She was, by her own admission, the most hated woman in America. As a fifth grader she claimed to have read the Bible cover to cover and was shocked by the "inconsistencies, the improbabilities, the impossibilities, the wretched history, the sordid sex, (and) the sadism." As an adult, Madalyn Murray O'Hair would lead the campaign to remove prayer from America's public schools, a stunning victory which resulted in her family's fleeing Baltimore, Maryland, for the more hospital territory of Austin, Texas, where for thirty-two years she served as religion's number one nemesis.
The founder, in 1963, of the nation's preeminent atheist organization, American Atheists, O'Hair relished her role as atheism's spokesperson, but lacked the poise and tact that would have made her a much sought-after speaker. She seemed to enjoy insulting her often adversarial audiences, and would more likely than not come off as a bitter, ragged crone who cursed and swore like a drunken sailor. As author Lawrence Wright said of O'Hair: "It was impossible not to admire her nerve, while at the same time wondering at her apparent compulsion to be loathed." Asked why she was an atheist, O'Hair replied: "Because religion is a crutch, and only the crippled need crutches. I can get around perfectly well on my own two feet, and so can everyone else with a backbone and a grain of common sense."
Madalyn O'Hair (she dropped the Murray when her son William J. Murray became an evangelical preacher), was not much interested in debate anyway. Early on she learned that reason was a dull weapon with which to attack religion, and found her only recourse in the courts, and in particular the first amendment. Not surprisingly, O'Hair and her followers soon developed a siege mentality in which the enemy was not only Christians, but the entire U.S. Government. She penned essays like "The War Is Joined" in which she blamed the government for putting up obstacles to litigation filed by atheists, litigation that would further the chasm between church and state. Because of its mass appeal, politics held little interest for her, although she was often accused of being a "godless communist." And it was her efforts, whether successful or not, in separating these two words of which O'Hair was most proud. "People can say, 'I am an atheist,' in the United States today, without being called a Communist atheist, or an atheist Communist...think that that's probably the best thing that I did," she said.
If O'Hair was despised it was not so much for her atheism as for her activism. There is in America a long tradition of atheist--or at least agnostic--writers and speakers, going back to Thomas Paine, whose anti-Biblical treatise Age of Reason (1794-96) led to the ostracization of the one-time hero of the American Revolution. Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-99) was a popular speaker on the 19th century Chautauqua circuit despite his seemingly blasphemous lectures, and many of the books in which he documented the paradoxes and inconsistencies of Scripture remain in print. But Paine and Ingersoll were more than mere atheist spokesmen. Paine is considered one of America's founding fathers for his stirring defense of liberty, while Ingersoll was a cultured man of insight and compassion, a Civil War officer, Illinois Attorney General, and early advocate of Darwinism. Though never formally educated, Ingersoll could discourse as eloquently on Shakespeare as on the Bible, and remained until his death one of the Republican Parties top campaigners. Likewise, editor and critic H.L. Mencken used humor, scholarship and irony to skewer populist evangelicals like William Jennings Bryan in the early 20th century. O'Hair had neither the patriotism of Paine, the eloquence of Ingersoll, nor the wit of Mencken.
And yet like all historical figures Madalyn O'Hair was a woman of her times, commencing her anti-crusade at just the moment in history when an activist U. S. Supreme Court was likely to look favorably on her arguments. In 1959, she sued the Baltimore Public Schools on behalf of her son William J. Murray, and four years later Murray v. Curlett, one of two similar cases that sought to end prayer in public schools, landed in the lap of the Warren court. In its ruling, the court pronounced unconstitutional the school's practice of requiring that schools begin each day with Bible readings, citing the Establishment Clause, as applied to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision made O'Hair a household name; for many Christians the devil had taken on human form. "The people need a devil," she said, and she was happy to oblige.
Less successful were O'Hair's later attempts to delete "In God We Trust" from U.S. currency, and to remove "So help me God" from court proceedings. Ironically, William J. Murray later renounced his mother and became an Evangelical preacher traveling the pineywood church circuit where he continues to detail his dysfunctional childhood and (at least until her butchered remains were uncovered in January) denounce his mother as a Marxist and a tool of Satan. In his tell-all autobiography My Life Without God, Murray portrayed O'Hair as a manipulative, sex-obsessed coddler of murders and pornographers (she liked to brag of her friendship with Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, whom she regarded as a clever businessman), and an indolent shrew who could keep neither husband nor job. O'Hair would seldom talk about her son's desertion, except to say in effect that behind the holy man guise stood a money hungry Elmer Gantry.
When the family's disappearance made headlines in late 1995, there was at first speculation--coming mostly from her critics--that the O'Hairs and Murrays had absconded to New Zealand with $500,000 of organization money. As years went by, however, investigators began to suspect the American Atheist's former office manager, David R. Waters, of kidnapping and murdering O'Hair, her son Jon Murray, and William's daughter Robin. Eventually Waters confessed, recounting for police a harrowing tale of kidnap, torture, rape and, ultimately murder.
As if keeping to some bizarre, twisted script, American Atheists President Ellen Johnson and William J. Murray battled briefly over the atheist leader's remains, but it was the William Murray who won the last and final round, though he honored his mother's wishes and said no prayers over her ashes. Writing soon after, he said, "I would not have done so anyway, because of my beliefs as a Baptist. As an evangelical, I do not pray for the dead."
In a press conference held shortly after the O'Hairs' remains were identified, Johnson asked that if reporters, "call (O'Hair) 'the most hated woman in America,' also try to remember that she was passionately engaged in the issues of her time, as an Atheist, as a social activist, and as a woman...She was also one of the most loved women--by Atheists in America and around the world."
In an interview in March 1989, O'Hair was asked how she would like to be remembered. "I want three words on my tombstone," she said. "Woman, Atheist, Anarchist." Assuming that O'Hair is remembered, it will be as the confrontational figure that Christians loved to hate, and who reveled in that fact.
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