I’m a left-leaning atheist. However at my college I became friends with my brothers friends, because we all share a love of sports. However, to my not-surprise I’ve discovered that they are all very right-wing Christian types. I don’t pretend to be something I’m not but at the same time they don’t know that I’m an atheist or anything like that, they think that I’m an apolitical believer.

Recently I’ve been thinking over whether I should begin to slowly distance myself from them, and an incident that just occurred has me thinking maybe it’s time to do just that. There was a small group of pro-choice activists in our college cafeteria today, and by the time I went to go sit with my friends they made note of this and decided to go confront them. The actual confrontation ended up being very short and only verbally-based (one of my friends went by the table where they had set up shop and said “I’m not signing this bullshit” referring to the petition they had), but it was clear that they (and their coaches, they are all members of the baseball team) were pretty pissed. I stayed silent and just watched, but I’ve come to realize that maybe I need to find people who I’m closer with in terms of values and moral convictions. I’ve only ever showed one side of myself to these boys, I know that if they knew all of me they probably wouldn’t want to be my friend.

Luckily I’m transferring to another college here in a couple of months anyway so I’m thinking maybe I should just only talk about sports with them and stick these last ~6 weeks out, and then go out and try to find another friend group on my own this time when I go to my next college. But part of me thinks I’m a bad person for still associating with them at this point.