The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O'Hair

Introduction

Introduction ON DECEMBER 8, 1960, Madalyn Murray (later O’Hair) filed suit in the Superior Court of Baltimore, Maryland, asking the Court to rule that required Bible reading and recitation of the Lord’s prayer in the city’s public schools are unconstitutional. She claimed that her son William’s First Amendment rights were being violated, and that he was being discriminated against because he refused to participate in his school’s morning religious exercise. Defeated in the lower courts, Madalyn appealed what became Murray v. Curlett to the United States Supreme Court, where it was joined with a similar case from Pennsylvania, Schempp v. School District of Abington Township. On June 17, 1963, the Court found in favor of the Murrays and the Schempps and by a margin of eight to one declared that the Maryland and Pennsylvania laws violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Although these events did not occur without some warning or precedent in the courts, much of the nation was stunned and angry. But while the Schempps, who had taken a low profile throughout their case, shunned the limelight, Murray seized it. She took credit for having single -handedly banned Bible reading and prayer from the nation’s public schools. She overstated the case, but Americans, searching for someone to blame, were only too willing to accept her claim. When she chose to push for the further separation of church and state—challenging the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust“ on American currency, the tax exempt status of religious organizations, the pope’s performing mass on the Washington Mall, and U.S. astronauts ’ reading the Bible in space—she became the most visible of American atheists. Indeed, she was branded with, and welcomed, the title, “the most hated woman in America.” 1 The details of Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s life are fascinating, but even more so is the story of how Americans responded to her. Similarly, her ideas on religion are interesting, but no more interesting than how those ideas related to American culture from the Cold War to the end of the century. Those themes provide the framework for this book, moving it beyond simply being a biography of Madalyn Murray O’Hair to an assessment of the beliefs behind her actions and how she came to symbolize all that postwar Americans hated and feared. Her son William, who later broke with her over her atheist activities, wrote: “In reality my mother did not create the time, the time created her.”1 Madalyn Murray O’Hair was a “mover and shaker” who struggled against the cultural and political consensus on many subjects. By her own admission, she was no philosopher and had little patience for theoretical explorations of unbelief. That is not to say that O’Hair failed to explain the tenets of atheism; she did that at great length. She was well grounded in the history of religion, theology, and skepticism, but she broke little new ground in those areas intellectually. Instead, she accepted what was prepared for her, popularized it, and applied it to the world around her. Not being content to personally and quietly reject the idea of belief in God, she launched a crusade against it and brought atheism out of the study and shadows of society to the masses. Her enemies pictured O’Hair as stupid. This was not the case. She was intelligent and well educated, both formally and informally. Her use of foul language shocked people, but her message was always accessible even to the minimally educated. And she made effective use of the media in delivering her message. By her personal behavior—in part exaggerated by her enemies and the press—she personified what people expected of atheists. She fulfilled Americans’ expectations of what would happen if someone were to lose his or her belief in God. In sum, in her hands atheism was no longer exclusively a matter of scholarly debate or hushed acceptance among fringe groups. O’Hair placed it near the top of America’s public agenda, where, her enemies maintained, it threatened to subvert, debase, and pervert all that was holy or at least good about American life.2 Madalyn Murray O’Hair became American atheism’s leading proponent , educator, spokesperson, and symbol, but she neither invented atheism nor introduced it to the United States. In exploring the history of atheism in the United States, historians have wrestled with...