runs through the progressive political movement. I’m usually full of ideas and I have a lot of leadership experience, so I’m looking forward to doing whatever I can to increase awareness for our cause.
My parents left an evangelical church when I was around 8 years old, and I’ve been a skeptic since age 7 (I always thought the stories they told us were crazy). My family has a vivid history of evangelism so I am very thankful to have been raised in a tolerant household. My father’s parents were missionaries originally from Washington state. Before my dad started high school his parents moved the family to Africa to spread the word of Jesus Christ. Every few years they took him and his brother to a new country, France, Switzerland, and many African countries, never giving either of them a chance at a normal childhood, sacrificing it so that others could be “saved”. Both of my parents are graduates of the infamous Liberty University in Virginia, and my grandmother and uncle are professors there. The home I grew up in in Virginia was a stone’s throw away from Jerry Falwell’s mansion. Luckily about ten years ago my parents began to see the light, we started attending a Unitarian Universalist church and moved to Indiana.
