The presidency of born-again Christian Jimmy Carter, followed by the high profile of evangelical Christianity under Ronald Reagan, demonstrated even to O'Hair that she was on a long slide toward irrelevance. The final insult came in 1989, when a Moscow Book Fair crowd ignored her atheist literature while grabbing 10,000 free New Testaments.
O'Hair's personal life brought frequent sadness. Son William, on whose behalf she had filed Murray v. Curlett, turned out to be a disappointment, a thrice-divorced drunk who handed his first child, Robin Ilene Murray, over to his mother to raise. Following a historic bender and a nonlethal shooting incident with the San Francisco Police Department, William found Jesus in a dream that seems to have been plagiarized from the Emperor Constantine. O'Hair's husband died slowly and painfully of cancer, American Atheists struggled for funds, and the atheist message, as measured by magazine subscriptions and mailing lists, found few takers in the United States.
Le Beau's challenge in telling this story is that the principal players -- Madalyn Murray O'Hair and the two family loyalists, second son Jon Garth Murray, and granddaughter Robin -- are all dead. In 1995 all three were kidnapped by three men (one a former employee at O'Hair's office), held captive for a month, forced to empty their bank accounts, and finally murdered. Even then the crime was used to damn O'Hair; until the family's remains were found in 2001, rumors abounded that she had absconded with her organization's funds. The details of O'Hair's case have been explored in Rappaport's book and in a splendid episode of the A&E Network's City Confidential. Le Beau is mercifully brief in his treatment of it.
Assessing O'Hair's legacy, Le Beau is skeptical, ungenerous, and, I think, mostly correct. Atheism has found little traction, though it is largely tolerated with nonchalance. Nor is society noticeably more comfortable with the critical approach to religious belief O'Hair advocated. (Witness the ease with which Americans accepted the notion that the September 11 attack, the most dramatic expression of religious belief in our time, was the work of a few knaves out to hijack a great religion.) Ostentatious displays of piety that would have been considered in poor taste in O'Hair's time are near prerequisites for high elective office. The nation appears comfortable in a state of indeterminacy with regard to God's presence on our money and in the Pledge of Allegiance.
How then did O'Hair contribute to expanding freedom of conscience? Her case might be easier to make if her devotion to freedom had been clearer. O'Hair's flirtations with Sovietism (though somewhat mitigated by her later efforts to push communists away from the atheist movement) are indicative of an approach that attacked the church but rarely, if ever, the state. Her critique of prayer in public schools left untouched the more central question of whether public education's mission of molding acceptable citizens is a legitimate one. Rather than trying to remove the nonprofit tax exemptions for churches, she might have asked why for-profit organizations must pay taxes in the first place. Is it any less absurd to pledge allegiance to an inanimate object than it is to mention God in the course of that pledge?
But religious freedom expands mostly through paradox. Martin Luther, a churlish priest and an anti-Semite even by the standards of his day, moved the question of individual conscience to the center of Western moral thinking. New England settlers, true believers in election and preterition, helped found a country where free will is given vast rein. Dante Alighieri, the most pope-intoxicated literary genius Europe ever produced, was also an early proponent of the separation of church and state.
In these terms, Madalyn Murray O'Hair may have had a lasting impact. She chased religion into the private sector, and there it flourishes, through homeschooling, through church-sponsored schools serving every creed, in overtly religious programming on network TV, in countless "spiritual" bestsellers. Most or all of these would have been anathema in the era of big-tent Cold War liberalism; in an age where the individual's duty to the state is no longer so clear, we live with them comfortably. Lately even some atheists have gotten into the act, demanding to be called "brights" and respected for their deeply held beliefs. Such a wild ending could only have been cooked up by a master storyteller, but God, as we know from His published works, has little appreciation for irony.
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