Richard Le Beau’s biography of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O’Hair (New York: NYU Press, 2003), is a biography of a “subject” some saw as a sinner, “the most hated woman in America” some called her, but who others saw as a saint, the tower of strength who helped return America to the nation that it was in the beginning, a nation that was not only a place where religion could be freely practised—some scholars refer to this as the democratisation of Christianity, others as free market Christianity—but a nation where there could be, as the US Constitution guaranteed, no establishment of religion, no federal American theocracy, an America where one was free not to be religious. O’Hair, as Le Beau notes, like all those who feed off of the fame, fortune, and misfortune celebrity breeds and brings, learned to treasure and use her status as saint and sinner. She seemed to love being the sinner and saint lighting rod and playing to the crowd, for and against, just like all celebrity salespeople including that noted flim flam man of late twentieth and early twenty-first century America, Donald Trump.
In Le Beau’s biography O’Hair is a real flesh and bones human being. Le Beau’s O’Hair is a Shakespearean figure who fights the good fight against bigotry, religious and “secular”—a fight which was perhaps ultimately tragic in that O'Hair recognised, in more private and reflective moments, that was likely ultimately to be a failure—and the essence of evil for other Americans because she was perceived by them as one of those who gave us an America that was decadent, an America that was devoluted, an America that was a nation that was no longer on god’s side.
O'Hair was also a paradox as Le Beau makes clear. She was, as Le Beau points out, the kissing cousin of her Christian evangelist and televangelist counterparts. She was an authoritarian organiser and salesperson, in her case, a salesperson trying to sell organised atheism to groups of people with varying “interests” who could probably never be fully organised in the first place—something O’Hair also realised in reflective moments—and who had often been cowed into fear by social, political and cultural contexts that surrounded them. As O’Hair realised from observing Jerry Falwell’s nationalist Christian advertising campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s aimed at particular demographics, fear was useful in selling a product, something Christian proselytisers and religious elites, Washington political elite, American economic elite, and modern advertisers recognised earlier on. As a consequence, O'Hair was not averse to using the same strategies as her Christian nationalist kin to raise monies from whom all blessings flowed for herself, her family, and her social movement.
O'Hair was, as Le Beau notes, a symbol whose star and celebrity rose and fell and rose again and fell again as America changed and changed again between the 1960s and 19990s. O’Hair’s celebrity declined, as Le Beau notes, in the 1960s only to revive somewhat in an era in which America saw a neo-liberal and right wing populist religious like cultural revival in the late twentieth century. O’Hair’s second coming, however, as Le Beau notes, did not rise to the level of celebrity she had from 1960s and into the early 1970s.
As Le Beau’s attentiveness to the ebbing and flowing of O’Hair’s star power points up, Le Beau’s biography does an excellent job of putting O’Hair’s life in context. O’Hair, as Le Beau notes, became a celebrity, a symbol of good for some and of evil for others, at the height of the Cold War. He does a fine job of contextualising O’Hair’s life and thought in the surface rigidity of Cold War America—there were always countercultures and subculture which ebbed and flowed in the post-World War II period it should be remembered—with its conformities and demonisations of “the other”. O’Hair, of course, was one of the most infamous and famous of these demonised “others”, of those demonised as“commie atheists” in Cold War America before the shock of the not so new sixties. It is also very good at contextualising O’Hair’s life in the broader history of scepticism and atheism. Le Beau provides an intellectual history that traces O’Hair’s influences to figures like Robert Ingersoll, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others. He provides an excellent summary of O’Hair’s synthesis of a variety of different intellectual sources relating to science, atheism, the origins of religion, theocratism, American civil, civic, or public religion, Christian nationalism, Christian persecution, the importance of a “real" education, and socialisation for conformity, among other things.
Where I had problems with Le Beau’s biography was in those cases where his very useful emic or going native approach got in the way of an etic or distanced and hence more scientific analysis. This lack of etic analysis is particularly apparent when Le Beau is discussing the very public break between O’Hair and her out of wedlock son, William in whose name the Supreme Court case arguing that public involuntary school prayer violated the US Constitution, and who later converted to right wing fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity. Unlike Le Beau, Murray’s polemic reduces his mother's polemicising and empirical analysis, decontextualising it in the process, to family and personal issues, a trait common to most humans who typically can’t see the proverbial forest though the proverbial trees. The problem I had with Le Beau’s “analysis" here was that he did not critique William's decontextualisation and personalisation of his mother’s ideology. If Madalyn was rebelling against family, against an absent god, and against the suffering that is life, trying to find a meaning or meanings for it—theodicy—so was he. If atheism was a crutch for O’Hair, right wing American Christianity was a crutch for Murray whose troubled life, a troubled alcoholic life, eventually led him to Alcoholics Anonymous and to its close cousin right wing Christianity, something that gave him and his life meaning along in his war with his mother just as atheism gave meaning to hers. If O’Hair loved the limelight so did he. While William's road to Damascus conversion turned him into a celebrity within a particular identity community. It is kind of odd that Le Beau, in emic mode, plays along with this decontextualisation and offers none of the contextual critique of Murray that he does of O’Hair.
Le Beau’s book was particularly interesting to read in the context of an early twenty-first century that has seen the increasing flexing of political and ideological muscles by politically and ideologically “correct” right wing theocratic our way or the highway and hence fascist American nationalist Christians. As Le Beau notes, the US courts, including the US Supreme Court, hedged its bets in its cases relating to religion and the state though recent history would suggest that the theocrats on the US Supreme Court and in many US states are hell bent on turning the US into a theocratic monarchy. They never pushed the fact that the US Constitution and the fourteenth amendment to that Constitution, which made theocracy in the states of the US unconstitutional, which prohibits the establishment of religion—though the US did and does have a civil, civic or public religion that proved somewhat flexible as the sixties show—to its logical conclusion. They allowed, for example, religious prayers to continue in federal, state, and local contexts on the basis of tradition, a tradition where meaning supposedly became so empty that it became meaningless in the process. In an era where right wing populists, religious or not, have jigged electoral maps, jigged voting itself cleansing Americans from the voting rolls in the process, a clear statement that they don’t trust their ideas to the marketplace, packed the courts with their politically and ideologically correct polemicists, and jigged the tax system in their favour, amongst other things—something that points up the fact that certain meanings can be imposed by force in a nation-state—Le Beau’s book serves as a warning if likely a warning of someone crying in the proverbial politically, economically, and ideologically incorrect wilderness.
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