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.
“Madalyn is napping,” my guide told me. “Would you like to take a look?” We weaved through offices filled with visitors from around the country who had come to Austin to attend the dedication of the handsomely appointed new headquarters of the American Atheist Center (valued at $1.7 million) and to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that removed prayer and Bible reading from public schools. Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the instigator of that famous lawsuit, was 69 years old and in frail health, and as usual at this hour in the afternoon she was taking a snooze on her couch. Several visitors were peeking through the glass wall into her darkened office. They gave way reluctantly as we approached. There before us lay the first lady of atheism, as she calls herself, in a flower-print dress. “It’s a little like Lenin’s tomb,” my guide observed.
Did she hear us? Suddenly Madalyn startled awake and swung her bare feet to the floor. She ran a hand through her vivid, abruptly cropped white hair. A heavy woman, she appeared even in this half-awakened state like a bowling ball looking for new pins to scatter. Before I could gracefully escape, Madalyn turned to look at the shadow in her office glass, and I was caught by her stare. There was no surprise in her face, only resignation and a look I would see several times again in those brief, unguarded moments when Madalyn stepped out of the spotlight and her mask of anger dropped aside to reveal the anxiety, the fear underneath.
I slipped away in embarrassment, realizing I had started badly with her. As with most Americans my age, my life already had been given a good shaking by Madalyn Murray O’Hair. For the first ten years of my schooling, I listened to prayers and Scripture every morning following the announcements on the P.A. system. I don’t recall ever questioning the propriety of such action or wondering what my Jewish classmates, for instance, might think about hearing Christian prayers in public school. But in the fateful fall of 1963 we began classes amid the enormous hubbub that followed the Supreme Court decision. The absence of morning prayers was widely seen as a prelude to the fall of the West. And the woman who had toppled civilization as we knew it was some loudmouthed Baltimore housewife—that was my impression—who then proceeded to wage another legal campaign to tax church property. She was the first person I had ever heard called a heretic. She jumped out of the front pages with one outrageous statement after another; indeed, the era of dissent in the sixties really began with Madalyn Murray, who styled herself as the “most hated woman in America.”
Certainly she was the most provocative. Soon after the school-prayer decision, Mrs. Murray, as she called herself then, was charged with assaulting 10 Baltimore policemen (she has inflated the number of policemen to 14, then 22, and then 26). She fled first to Hawaii, where she took refuge in a Unitarian church. Then she went to Mexico, which summarily deported her to Texas in 1965. Her odyssey ended in Austin, where she successfully fought extradition to Maryland, married an ex-FBI informer named Richard O’Hair, and remained long after the Maryland charges were dropped.
Over the years I followed Madalyn O’Hair in the way one keeps tabs on celebrities, as she bantered with Johnny Carson, sued the pope, or burst into a church and turned over bingo tables. When I was in college, she came to speak. By then she had achieved a kind of sainthood status with the undergraduate intelligentsia. True to her billing, she raked over capitalism and Christianity and especially Catholicism, unsettling if not actually insulting every person in the auditorium. Afterward she repaired to the student center and held forth in the lobby, giving an explicit and highly titillating seminar on the variations of sexual intercourse. I had never seen anyone with such a breathtaking willingness to endure public hatred. “I love a good fight,” she boasted to the press. “I guess fighting God and God’s spokesmen is sort of the ultimate, isn’t it?”
Neutrality is never present around Madalyn O’Hair; she polarizes everyone. “The insults she stood, the beatings she suffered paved the way for more modern atheists,” says her friend Frank Zindler. “She has done the consciousness raising. It is accepted now that atheists have the right to exist in America, whereas when she started that was not a given.” Charles Dews, who used to work for her, says, “She’s really a freedom lover. Beneath everything else, Madalyn Murray O’Hair is about freedom.” On the other hand, G. Richard Bozarth, another former employee, calls her a “petty, jealous little ex-bureaucrat who once shouted loud enough to gain attention and has continued shouting for lack of imagination to do anything else—and because it pays.” Her former treasurer, Brian Lynch, says, “I really think she hates herself, and that hatred is projected onto everyone else she comes into contact with.” Everyone has an opinion about Madalyn Murray O’Hair, yet no one who knows her well claims to understand her.
Hungry all her life for money and power, she lives at last in a world of material comfort, surrounded by luxurious German cars and expensive artwork, yet the organization that she created to carry on her crusade is little more than a hollow shell, a sounding chamber for the roar of Madalyn’s complaints. She has suffered the loss of her husband to cancer and the defection, in 1980, of her eldest son, William, to Christianity. Perhaps those losses might account for the anxiety that one sometimes sees in Madalyn’s eyes. More than once I had heard from some gloating Christian that even Mrs. O’Hair stood quaking at the prospect of death. But the more I learned about her, the more I wondered whether it was not death but life that frightened her—life and the contradictions, the lies, and the deceit that made up the furious existence of Madalyn Murray O’Hair.
Awake and arguing, Madalyn was in the computer typesetting room trading opinions with Arthur Frederick Ide, a former Lutheran minister and former Carmelite monk who is the author of Unzipped: The Popes Bare All, which was published by the American Atheist Press. Madalyn and Ide were talking about the government conspiracy to control the flow of information through the mails. A bony, white-haired visitor from Ohio was creeping forward in an office chair, and he ventured the opinion that it was a goddam shame one couldn’t buy stock in the post office monopoly.
“Oh, but you can,” Madalyn said.
“No!” said the Ohioan, suddenly shooting backward in his chair. “But, Madalyn, it’s a government agency.”
“The hell you say. It’s no more a government agency than General Motors.”
“It says ‘U.S. Postal Service,’” the man insisted, creeping forward again. “It’s like a department —”
“It’s nothing of the sort,” Madalyn replied. “It’s, it’s a . . . ”
“It’s an instrumentality,” said Ide. “An instrumentality is an entity that serves the functions of government but is privately constituted.”
“An instrumentality!” said the flabbergasted Ohioan.
“Just like the gawddam Federal Reserve,” Madalyn observed in an accent that harks back to the broad vowels of Tidewater, Maryland.
“The Federal Reserve!” the Ohioan cried. His chair flew back against the wall.
I walked past the typesetting room, following Robin Murray O’Hair, Madalyn’s granddaughter and adopted daughter, who is the editor of the American Atheist magazine and the president of the 40,000-volume Charles E. Stevens atheist library. Robin is a redhead with many of her grandmother’s features, including freckles and a strong, round jaw. Robin also shares Madalyn’s famous love of animals. At the moment, Robin was being towed along by a black spaniel named Princess, one of six dogs that sometimes share her office. “We have commissioned ten new books,” Robin said as we passed through the art department on our way to the audiovisual room. “The latest is I Bought My First Six-pack When I Was 35, which is about a Mormon who overcame religion.” Robin smiled shyly. On the wall, among the frequent photographs of Madalyn, was a framed letter from Bertrand Russell protesting one of Madalyn’s many arrests. “Mrs. O’Hair has been in jail eleven times,” Robin said. “Many of the charges were, of course, trumped up. In Baltimore there was a law on the books that one can’t tether a horse for twenty-four hours. Someone once interpreted a horse to mean a car in modern times, so when Mrs. O’Hair left her car parked on the street for two days, she was arrested for abusing a horse.”
Robin left me in the bookstore, where I browsed among the T-shirts, the coffee mugs, and the many books and pamphlets for sale, most of which seemed to have been written by Madalyn. In addition to her weekly cable television show, her many public appearances, and her prolific interviews, Madalyn writes much of the monthly magazine and an Insider’s Newsletter for members. And indeed, when she finally invited me into her office for a talk, the blast of verbiage left me feeling like I was being showered with a fire hose.
My Library
