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." In 1989 Flynn joined the staff of CODESH, later an affiliate of the Center for Inquiry. In 2000 he became the editor of Free Inquiry. In 2009 he was named executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, as the former CODESH had been known since 1996. Popular culture 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." The Trouble With Christmas 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. 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. 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