Obama is a Protestant Christian whose religious views developed in his adult life. He wrote in The Audacity of Hope that he 'was not raised in a religious household.' He described his mother, raised by non-religious parents, as being detached from religion, yet 'in many ways the most spiritually awakened person ... I have ever known,' and 'a lonely witness for secular humanism'. He described his father as a 'confirmed atheist' by the time his parents met, and his stepfather as 'a man who saw religion as not particularly useful.' Obama explained how, through working with black churches as a community organizer while in his twenties, he came to understand 'the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change.'