Baylor Arts & Sciences magazine, Spring 2015: Meeting Madalyn

Meeting Madalyn

Meeting Madalyn

The never-before-told story of how faculty from the world’s largest Baptist university ended up getting to know the country’s most notorious atheist.

By Randy Fiedler

Five Baylor-related road trips made in the early 1970s must surely rank as some of the most unusual journeys ever taken in Texas.

That’s because over a three-month period, three Baylor professors and a graduate student traveled to Austin to record oral history interviews with a personable grandmother named Madalyn Murray O’Hair –– the outspoken atheist called “the most hated woman in America” by Life magazine.

O’Hair was the daughter of churchgoing Presbyterians, but rejected religion at an early age. She gained national prominence in 1960 after filing suit against the Baltimore school system to protest the constitutionality of requiring her son to take part in Bible readings and recitations of The Lord’s Prayer. The case eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which voted overwhelmingly in 1963 to ban officially mandated Bible verse reading or prayer in public schools.

Suddenly a media celebrity, O’Hair enjoyed acting as a national spokesperson for atheism. She gave a popular interview to Playboy magazine in which she called religion “a crutch” and an “irrational reliance on superstitions and nonsense,” and made national headlines again when she unsuccessfully sued the U.S. government in protest of the Biblical account of creation being broadcast from space in 1968 by the Apollo 8 astronauts.

Following a series of moves across the United States and Mexico to outrun legal troubles, in 1965 the former Madalyn Murray landed in Austin, where she married her second husband, Richard O’Hair, and soon established the American Atheist Center.

Setting the stage

The story of how O’Hair and Baylor came together for their historic meetings began in 1970, when a group of interested Baylor faculty members sparked the creation of the Program for Oral History –– the forerunner of today’s Baylor Institute for Oral History. Dr. Thomas Charlton, then an assistant professor of history who had just joined the Baylor faculty, was chosen as the program’s first director.

“We had several themes we were trying to develop [at first],” Charlton said. “We had a Texas judicial history project in which we went out and interviewed former Texas Supreme Court justices and appellate court judges in Texas. Another was a business history project. We also had what we called the Religion and Culture Project, where we wanted to interview (concerning) all aspects of religion in Texas.”

Indeed, religion was the focus of the oral history program’s very first completed project –– a series of eight interviews which began in January 1971 with Rev. Joseph Martin Dawson, a Baylor graduate who was the longtime pastor of Waco’s First Baptist Church.

Around the time the oral history program was getting started, students doing work in Baylor’s J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies had adopted some related research interests.

“There were a number of graduate students who were thinking about writing their master’s thesis on church-state issues,” Charlton said. “One of them –– Kenneth King –– happened to come to work in the oral history office as a graduate assistant. He was madly collecting clippings from newspapers all over the world about Madalyn Murray O’Hair.”

Around the same time on campus, some Baylor students became interested in a public exploration of the topic of atheism. They wanted a prominent atheist to come to Baylor to teach one of the then-popular noncredit “Free University” classes that would examine the subject. Since O’Hair was only 90 miles away in Austin, the students tasked with coming up with ideas for class topics began making plans to invite her to be the instructor.

O'Hair lecture prohibited Lariat 1-19-1972 (crop)But before any invitation went out, Baylor executive vice president Herbert H. Reynolds prohibited the atheism class from being offered. He claimed it would violate Baylor’s campus speaker policy, which prohibited any speakers who would “attack the basic tenets of Christianity or advocate atheism or…violent rebellion.”

It was in this setting of conflicting desires and emotions that members of Baylor’s oral history program decided that exploring issues of church and state with America’s leading atheist was an opportunity they must seize.

“We wrote [O’Hair] a letter, asking if we might conduct at least one oral history interview with her that would help her document her position on church-state matters, and [said] we would be eager for her to tell her story about how she made it to Texas,” Charlton said. “To our great delight and surprise, she agreed.”

Getting acquainted

Working with graduate assistant Kenneth King, Charlton and other oral history program members prepared meticulously for the interview. On Nov. 17, 1971, Charlton and King packed their research materials and drove down to Austin to meet O’Hair at her home. The small, one-story bungalow in an older residential area served as the headquarters of the American Atheists organization O’Hair directed.

The unassuming woman who greeted the Baylor academics at the door was not the loud, argumentative Bible-basher they’d seen on television.

“Rather than our finding her bristling or being inhospitable toward us she took us in, seemed to smile and was warm to what we were doing,” Charlton said. “It was obvious that she was not exactly hooked on oral history, but she saw this as a chance to get her message out.”

Tape recorderScreen Shot 2015-04-20 at 3.57.33 PMAfter setting up a large reel-to-reel tape machine and a professional microphone, Charlton and King began the interview with a look back at O’Hair’s childhood and school days. She characterized her early religious training from her parents as “scar tissue on the brain” and said she decided she would not be ruled by what others believe.

“We play religious games all the time,” she said. “One of these is that you don’t belong to yourself, you belong to ‘God.’ That’s not true. I belong to me!”

Despite the changes brought about by her lawsuit filed a decade earlier, O’Hair told the Baylor interviewers she in fact wanted the Bible introduced into public schools in the fifth grade because she felt that if children actually read the Bible, they would abandon it for being so unbelievable.

“The reason it hangs on is everybody has one and no one reads it,” she said.

After two hours and 45 minutes of continuous dialogue about O’Hair’s early life and anti-religious beliefs, Charlton suggested to her that they bring that day’s interview to a close.

“We were amazed that she wanted us to stay all day,” Charlton said. “In fact, it was an extremely uncomfortable situation, and I’m sure our bladders were at the painful stage at the end…without a single bathroom break.”

Growing the team

That wouldn’t be the last time a group from Baylor would sit down with O’Hair, as Charlton and King returned to the little house four more times. On the third and fourth visits they brought with them a third interviewer, Baylor history professor Dr. Rufus B. Spain, who was struck by O’Hair’s frank and open demeanor.

“She was just very down to earth –– she didn’t put on any airs,” Spain said. “She was not apologetic (but) she was not bragging about what she had done. She was just very matter-of-fact.”

On the fifth and final visit to interview O’Hair, the team grew to five members with the addition of Dr. Robert Baird, a young Baylor philosophy professor.

“They wanted somebody in on the interview who had some philosophical background, because at times (O’Hair) seemed to drop certain philosophers’ names,” Baird said. “I think that she said she had a minor in philosophy as an undergraduate, but I certainly don’t remember having any sense that she had any sort of systematic grasp of philosophy.”

4 guys Screen Shot 2015-04-20 at 3.57.58 PM

Surprises and distractions

Over the course of the interviews, the Baylor team heard O’Hair’s opinions on a wide variety of topics –– everything from the war in Vietnam, women’s liberation and race relations to the best ways to raise young children and run a university. But sometimes, it was the events that took place outside the formal question and answer sessions that remain memorable to the interviewers.

Although his voice appears infrequently on the recorded tapes, O’Hair’s husband Richard –– who was bedridden in a nearby room –– was a looming presence throughout all five interviews.

“He was a gadfly (and) really wanted to interrupt. He was pulling her chain, and loved to tease her,” Charlton said. “We would be moving along smoothly, going from topic to topic and question to question, and out of the blue from the next room would come this stentorian voice (saying) ‘Madalyn, you know that’s a damn lie!’ And she would say, ‘Richard, shut up! This is my interview.’”

O’Hair told the Baylor interviewers that her husband was a retired Marine Corps gunnery sergeant who had a metal plate put in his head after suffering brain damage, and she claimed that some of his brain was still not functioning properly.

Another occasional interruption was furnished by O’Hair’s six-year-old granddaughter Robin, whom O’Hair had adopted.

“One time about three o’clock in the afternoon (Robin) got out of school, came bounding up on the front porch like kids do and (O’Hair) said ‘Excuse me,’” Charlton said. “I had to turn the recorder off. (O’Hair) got up and fed this young girl cookies and milk, like any grandmother would. After that I saw her in a different light –– I saw this grandmotherly side.”

On another occasion when the team showed up at O’Hair’s house, they learned that although she was not feeling well she insisted on going ahead with that day’s interview session.

“She was in her little cubbyhole (office with) a bottle of wine in front of her,” Charlton said. “She was sipping this bottle of wine and her voice was raspy…She said, ‘You’ll have to excuse me, my voice is not too good today. I have a little cold and I’m hoarse, but this bottle right here will help me get through this.’ She killed the whole bottle during the next four hours. By the end of the time her speech was slurred, but her mind was still pretty clear.”

At another time, the Baylor team realized toward the end of their interview session that O’Hair was hungry.

“I could tell she was sort of down a meal that day and she needed a little protein,” Charlton said. “I thought, well, we gave her no gifts…and we were trying to keep this as pristine as we could, but she asked if we could grab a bite to eat.” The interviewers agreed, and soon they were all eating Mexican food together at a nearby restaurant.

A momentary concern

O'Hair memoirs taped, Free U. attempts O'Hair visit Lariat 1-25-1972 (crop)Meanwhile, the secrecy the researchers had enjoyed was shattered before the project’s end. On Jan. 25, 1972, the day after the fourth interview was completed, the Lariat ran a front-page story that revealed that Baylor professors had been doing oral history interviews with O’Hair, despite the university’s decision not to allow the famous atheist on campus.

Charlton remembers that after the article ran, some of his students were concerned about whether Baylor’s administration would uphold his academic freedom, since he was an untenured assistant professor tackling a controversial topic. Although he felt he was in no danger of a reprimand because the project dealt with legitimate research, Charlton paid a visit to Baylor President Abner McCall just to make sure.

“(McCall) looked at me and smiled, and he said, ‘I’ve told you I want you to go out and bring in as much of this raw material as possible. Now I want you to go back out there and keep going,’” Charlton said. “He then told me the latest Aggie joke, which let me know that he was pretty relaxed about the whole thing.”

The (not-so) great debate

Patterson debates O'Hair Lariat 12-5-1975 (crop)The fifth and final interview took place on Feb. 22, 1972, but that would not the famous atheist’s last personal interaction with Baylor faculty. In the winter of 1975, Dr. Bob Patterson, then an associate professor of religion at Baylor, received an offer he couldn’t refuse. He was asked to go on a local television station and debate Madalyn Murray O’Hair on the topic of religion.

The two met in the studios of KCEN-TV, which serves the Waco-Temple-Killeen market, to tape a program that debuted on KCEN at noon on Sunday, Dec. 14, 1975. However, the formally moderated debate on religion that Patterson was promised turned out to be more of a no-holds barred attack led by O’Hair.

“The moderator just sat there and did nothing and let the two of us go at it,” Patterson said. “(O’Hair) wrote a book while in Hawaii and came back and was selling it. That’s why they invited me in –– they just wanted a warm body to advertise the book. It wasn’t a debate. It was a setup.”

Patterson said O’Hair told him off camera that her public debate strategy was not to argue with her opponents, but to “out shout” them. And he said her reluctance to argue the finer points of religion meant that they never really discussed the topic of whether God exists.

“She was a terrible, terrible atheist. All she could point out were errors the church had made, but she didn’t know I knew a lot more errors than she did,” Patterson said. “She had no idea what atheism was about, and no theistic or anti-theistic arguments –– just throwing rocks at the bad things the church had done…It was a personal thing with her…You could just sense the emotional baggage that she was bringing to this.”

Despite their on-air jousting, Patterson said he and O’Hair got along well.

“She and I sat down and had coffee after the thing was over and we agreed we’d get together and do this again, but somehow it didn’t work out,” Patterson said. “We had a wonderful time together…We stayed in correspondence and I may have sent her a book or two of mine.”

The final chapters

Online Screen Shot 2015-04-20 at 3.58.15 PMThe five interviews Baylor recorded with O’Hair take up more than 12 hours of tape, and the transcribed versions fill two bound volumes totaling 442 pages. Those typed transcripts –– as well as the actual audio recordings of the O’Hair interviews –– are available online.

The only restriction placed on the use of the interview materials was put there by O’Hair herself. Offended when she learned of Baylor’s refusal to let her and other atheists speak on campus, O’Hair insisted on a written warning that “no religious person or institution may make any kind of profit” from her memoirs.

Of course, O’Hair is no longer around to keep watch over her Baylor materials. In 1995 she was kidnapped and murdered along with her son, Jon Garth Murray, and her adopted granddaughter Robin Murray O’Hair –– the same person who had interrupted the Baylor interview sessions as a young girl. A former American Atheists employee was convicted of kidnapping, robbery and murder in the case.

Looking back, the Baylor professors who interviewed O’Hair said that although they didn’t share her views on most topics, they were impressed with her willingness to defend her beliefs.

“I came away with a better opinion of her,” Spain said. “She was acting on principle.”

“She knew that all of us there were practicing Christians…but she did not question us about that,” Charlton said. “There was never anything negative or sarcastic about that, which I thought commendable on her part. She took it seriously, and it made us want to respect her all the more, even if we did not agree with her theology.”

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The entire Spring 2015 issue of Baylor Arts & Sciences magazine is available online.

©2015 Baylor University

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