Mother and Son: Madalyn Murray O’Hair
10
THE ATHEIST’S REVOLT: MADALYN MURRAY O’HAIR AND OTHERS
ONE OF THE great themes in the history of atheism is the rebellion of son against father. This powerful personal quest for identity is often linked with the rejection of the father’s beliefs. In the high noon of atheism, this story often took the form of the rebellion of an atheist son against the stale and barren worldview of a Christian father. The wisdom of the age was that atheism was exciting and liberating, promising an end both to the interminable boredom occasioned by religious indoctrination and to its baleful and despotic impact on personal development. This pattern of the accumulated intergenerational rejection of faith must, it was widely believed, lead to the end of faith and the triumph of some form of atheism. Yet the situation is far from being as simple as this pattern might suggest, as we shall see.
FATHER AND SON: EDMUND GOSSE
One of the most fascinating works to deal with a son’s revolt against his father’s faith is Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, published in 1907, some forty to fifty years after the events it relates. Gosse’s book describes, movingly yet relentlessly, the movement of a son away from the religious beliefs of his father. Admittedly, those religious beliefs were quite extreme, particularly by British standards. Philip Henry Gosse, a noted naturalist, was a member of the Plymouth Brethren, a pugnaciously introverted group of Christians who held that just about every aspect of late Victorian culture was inspired by Satan and designed to lead believers away from the true faith. The celebration of Christmas was deemed to be “popish.” Gosse would have no formal celebration of the birth of Christ. A moving passage describes how the two housemaids decided to mark Christmas Day 1857 by cooking a plum pudding. Young Edmund, then aged eight, was offered a small piece. On learning of this, his father flew into an uncontrollable rage—angered more by the sheer sacrilege of the event than by the challenge it posed to his authority.
At times the book seems to verge on the comic; at others on the tragic. Gosse’s narrative recounts the vivid and disturbing memories of a lonely boy reading aloud works of theology to his dying mother, of his pressing his pale cheek against the windowpane for interminable hours, and of the silence between father and son “in which you could hear a sea anemone sigh.” Although, following the researches of Ann Thwaite, the work is now widely regarded as factually inaccurate, perhaps written more to make a point than to tell the truth, it remains a fascinating portrayal of what the religious alienation of son from father in the Victorian period might have been like.
As the work unfolds, its readers begin to sense that there is more to the elder Gosse than might at first seem the case. He is a moderate by the standards of his colleagues. When a preacher remarks, perhaps with a little too much enthusiasm, that William Shakespeare is a “lost soul now suffering for his sins in hell,” Gosse objects. How do we know? Might not God’s mercy extend to such a soul? Edmund himself begins to appear as something of a bore, inclined to a rather tedious form of rationalism at one moment and a love of poetry and art at another.
Edmund Gosse’s rebellion against his father and his mental world parallels that of the age. The Victorian father was widely depicted as an authoritarian despot, making demands of his children that they could not possibly meet. To reject the faith of the father almost becomes a routine element of the process of growing up. A popular stereotype began to emerge and then to crystallize into the rigidity of a fossil: Christianity is the unthinking, unreflective faith of the previous generation; atheism the dynamic and informed worldview of its successor.
DAUGHTERS AND SONS: IVY COMPTON-BURNETT
This view is set out with particular stridency, fortunately tempered by an engaging wit, in the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884–1969)—such as Brothers and Sisters (1929) and Daughters and Sons (1937). One of the themes explored in her writings is the manner in which the present is damaged but not defeated by the past. Part of the legacy of the past, with which the present must struggle, is religious belief. Compton-Burnett’s view on this matter was simple: religion was credible and powerful in the past; now, it had no relevance for anyone. A mere fifty years was sufficient to erase its power. She makes this point, for example, in Daughters and Sons by stressing the historically situated character of religious belief. The novel is set in 1894, and we are asked to imagine Sabine, now over eighty years of age, absolutely settled in her beliefs and morals. She knew what God was like and what he expected of her. The narrator comments: “Her feeling for [God] was of such a nature that she only needed to have been born fifty years later than her date of eighteen hundred and ten, to fail to recognize him at all.”
There is no doubt that this pattern can be seen repeated throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The religious beliefs of an older generation were an embarrassment to their children. In Compton-Burnett’s A Family and a Fortune (1939), a funeral prompts Oliver, an elderly grandfather, to own up to a slightly tenuous belief in life after death. “His grandsons,” the narrator observes, “looked at him with incredulous eyes, startled by the faith of a man who was in other respects a normal being.” The children of Anglican clergy were often the most aggressive atheists, and the most critical of the institution their parents served.
If this worldview had prevailed, the Christian faith in England would have died out years ago. Each generation seems to have believed that Christianity would disappear within its lifetime. Let us assume that a new generation arises every thirty years; that the rate of decline of religion is such that one in three will rebel against the faith of their parents; and that the entire British population in 1880 would have defined itself as Christian. (This hypothetical rate of erosion is actually rather modest in comparison with the cataclysmic decline presupposed by some atheist propagandists in the early 1990s.) The figures would then be:
ATE
HRISTIAN PERCENTAGE OF POPULATION
1880
100
1910
67
1940
45
1970
30
2000
20
This crude analysis does not take into account the substantial postwar immigration into Britain from the Indian subcontinent, which resulted in large Hindu and Muslim communities’ becoming established in the nation. Although not reducing the number of Christians in Britain, this phenomenon would significantly reduce the proportion of Christians within the population as a whole.
Yet the 2001 census of Great Britain, which allowed people the opportunity to self-define religiously, came up with a figure that must give cause for thought to those who have bought into this model. About 42 million people—72 percent of the population—defined themselves as Christian. Relatively few of these attend church—a pastoral problem that the Christian churches must clearly explore and address. But there has simply not been the erosion of faith that earlier generations predicted with such confidence. The glib and simplistic predictions of a secular or atheist society simply have not come about. Christianity turned out not to be a marginalized anachronism doomed to terminal decline, but instead a remarkably resilient and enduring part of the social and intellectual order.
My concern in this chapter is not to document the failure of the confident predictions of well-meaning atheist pundits of the past, interesting and illuminating though they may be. This failure is widely conceded, and I have already given some thought to the critical weaknesses that it exposes in atheism. Instead, I want to tell another story. It is not the story of the son who comes to reject Christianity by rebelling against his father—the cultural stereotype of the late nineteenth century—but of a son who comes to Christian faith by rebelling against the atheism of his mother. The story casts light on why atheism is highly unlikely to achieve cultural or intellectual dominance in the United States, and why its appeal is declining elsewhere. The story we shall tell is of William J. Murray’s relationship with his mother, Madalyn Murray O’Hair.
MOTHER AND SON: MADALYN MURRAY O’HAIR
Madalyn Elizabeth Mays was born in Pittsburgh on April 13, 1919.1 As it happened, that day was Palm Sunday, the day traditionally observed by Christians as marking Christ’s entry into the city of Jerusalem, where he would die a week later. She married John Henry Roths in October 1941. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of that year plunged the United States into war against Japan. Madalyn and her husband signed up and went to war—separately, as it happened. John was shipped out to the Pacific theater of war, while Madalyn ended up in Italy, working as a cryptographer. Her work brought her into contact with many senior American officers, including William J. Murray, serving in the Eighth Army Corps. She became pregnant with her first child in September 1945.
Murray declined to acknowledge the child as his own. On his return to the United States in late 1945, Roths offered to remain as Madalyn’s husband, despite her infidelity, and act as father to her child. Madalyn declined and sued for divorce. Her first child was born in May 1946. By this time, Madalyn had begun to refer to herself as Madalyn Murray, even though no relationship now existed between herself and William J. Murray. In a further sign that she regarded herself as married to Murray, she named her son William Joseph Murray III. In February 1954, Madalyn became pregnant once more as the result of an affair with Michael Fierello, a local man. Although Murray was not the father, she named her second son Jon Garth Murray. Interestingly, both children were baptized.
Madalyn now began to become involved with radical political groups. Although the nature of those groups remains unclear, they can probably be described as Communist. Although it is uncertain when Madalyn became an atheist, or for what reason, there seems little doubt that she regarded this as an integral aspect of her new radical identity. She attempted to find employment in the Soviet Union, believing that this was where the future of the world would be shaped. In the event, nothing came of these advances.
To modern readers, this naïveté seems incredible. Yet it must be recalled that many idealists in the United States at this time genuinely believed that the Soviet Union was a bastion of freedom and enlightenment, offering a model that avoided the multiple failings of American capitalism—above all, unemployment. Lee Harvey Oswald, for example, was one such idealist. Having linked up with much the same radical groups as Madalyn, Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959. He returned to the United States in June 1962, only a little disillusioned. The rest, as they say, is history.
The episode that propelled Madalyn to nationwide fame took place in the fall of 1960. William was just about to begin attending school in Baltimore as a fourteen-year-old ninth grader. He had enrolled late because of the family’s delayed return to the United States from Europe, where Madalyn had tried to defect to the Soviet Union through the Soviet Embassy in Paris. Much to her irritation, she had been refused. She was not in a particularly positive frame of mind after this humiliation. While visiting her son’s school, she noticed that the children were praying and reading the Bible. She took immediate exception to both, and ordered her son to begin keeping a log of any religious activity that took place at school. William himself had no objection to these activities. But Madalyn saw him as a pawn in a larger game. He would be her passport to celebrity. William later recalled his mother’s words: “The United States of America is nothing more than a fascist slave labor camp run by a handful of Jew bankers in New York. They trick you into believing you’re free with those phony rigged elections . . . If they’ll keep us from going to Russia where there is some freedom, we’ll just have to change America. I’ll make sure you never say another prayer in that school.” Madalyn would not be the first attention-seeking mother to exploit her child in this way; it was, however, a classic example of the phenomenon.
William’s log gradually filled up, until Madalyn judged the time was right to make a protest. She wrote to the school board, demanding that her son be exempted from Bible reading and prayer. When the school board turned down her request, she wrote to the Baltimore Sun, setting out her grievances. Eventually, the Sun decided to run a story. On October 27, the front page of the Sun was dominated by its headline: “Boy, 14, Balks at Bible Reading.” The story was taken up in the media and rapidly became a national issue. The American Civil Liberties Union expressed interest, then backed off. They had another virtually identical case under way nearby. The school agreed to a compromise. In the first week in November, they announced that they regarded the reading of the Bible as perfectly constitutional. They were, however, prepared to allow any student who took exception to Bible reading or prayer to remain silent or be excused from the class at that point. It seemed that the matter was closed.
But it wasn’t. Madalyn’s protest led to a tenfold increase in her mail, and a substantial number of checks began to arrive. She could afford to hire a lawyer. In December, she filed a petition, in the name of her son, demanding that illegal Bible readings and prayers should cease. The event attracted her more publicity. She became a lightning rod for alienated Americans of all kinds, who saw in her protest the potential beginnings of something much greater. The Baltimore courts threw out the petition, forcing Madalyn to appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. By this stage, funds were rolling in, and there was no problem about coping with legal costs. Madalyn’s genius for self-promotion was paying off in a big way. Suddenly a new opportunity for advancing her agenda and heightening her profile opened up.
Early in 1962, the founder of the Free Humanist magazine (circulation 600), finding he no longer had the time to manage his pet project, handed the entire enterprise, including the mailing list, over to Madalyn. It was promptly renamed the American Atheist, and became a key means for promoting Madalyn and atheism in about equal measure. It became a nonprofit corporation in May of that year. It would prove the ideal vehicle for the advocacy of Madalyn and her ideas.
Arguments before the Supreme Court began on February 26, 1963, and generated immense debate nationwide. Madalyn was given free rein to express her atheist views in the columns of newspapers. The tone of her approach can be judged from these comments in the April 12, 1963, issue of Life magazine: “We find the Bible to be nauseating, historically inaccurate, replete with the ravings of madmen. We find God to be sadistic, brutal, and a representation of hatred, vengeance. We find the Lord’s Prayer to be that uttered by worms groveling for meager existence in a traumatic, paranoid world.”
On June 17, the Supreme Court announced its decision. By a majority of eight to one, the Court ruled that the Bible and prayer were to be kept out of the public schools. It was a landmark decision, one of the most important milestones in the long history of clarification of the constitutional relation of church and state. It propelled Madalyn into the forefront of public debate. Life called her “the most hated woman in America,” a label she accepted with pride. It was her badge of honor.
Some local difficulties (such as charges that she assaulted five Baltimore police officers) now forced Madalyn to relocate to Hawaii, from which she gave an interview to Playboy in October 1965. She made it clear that she had no time for traditional morality. As a “radical feminist,” she was convinced that celibacy was absurd, even pathological—especially for nuns who believed in some kind of spiritual marriage to Christ. “You think I’ve got wild ideas about sex? Think of those poor old dried-up women lying there on their solitary pallets yearning for Christ to come to them in a vision some night and take their maidenheads. By the time they realize he’s not coming, it’s no longer a maidenhead; it’s a poor, sorry tent that nobody would be able to pierce—even Jesus with his wooden staff. It’s such a waste. I don’t think anybody should be celibate—and that goes for priests as well as nuns.”
After flirting with the idea of moving to Cuba, then still viewed by the American radical left as a socialist paradise, Madalyn transferred to Texas in 1965, where she would remain for the rest of her days. She married Richard O’Hair, a former FBI informant. A spate of activism followed. Her organization, American Atheists, began to grow, reaching a claimed membership of fifty thousand with chapters in thirty states and a high-profile national convention. She ran a weekly talk show on 150 radio stations. She busied herself with a flurry of lawsuits—including a 1978 lawsuit against the state of Texas to abolish the requirement that public officials swear their belief in a supreme being—with an enthusiasm that even some of her supporters worried about. She seemed almost pathological in her hatred of religion. In 1979 she even filed a lawsuit against the pope, who was due to visit the United States and celebrate a “stupid, archaic” Mass on public land.
Her high public profile was confirmed in November 1967, when she was invited to appear in the first episode of Phil Donahue’s pioneering TV talk show. Although the Vietnam War dominated the news and temporarily eclipsed her, she was never far from the center of public debate about religion. Public donations reached a new high, allowing her to fund the building of a new headquarters and various other organizations—including the Society of Separationists, United World Atheists, and United Secularists of America. Bumper stickers began to appear with uniquely sophisticated messages like “Honk if you love Madalyn!” and “Apes evolved from Creationists.” If Billy Graham was the spokesman of evangelical Christianity across the nation, there was no longer any doubt as to whom the public identified as the public face of atheism.
Madalyn’s reputation as an atheist propagandist certainly did not rest on the quality of her arguments, which were generally superficial and banal. Rather, that reputation was based on her pugnacious attitude to religion, linked with her unwillingness to give up even the slightest ground to her opponents. Her case for atheism, set out in her radio shows and published in books such as The Atheist World, was conventional, even dull, and intellectually vapid to the point of being self-defeating. Here, for example, is a rather predictable attack on the history of religion, which Madalyn broadcast on November 11, 1972: “The horrible record that has been compiled over the centuries by religious fanatics and zealots of whatever creed would be incredible if it were not so well documented and if it did not indeed persist to our own time.” Quite so. But one looks in vain for any recognition that the twentieth century witnessed some of the most appalling massacres and repressions perpetrated by those opposed to religion. The great paradox of our time, which apparently eluded O’Hair, is that the worst slaughters in the twentieth century were carried out against people on account of their religion. If a creed is judged by its human rights record, atheism cannot be said to have a record of distinction.
Then a double whammy hit home. The blows were fifteen years apart, but no less lethal on that account. First, in 1980, William Murray—Madalyn’s son, in whose name the famous lawsuit of 1960–63 was brought—became a Christian believer. Second, in 1995, Madalyn went missing, precipitating massive public interest in her financial affairs and personal life. What came out was far from flattering.
William’s long and complex journey to faith is described in his book My Life without God (1992), which provides intimate and generally unattractive details of his mother’s personal life and convictions, as well as his own private reflections on what led him to the Christian faith. In 1995 he authored Let Us Pray, a manifesto for the reintroduction of prayer into public schools—precisely the issue on which his mother had campaigned on his behalf thirty years earlier. My Life without God tells the story of a life without God—but with Madalyn. It makes for excruciatingly embarrassing reading for American atheists. Some little snippets will give an idea of what life with Madalyn was like, and the total contradiction between her public posturing and private behavior.
One of Madalyn’s standing arguments for atheism was that by liberating people from the ludicrous demand to love God, they could love other people more effectively. Atheism was pro bono publico, a surefire recipe and catalyst for philanthropy and social justice. But not in Madalyn’s home, it seems. Madalyn lived together with her parents and two children. It was not an easy situation, partly because of their limited income (which only ceased to be a problem once Madalyn was launched on the lucrative lecture circuit), and partly because of the social dynamics of the family. Madalyn regularly ended up having dogfights with her parents, forbidding her children to speak to them.
By 1960 Madalyn had reached the conclusion that the problems her family faced were entirely due to her father, John Mays. Get rid of him and the family would be at peace. Unfortunately, John showed not the slightest interest in leaving home or conveniently dropping dead. Madalyn decided to help nature take its inevitable course, and instructed William to add a judicious dose of rat poison to his grandfather’s coffee. “He’s just a rat anyway,” she remarked. “You put sick animals to sleep, and this is no different.” William declined.
In the end, nature helped out. On January 9, 1963, Madalyn and her father had a ferocious argument before breakfast, which ended with Madalyn leaving the house in a rage, firing off some pastorally sensitive words as she did. “I hope you drop dead! I’ll dump your shriveled body in the trash!” John Mays had a heart attack that same afternoon and died almost immediately. On returning home from work, Madalyn was informed of the news. William recalls the conversation as proceeding along the following lines:
“Well, I’ll be. Where’s the stiff?”
“At the Memorial Hospital Morgue.”
“Have you made any arrangements?”
“Not yet.”
Then she turned to [William], and said, “Bill, call up some undertakers and find the cheapest one. Then have them pick up the stiff from Memorial.”
Of course, this proves nothing. America has more than its fair share of dysfunctional families and insensitive individuals. Yet somehow, people expected better than this. If atheism really is about changing lives and society, might it not be reasonable to expect it to have changed Madalyn into something a little more civilized?
It is a fair question, and one that will not go away. Initially, concerns about Madalyn were limited to her behavior toward her employees at American Atheists and toward minority groups. She had a special dislike for homosexuals, as an incident with gay activist John Lauritsen made clear. In 1976 Lauritsen attended a convention of the Society of Separationists, one of Madalyn’s organizations, at which Madalyn attacked homosexuals. Lauritsen wrote to protest, evoking a robust response from Madalyn, dated May 20, 1976, in which she expressed her stridently homophobic views. Madalyn, it seems, was not really into the atheist equivalent of ecumenism.
Nor was she into networking or the cultivation of personal relationship, normally regarded as an integral aspect of American corporate life. She was vulgar, rude, and contemptuous, especially to those who donated to her causes. But the real problems began in 1993, when rumors of fraud within Madalyn’s empire began to circulate. It would not be long before she would be likened to Jimmy Swaggart, the fallen TV evangelist, rather than to the unblemished Billy Graham.
Initially, the rumors focused on the inflated membership claims of American Atheists. Estimates that its membership was in the region of fifty to seventy thousand were increasingly ridiculed. A leaked Handbook for Chapter Directors advised American Atheist chapters to give “optimal” figures and speak of a “national mailing list of about 70,000 families.” At a time when the actual membership was rumored to be about two thousand and dropping, the document noted that “if the media knew our actual number of members or subscribers they will know that we do not have enough clout numerically to kept [sic] them from saying anything they like about us.”
Through a combination of abuse and mismanagement, American Atheists began to fall apart at the seams in the early 1990s. The state chapters started to break away, alienated by Madalyn’s aggressive personality and her dysfunctional approach to management. Her decision to impose her son, Jon Garth Murray, on her fellow board members as her successor proved unwise in the extreme. His lack of social skills was aggravated by a most unfortunate speech impediment. Yet the corporate charter of American Atheists, Inc. (1987), gave three of the five seats on the board to members of Madalyn’s family: Madalyn herself, her son Jon, and her granddaughter Robin.
Also during the early 1990s, a dispute arose over the ownership of an atheist publication entitled the Truth Seeker. Madalyn had been trying to take over the Truth Seeker Company of San Diego since January 1989. The story broke on April 30 of that year, when the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story alleging that Madalyn was trying to seize the Truth Seeker and its multimillion-dollar estate, bequeathed by James Hervey Johnson. Madalyn argued that Johnson had left his millions to promote atheism. So why hadn’t Johnson left his fortune to her? Reporter Armando Acuna had no doubts: “Because he despised her. And she loathed him. She continues to refer to the man she says she knew for 40 years as James Scurvy Johnson.” Madalyn was not a stockholder in the Truth Seeker Company; her declared interest in the estate rested solely on her public profile as the most prominent American atheist. In reporting later developments in this case on July 19, 1990, San Diego Union-Tribune staff reporter Anne Krueger wrote scathingly of Madalyn’s imperious claims to sovereignty over lesser atheists: “[O’Hair] cannot be considered an implied beneficiary of atheist Johnson’s estate merely because she considers herself the country’s ‘pre-eminent spokesperson for mainstream atheism’ . . . O’Hair’s attorney, Georgine Brave, argued that . . . [Johnson’s] entire estate should go to her client as the world’s leading atheist.” It was a public relations disaster for Madalyn and her organization. But worse was to come.
In response to Madalyn’s predatory attempts on his client, San Diego attorney Roy Withers sued American Atheists for $6 million, claiming that they had improperly conspired to gain control of the estate of James Hervey Johnson. Things began to look bad for the Atheists. Faced with the very real possibility of losing the lawsuit and hence incurring massive payouts, Madalyn decided to resort to concealing their assets. Jon was instructed to ship out the 50,000-volume Charles E. Stevens American Atheists Library—their greatest single asset—in such a way that it could not be traced. David Waters, who had been hired by American Atheists in 1993, was given the job of organizing the covert disposal of assets, including converting some bank accounts into cash. (In 1998 he showed secret correspondence to the Austin Chronicle, which broke the story of the deception.) David R. Travis, a Vietnam “foxhole atheist” who was employed at the headquarters, came across statements from the New Zealand Guardian Trust Co., which showed that Madalyn and her two family board members had stashed $900,000 in offshore accounts. Shocked at the implications of this discovery, he took the story and the documents to the Internal Revenue Service and the local press. The publicity got worse for Madalyn, day by day.
In August 1995, Madalyn, Jon, and Robin left Austin for San Antonio. The following month, Jon ordered $600,000 worth of gold coins from San Antonio jeweler Cory Ticknor, using funds from the New Zealand bank account. He collected the bulk of them a week later. Then they disappeared. According to records from the U.S. bankruptcy court, Robin left town owing $30,075 on nine different credit cards (plus a couple of department store cards). Jon left owing $47,782 on eleven different cards. All the indications were that the trio were building up huge cash holdings. But why? And where did they intend to go? Phil Donahue certainly wanted to know. His final program was due to be broadcast in May 1996, and he wanted to end the series as he had begun—by interviewing Madalyn. But not even the private detective he hired was able to track her down.
Conspiracy theorists had a field day. Suspicion immediately fell upon the American Christian right. Perhaps some fundamentalist had kidnapped the O’Hair family and was holding them for ransom. Or even trying to convert them? On September 24, 1996, William Murray filed a missing persons report at the Austin Police Department, which began an investigation. The trail went cold, with the Austin police refusing to accept that any crime had actually been committed. Others, however, were not so sure. The investigation passed up to the federal level. Eventually, the true story emerged.
The trio had been kidnapped by David Waters, Gary Karr, and Danny Fry in August 1995. The motivation for the crime was money, pure and simple. Neither Christians nor aliens were involved. The kidnapping, it turned out, had been organized by Waters, a former employee of American Atheists, who had been sacked in 1994 for financial misappropriation. Waters never faced trial for the kidnapping and murder of the Murray O’Hairs, but can expect to spend the rest of his life in jail. In March 2001 he was sentenced to twenty years (in addition to earlier sentences of sixty and twenty-five years). As a result of a plea bargain, he finally revealed the location of the three corpses. Their dismembered bodies were eventually found by the FBI on a five-thousand-acre ranch near Camp Wood, Texas. Madalyn’s corpse was positively identified from the serial number of a 1993 replacement hip.
The story did not quite end at that point. William Murray claimed the remains of his mother, half brother, and daughter, and arranged for their burial in Austin—their last abode. He respected their last wishes, and arranged a quiet funeral service according to their requests. No prayers were said over her. Madalyn had often expressed anxiety over a Christian funeral—she did not want a “crucifix shoved up her ass,” as she delicately put it. In a bizarre twist, American Atheists demanded possession of the three cadavers, apparently believing that they were somehow their property.
So what happened to American Atheists, the organization that Madalyn founded and from which she siphoned off millions of dollars for her own ends? (An investigation by ABC-TV’s Nightline on June 1, 1998, suggested a figure of eight million dollars.) Well, it is still there. Ellen Johnson took over as president at a board meeting. In an article in Atheist Nation, Howard Thompson—editor of the the Texas Atheist newsletter—argued that there were grounds for challenging the legality of that decision. With the three O’Hair members removed from the board, how could the remaining two members appoint a new president? The small-minded squabbles that broke out over this matter reminded critics of the movement of the kind of petty political infighting that they thought was limited to church organizations. The organization, however, recovered from these difficulties, and remains America’s best-known atheist organization.
What do American Atheists actually do? The National Review decided to find out. On Easter weekend 2002, their reporter Andrew Stuttaford attended the twenty-eighth national convention of the organization, held at Logan Airport, Boston. Attendance was pretty good. In the June 2002 issue of the National Review, he commented on his impressions:
Around 250 souls (maybe that’s not the word) had turned up for the fun, typically bright, somewhat eccentric sorts, often with the style sense of faculty members at a failing community college. Guys, shoulderlength hair does not work with bald on top. Oddballs? Well, the affable man sitting next to me did spend a surprising amount of time busily crossing out the word “God” from his dollar bills. Cranks? Judging by the pamphlets on display outside the main auditorium, quite possibly, although, to be fair, I did not witness anyone actually picking up a copy of The Unpleasant Personality of Jesus Christ.
They could have fitted these souls easily into a corner of one of the megachurches that are springing up all over the United States at the moment, with congregations in the thousands. In fact, American Atheists seemed just like a small denomination, with their own religious goals and gripes, and the same sense of entitlement to representation in the public arena. Theologically, atheists may be totally different from small Protestant denominations; sociologically, they seem indistinguishable, not least in their petty squabbles.
Where most atheists just ask to be left alone, getting on with their lives peacefully and Godlessly, Stuttaford found American Atheists to be decidedly more militant, awkward, and angrier. “There are no horns on their heads, but watch out for the chips on their shoulders.” Stuttaford clearly regarded the whole event as a gathering of the forlorn and social misfits, busy fighting yesterday’s battles and seeking to preserve the heritage of their great founder—Madalyn Murray O’Hair. “Oppressed by their sense of oppression, they also show signs of succumbing to the temptation of that most pernicious of contemporary cults, the cult of the victim.” Stuttaford relates how he heard tales of social snubs and embarrassment that demonstrated unequivocally that atheists were a persecuted minority, reduced to defending their integrity and bravery in the face of relentless criticism by telling jokes about “foreskins, nuns, and a hermaphroditic divinity.” The crude and abusive spirit of Madalyn clearly hovers over her successors. The best way of ridding America of religion, it seems, is to tell dirty jokes.
There were some high points to the convention, however. Most impressive of all, Stuttaford reported, was a lecture by Michael Cuneo, a professor from New York City, an expert on Satanism and those who exploit this for their own rather sordid ends. “In an amusing presentation, he spoke of ceremonies that combine the best of The Exorcist with the worst of Elmer Gantry. This was skepticism at its good-humored, informative best, an inspiration, one would think, to the Hyatt’s godless horde. But there was one small irony. Prof. Cuneo teaches at Fordham, a Jesuit university, and, yes, he’s a Catholic.” Stuttaford left the convention with the new realization that you don’t have to believe in God to be a fundamentalist.
So is atheism going to take over America? Or anywhere else for that matter? Not on this showing. The history of American Atheists, Inc., suggests that atheism can be just as arrogant, deceitful, and downright outrageous as anything that the churches have managed to put together over their much longer history. Far from ushering in a new age of antireligious virtue, atheism just seems to end up aping the vices of its religious rivals. If Americans are looking for something to rid them of the institutional corruption and personal arrogance that have tainted the religious life of their nation, then institutional atheism singularly and publicly fails to provide it.
It is, of course, entirely fair to object at this point. The legitimacy of self-appointed representatives will always be a matter of debate. Madalyn Murray O’Hair, it might reasonably be argued, is simply not typical of the movement at large. Yet this is a dangerous strategy, offering a slightly evasive means of deflecting criticism for atheist and Christian alike. “They’re not typical!” begs awkward and difficult questions over the boundaries of movements, and who is to be regarded as “representative” and who is not. The point being made here is simply that, under Madalyn Murray O’Hair, America’s most prominent atheist organization projected an immensely unattractive image of a Godless world, which has helped to shape American perceptions of atheism. A movement that began with a sense of outrage at the injustices of the world seems to have ended up either by parodying itself or by appropriating the excesses—moral and intellectual—of its opponents.
Atheism in twenty-first-century America has become little more than one among many self-serving religious interest groups, competing for the attention of the media and public policy makers. In its more fundamentalist forms, American atheism aspires to universality and a sense of entitlement to sit at the top of the public table; these pretensions exude an arrogance and complacency that are increasingly out of place in a postmodern culture. Perhaps it is not surprising that its star is waning. A movement that was always on the periphery of American public life seems doomed to remain there.
Yet that sense of decline and decay is by no means limited to atheism in America, where it was never a major player anyway. Throughout those regions of the world in which atheism was once a significant intellectual force, there are signs of a loss of confidence in the movement, both in the wider public arena and within its own ranks. The sun seems to be setting on yet another empire—this time, an “empire of the mind.”
1 This account is based on information freely available in the public domain, especially William J. Murray, My Life Without God (Eugene, Oreg.: Harvest House Publishers, 1992); Madalyn Murray O'Hair, The Atheist World (Austin, Tex.: American Atheist Press, 1991); and Jon Rappoport, Madalyn Murray O'Hair (San Diego: Truth Seeker Press, 1998); supplemented by reporting from ABC News, Associated Press, the Atheist News, the Austin Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, the Los Angeles Times, the National Review, the San Antonio Express-News, and Time magazine.