God Help Her
She calls herself the “most hated woman in America.” She has led a lifelong crusade against everything holy. But if Madalyn Murray O’Hair did not exist, God would have had to invent her.
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“While she was in Rome, serving on General Eisenhower’s staff, she and some friends went out for a night on the town. After a more or less conventional round of dining and drinking, according to Mother, they arrived at the Vatican around three o’clock in the morning. Drunken and rowdy, they nevertheless gained entrance to St. Peter’s Basilica by bribing a Swiss guard. Once inside, with champagne bottles in hand, they made their way to a room where the three-tiered crown used in papal coronations was on display in a glass case. Mother never said how, but she claims they managed to remove the crown from its case. Thereupon they proceeded to act out a mock coronation of my mother as the first female pope. If true, Mother’s knack for attention-getting theatrics was already fully refined.”
It was in Italy that Lieutenant Madalyn Roths met William J. Murray, Jr., an officer in the Eighth Army Air Corps. Murray was a wealthy, married Roman Catholic from Long Island. “They became intimate,” his son and namesake writes, “and I was conceived in September 1945, the same month that Japan officially surrendered.”
Murray’s paternity was later established in court. Madalyn told her son that Murray said his religion forbade him from divorcing his wife and marrying Madalyn—who was, of course, still married to Roths. To compound the misery for Madalyn, she discovered when she returned from the war that her parents had moved into a shack with no electricity or running water. “She soon learned that her father had spent on booze all the money she had sent home for savings,” William Murray writes. “The whole family was destitute, she was pregnant, and her husband—not the father of her child—was expected home anytime. I believe it was during this period, as she was pacing the dirt floor of that shack and mulling over the dismal outlook for her life, that her extreme anti-God views were born.”
When Roths returned, he gallantly offered to stay with his wife and raise the child as his own, but Madalyn declined and proceeded to sue him for divorce. “By this time Mother’s antagonism toward God had reached an advanced stage,” Murray notes. During a violent electrical storm, Madalyn suddenly announced to her parents that she was going out in the storm “to challenge God to strike me and this child dead with one of those lightning bolts.” The pregnant Madalyn stood in the rain waving her first and cursing God. “You see, you see!” she cried when she returned inside. “If God exists, he would surely have taken up my challenge. I’ve proved irrefutably that God does not exist.”
Her son was born on May 25, 1946. She named him William J. Murray III, and soon after that she began calling herself Madalyn Murray—although she and Murray never married. Like his mother, baby Bill, as he was called then, was baptized in the Presbyterian faith. Several years later Madalyn bore a child by another man and named that child Jon Garth Murray. She baptized him in a Methodist church. “It pleased their grandparents,” she explained, “and I figured the kids would think it was like any other water splashing on their heads.”
The Mays-Murray clan, consisting of Madalyn, her parents, her elder brother, Irv, and Bill, moved to Houston in 1949, where Madalyn worked as a probation officer for Harris County and studied law in night school. In 1952 Pup migrated to Baltimore, following a job prospect, and the rest of the clan soon joined him.
Madalyn found work in various jobs—she says she had been a model, a waitress, a hairdresser, a stenographer, a lawyer, an aerodynamics engineer, an advertising manager, and a psychiatric social worker. During that period she turned to radical politics. She attended meetings of the Trotskyite Socialist Workers’ Party in 1957. In 1959 she applied for Soviet citizenship. Getting no response, the following year she and her two children traveled to Europe on the Queen Elizabeth with the intention of defecting to the Soviet Embassy in Paris. “The Soviet Embassy didn’t know what to do,” William Murray says now. “It was the first time they ever had anybody trying to defect to them.” Madalyn Murray and her sons returned to Baltimore in the fall of 1960, and Madalyn immediately filed her historic suit against the Baltimore schools. According to William, the school-prayer suit was little more than a ploy to persuade the Soviets to accept her.
The suit Madalyn Murray brought in her son’s name took three years to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. During that time the Murray family was the object of intense harassment. There were death threats. The house was egged. Her flower beds were destroyed. The cat was murdered. Mail came to the house in canvas bags. Much of it was hate mail, but some of it contained money—enough for the Murray family to live comfortably, according to William. Madalyn fanned the hysteria with her own provocative words and actions. “We find the Bible to be nauseating, historically inaccurate, replete with the ravings of madmen,” she wrote to Life magazine. “We find God to be sadistic, brutal, and a representation of hatred, vengeance. We find the Lord’s Prayer to be that muttered by worms groveling for meager existence in a traumatic, paranoid world.”
On May 15, 1962, Madalyn was working for the Baltimore Department of Public Welfare when she decided to appeal the school-prayer suit, which she had lost at the Maryland Court of Appeals level. “Twenty-four hours after I had filed in the United States Supreme Court, I was fired from my job for ‘incompetence,’ ” Madalyn says.
All of her life, Madalyn had yearned for understanding. One evening in Baltimore, as she sat alone in her basement library, trying to decide whether to press ahead with the lawsuit, she reflected on the sense she always had felt of her separateness. “When we had first moved into those row houses in Baltimore, I think that I had picked one out for purchase deliberately, in the hopes that I could be ‘like everyone else.’ I had wanted so desperately to fit in,” she recalled in Bill Murray, the Bible and the Baltimore Board of Education. “I could not engage in conversation about which bleach was the whitest for the wash. I never gave a damn about the chlorophyll in toothpaste. The idiotic idea of back fence visiting left me completely cold. None of my work had ever taken up even a fraction of my thinking processes and too often I would pace that basement library floor like a lioness caged, the wrap of loneliness, of aloneness, always about me.”
“I had just wanted one person somewhere, sometime, to understand me and I had never found any.”
Her parents had not. Nor had her first husband or any of her lovers. “I just want a man,” she complained in her 1963 Playboy interview, “a real, two-balled masculine guy—and there aren’t many of them around, believe me. But I do want somebody my own age, and somebody who has brains enough to keep me interested and to earn enough money to support me in the style to which I’ve become accustomed. . . . I want a man with the thigh muscles to give me a good frolic in the sack, the kind who’ll tear hell out of a thick steak, and yet who can go to the ballet with me and discuss Hegelian dialectic and know what the hell he’s talking about. I want a strong man, but a gentle one.” For a while she thought she might have found her ideal companion in Richard O’Hair, the ex-FBI informer whom she married in Austin in 1965, a man who was “both cruelty and love, patience and anger, ignorance and knowledge,” as she described him, but it was his cruelty that landed him in the Travis County jail for aggravated assault against Madalyn. William Murray says that she intended to divorce O’Hair until she learned he had terminal cancer, then she hung on to him for his pension. The disappointments in her sex life may have colored Madalyn’s attitude toward religion, Murray believes: “It is my opinion that my mother’s maniacal campaign to remove all reference to God in public schools and government . . . stems back to this issue. Madalyn Murray was mad at men, and she was mad at God, who was male.”
Shortly after moving to Austin, Madalyn and Richard O’Hair formed Poor Richard’s Universal Life Church to dramatize the folly of tax exemptions for religious institutions. Richard was the “president, pastor, and prophet,” and Madalyn was the bishop. Unlike her other organizations, Poor Richard’s church never did gain a tax exemption; nonetheless, Madalyn took to wearing a clerical collar for effect.
Madalyn’s obsession with religion leaves some other atheists scratching their heads. “Don’t you really think she is a religious person?” asks Charles Dews. “If she didn’t care tremendously about all that biblical stuff, why would she spend so much time and effort refuting it?”
It is certainly true that religion defines Madalyn’s life just as powerfully as it does the life of a priest or a television evangelist, although in Madalyn’s case she finds her identity in resisting belief instead of accepting it. At times, she acknowledges herself as a kind of religions phenomenon, even claiming to have been prophesied by Jesus in Matthew 12:42 and Luke 11:31: “The queen of the south [i.e. Austin] shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it.”
“My mother is a cult leader, in case you haven’t noticed,” said William J. Murray III, as he raced toward McKinney to deliver his Christian testimony at a crusade in the junior high school. “She makes Reverend Moon look mainstream.” Murray is a sandy-haired man with Madalyn’s light-green eyes and a similar tendency to speak in diatribes. Since Mother’s Day, 1980, when he announced that he had found God, William Murray has been preaching salvation and telling the world about life with America’s most famous atheist.
My Library
