In God's country: thanks be to the American Atheist - Book Review

Reason, Feb, 2004 by Tim Cavanaugh

The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O'Hair, by Bryan F. Le Beau, Nero York: New York University Press, 321 pages, $29.95

BEFORE THE U.S. Constitution, before long division, before sentence diagramming, the teachers at Blessed Sacrament School made sure I absorbed three lessons: that John F. Kennedy, America's greatest president, had been a Roman Catholic; that my left-handedness, a condition barely removed from mental retardation, would prevent me from ever achieving the sumptuously rounded, deftly tilting style of penmanship necessary for success in adulthood; and that Madalyn Murray O'Hair was, quite justly, the most hated woman in America.

While I shared the nuns' disapprobation of O'Hair, whose lawsuit against the Baltimore school system helped remove organized prayer from public schools, their argument that she was a national menace seemed at the time--the mid-1970s--as fantastical as the dogma of transubstantiation. The claim that O'Hair had made it "illegal to pray in schools" didn't square with our daily schedule of devotions. A few years later I transferred to public school, where December sing-alongs of "Silent Night" and "Oh Dreidel" foiled my expectations of godless sterility. If such post-sectarian neutrality was the mess O'Hair had made, it seemed an eminently reasonable mess.

It was in considering O'Hair as a figure that I saw the nuns' point. Mother of two illegitimate sons by two fathers, a Central Casting battle ax more cunning than brainy, driven by a sense of miserable but conscientious maternalism, O'Hair made her case against religion as no polished lawyer or pointy-headed academic could have. She was one of us.

At the time she had already become a pre-Jerry Springer sideshow attraction, with touring debates against the Rev. Bob Harrington ("Chaplain of Bourbon Street") and get-a-load-of-this appearances with Mike Douglas and Phil Donahue. O'Hair's angry lack of polish marked her as the kind of mom who might single you out for bitter sarcasm when it was her night to work the Little League refreshment stand. By the time of O'Hair's 1995 murder, the few Americans who noticed seemed to think she'd gotten what she deserved. That we all may owe Madalyn Murray O'Hair a debt of gratitude is a truth rarely acknowledged.

The achievement, and the downfall, of Bryan F. Le Beau's The Atheist is to whip O'Hair's flabby popular image back into shape, to show the dialectical brilliance she mixed in with her sailor talk, the intellectual muscle packed into that flower print muu-muu. This book fills an important gap in O'Hair biography. Until now we've had to make do with bitter tell-alls by former associates or books such as Madalyn Murray O'Hair: "Most Hated Woman In America" (1998), a true-crime quickie written by Jon Rappaport and published by Truth Seeker, a rival atheist organization O'Hair was trying to take over just prior to her 1995 murder.

The Atheist is at heart an intellectual biography. For Le Beau, the evolution of O'Hair's atheist doctrines is where the real action is. Whole chapters, including a stretch of more than 100 pages, go to paraphrasing O'Hair's philosophy, as it was detailed in public comments, a diary, a radio program, and writings such as Why l Am an Atheist (1996) and Freedom Under Siege (1974). O'Hair, as represented here, lays out a compelling case against religion and for atheism as an honorable, inspiring system of belief. Whether that system ever crossed the frontier into faith is a bit of woolgathering this book rarely indulges.

While O'Hair delights in mocking Catholic archaisms, biblical literalism, and other easy targets, she's equally tough on modern liberal theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Buber, and skeptical of the notion that Americans left religious intolerance back in the Old Country. She resurrects 19th-century atheist heroes such as the forgotten Republican jurist, polymath, and orator Robert Green Ingersoll, and coopts famous religious dissidents as atheists in all but name. Watching O'Hair cut through "freethinker" and "humanist" labels is as enjoyable as seeing a catty queen out "confirmed bachelors."

O'Hair's lectures include sustained notes on U.S. history, almost a national counter-history, in which church-avoiding George Washington and stern foe of superstition Thomas Jefferson support church/state separation out of exasperation with religion rather than sympathy for it. There's a quibble over the addition of apocryphal religious phrases to the "Mrs. Bixby" letter attributed to Abraham Lincoln. In one riveting tale, O'Hair tracks the 19th-century history of efforts to establish a state religion.

Le Beau's version of O'Hair's personal history is less impressive. O'Hair led an interesting life, but Le Beau, a historian of documents rather than persons, seems unwilling to put much flesh on the bones. He appears to have conducted no interviews, relying on published sources for his portrait of O'Hair. Since she had almost as many enemies as there are Americans, this means the narrative draws heavily from derogatory works, most notoriously My Life Without God (1982), an autobiography and conversion narrative by her apostate son William Murray.