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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In the trunk of Murray’s Mercury were several boxes of books that he would sell after his testimony. Murray is the author of four books, including My Life Without God and Nicaragua: Portrait of a Tragedy. These days he divides his efforts between evangelism and soliciting private aid for the contras and other anticommunist guerrilla organizations.
William has often voiced the hope that his mother would repent. In his fantasies he sees his mother “walking up the aisle of a church as I am at the podium giving the invitation for salvation.” Madalyn refuses to discuss her elder son’s conversion. “Bill simply got fed up with being poor, and he has sold out to the highest bidder: religion,” she observed when she first heard the news. Years later she would only comment, “My son is disturbed.”
Sitting on the stage, William listened as Paul Jackson, a Little Rock evangelist, introduced him to the half-filled auditorium. It must have seemed an odd moment for a man whose life was changed in another junior high school in September 1960, when his mother went to register him for the ninth grade and overheard the students praying aloud. The lawsuit that followed would make Madalyn Murray a household word. Fame came to her, and eventually fortune arrived as well. But Bill had to continue his life in the Baltimore public schools. “He was pummeled, hit, shoved, pushed, tripped,” his mother once wrote. “A favorite trick became that of spitting in his locker through the air slots.” Once a group of thugs cornered him in a barbershop and serenaded him with “Jesus Loves Me,” and when he tried to escape, they shoved him in front of a city bus.
And yet now William Murray renounces the atheism that he had suffered to defend. “My conversion was not a reaction to my mother’s being an atheist,” he contends. “It was a reaction to the total, swirling chaos that surrounds everything that has to do with my mother. When I was eighteen years old, my mind was totally scrambled.” He had already fathered a child, Robin, whom he later left in his mother’s care, using an old mailing list to pay off Madalyn for her trouble. After serving in the Army, he went to work for Braniff Airlines as an operations agent, later working his way up to manager. In 1975 he decided to rejoin his mother and his daughter in Austin, to “help with the family atheist business. All of a sudden I was back in all this irrationality—the screaming, the hollering, the profanity, the drinking. I started to drink heavily myself. When I finally left Austin in October of 1977, I was in total emotional distress. I got in a car and drove to Tucson, Arizona, and opened up a bookstore.”
Murray drifted to San Francisco and went back into airline management. During that period he began seeking God, partly because of the influence of Alcoholics Anonymous. “But I was praying to a god I didn’t know. I said, ‘Please, God, get this garbage out of my mind about my mother. Let me walk away from my past and do whatever it is I need to do.’ It took me two years after I had said, ‘Yes, I want to believe that Jesus is the Christ,’ to convince myself that that’s what I believed.
“Some here would say, ‘That’s all fine and good, William Murray, but how can you say all those terrible things about your mother?’ ” Murray told the audience in McKinney. “Well, I’ve tried to tell this story without saying a single derogatory word about anyone. I soon found out it was impossible to tell the story without the truth. That doesn’t mean I don’t love my mother. I don’t love the one who reaches up from his fiery pit to direct her, but I can and do love my mother. Because I want you to listen very closely to what I am going to say. She is no different than a single person in this place tonight before they accepted Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior. She’s just another sixty-nine-year-old white-haired woman that needs Jesus.”
Madalyn and her son Jon Garth were in a television studio taping their weekly cable television show when I came in and took a seat behind the crew. Madalyn glowered when she noticed me. “You’re really dogging us, aren’t you?” she said when the camera blinked off. She combed her hair in furious strokes and trapped it in a yellow hair-band. Jon Garth glanced away. He had invited me to the taping.
“Hello, I’m Madalyn O’Hair,” she suddenly said with a broad smile when the red eye of the camera opened again. It was easy to see the charm she has in store when she chooses to call upon it and easy to see as well her courageous, witty, but also bitterly sarcastic intellect. Her intelligence is real, despite her gruff nature and the fabrications of her background. Tonight she and Jon Garth were discussing the recent purported appearance of the Virgin Mary in Lubbock at a small church that Madalyn labeled a “Texas Lourdes among the mesquite.”
“Two different cripples jumped out of their chairs, and people cried, ‘They’re healed, they’re healed!’ ” Jon Garth reported. Except that when the media got to them, these individuals said that they were in wheelchairs for other purposes—they could walk perfectly fine.”
This has been one of the valuable functions of the American Atheist Center, exposing the credulousness of mistaken believers and the occasional religious fraud. With an increasingly conservative Supreme Court, Madalyn acknowledges that the ground-breaking lawsuits are mostly a part of the past. Indeed, since the school-prayer decision, her victories have been scattered and rather marginal. She did succeed in preventing Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin from taking a televised communion on the moon. In O’Hair v. Hill, which became one of her most important victories, she sued the State of Texas over a constitutional provision that anyone holding an office of public trust be required to believe in a Supreme Being. That requirement is no longer enforced. On the other hand, her campaigns to eliminate tax exemptions for churches and to remove “In God We Trust” from the coinage have failed.
In the past, Madalyn has claimed as many as 100,000 members in her organization. If that were true, the $40 annual dues would exceed by more than five times the $750,000 budget of the American Atheist Center. Sometimes Madalyn uses the more ambiguous figure of 60,000 or 70,000 “families.” When William Murray resigned from the center, he said that the organization’s mailing list comprised only 2,517 names, less than half of whom were actual members. “If I headed the atheist movement for twenty years and had only twelve hundred and forty members, I’d look for something else in life,” he said in 1980. The latest official numbers are 55,000 members representing 45,000 families. Brian Lynch, the former treasurer of American Atheists, whom Madalyn fired for alleged sexual misconduct (he emphatically denies the charge), says that the actual membership is about 2,400, “the highest total she’s ever had.” Lynch continues, “That’s pretty pathetic considering that there are somewhere between eighteen and twenty-three million atheists in the United States and that when you mention atheism to most people, the only name they can think of is Madalyn Murray O’Hair—a loudmouth who has a bad family life, communist ideas, and a negative personality. She’s brought atheism into a position of intellectual disrepute, accomplishing in only twenty-five years what churches haven’t bee able to accomplish in centuries. I think she ought to get a check from the pope.”
The checks Madalyn counts on come from the estates of deceased atheists. Lynch maintains that Madalyn’s organizations (besides the American Atheists, there are the Society of Separationists and the Charles E. Stephens American Atheist Library and Archives) took in $1.9 million, most of it from estates. “Madalyn told me she learned from Jerry Falwell that if you create a crisis every month, people are more likely to respond with money,” says Lynch. Although Madalyn occasionally does report bequests to her members, it’s also true that her complaints about money are legendary. Her newsletters are filled with urgent requests for funds. “In a continuing way, I feel like an old dog outside the stoop of your house, waiting for you to throw me a well-chewed bone, devoid of the meat,” Madalyn complained to her members. Frequently she has told her employees that she cannot meet their payroll that month. At the annual American Atheist convention she hectors her loyal followers about the need to include her organizations in their wills. “Madalyn is not an atheist activist,” wrote G. Richard Bozarth, a former employee. “She is an atheist mendicant.”
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