“The Most Hated Woman in America”: Madalyn Murray and the Crusade against School Prayer

Abstract

“The Most Hated Woman in America”: Madalyn Murray and the Crusade against School Prayer BRUCE J. DIERENFIELD* Throughout her life, Madalyn Murray (O’Hair) tried to obliterate the concept of God and Christianity. She first burst onto the national stage in the early 1960s with a lawsuit against the religious exercises her son was subjected to in a Baltimore, Maryland, public school. A colorful woman who flouted convention, Murray despised religion: “Ifpeople wantto go to church andbe crazy fools, that’s their business. But I don’t want them praying in ball parks, legislatures, courts and schools.... They can believe in their virgin birth and the rest oftheir mumbojumbo, as long as they don’t interfere with me, my children, my home, my job, my money or my intellectual views.” At a time when religious conviction was often equated with patriotism, Murray’s public statements were regarded as heretical. The media naturally sought her out and as the public learned more about her, Murray was demonized as a belligerent, loudmouthed crank—“the most hated woman in America.” She was not, in fact, the first person to challenge school prayer successfully. That distinction belonged to a fellow atheist, Lawrence Roth, in Engel v. Vitale (1962), a highly unpopular decision against a state-devised prayer in New York. But unlike the reclusive Roth, Murray gravitated to the limelight and became the leader of American atheism in the late twentieth century. To dampen the extraordinary fervor against Engel, the U.S. Supreme Court re­ visited the question of school prayer in a pair of cases decided the following year. In School District of Abington Township v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett, the ques­ tion before the Court was whether school officials in Pennsylvania and Baltimore, Maryland, could require students to partici­ pate in daily devotions, including listening to Bible verses and reciting the Lord’s Prayer, even if the state had not written the devo­ tions. These cases had broad implications be­ cause thirty-nine states either required or per­ mitted religious exercises in public school classrooms. “THE MOST HATED WOMAN IN AMERICA” 63 In Pennsylvania, Bible reading had existed in the public schools before the Civil War. In 1913, the state legislature voted to require the practice to help young people develop lives of “good moral training,” “honorable thought,” and “good citizenship.” As the Cold War di­ vided the world into two camps—one demo­ cratic and God-fearing, the other communistic and atheistic—many American politicians be­ lieved that devotions were indispensable to the nation’s survival. With that thought in mind, the state in 1949 required Pennsylvania public schoolteachers to read ten Bible verses without comment every school day orface dismissal. In Baltimore’s pubic schools, the Bible had been required as a “reading book” since 1839, a rule that was superseded in 1905 by a requirement for daily devotions consisting ofa chapterfrom the King James or Douay versions ofthe Bible and/or recital of the Lord’s Prayer. The Schempp case arose in 1956 when sixteen-year-old Ellory Schempp, a popular honors student and track athlete at the pres­ tigious Abington High School in suburban Philadelphia, decided to ignore the scripture reading. Every day, at 8:20 a.m., a teacher selected students from a television and ra­ dio workshop to lead their classmates in a familiar ritual. Using the public address sys­ tem, they opened with a “fact for the day”— “Mt. Everest is 29,000 feet high”—to get the students thinking, followed by ten Bible verses, the Lord’s Prayer, the salute to the flag, and school announcements. The school provided the King James Bible, but students who were selected to read sacred text could use a different version. The Revised Stan­ dard (Protestant), Douay (Catholic), and Torah (Jewish) scriptures were sometimes used. In the lower grades, which were attended by Ellory’s younger sister, Donna, and brother, Roger, entire classes recited the Lord’s Prayer with bowed heads and closed eyes. Although state law did not require recital of the Lord’s Prayer, the Abington School District mandated it anyway. At first, Ellory thought of morning de­ votions as harmless background noise, but he...