AUSTIN, Texas — It’s been 50 years since Madalyn Murray O’Hair founded American Atheists in Austin and went on to become the public face of atheism with her trademark defiant, in-your-face style.
A lot has changed, more so with Americans than with atheists, says American Atheists president David Silverman.
“The country has progressed a tremendous amount from the days when being an atheist got you harassed by the police,” Silverman said. “What used to be a one-woman campaign has now become a national movement.”
The organization will return this weekend to the city where it started for its national convention, which ends Sunday. A spokesman for the group said 900 or more people are expected to attend; membership fluctuates between 3,000 and 4,000.
From the American Atheists headquarters then in Austin, the mercurial O’Hair regularly filed church-state separation lawsuits, and her 1963 lawsuit helped end prayer in public schools. O’Hair, her son and the granddaughter she adopted as her daughter were killed as part of a 1995 kidnapping plot.
Now based in Crawford, New Jersey, American Atheists remains focused on the same objectives: working for the separation of religion and government and defending civil rights for atheists, Silverman said. It is, for example, suing the Internal Revenue Service to stop the agency from giving what it calls preferential treatment to churches and religious organizations, which receive nonprofit, tax-exempt status. It is also fighting plans to display a cross at a memorial to the World Trade Center, contending that a religious symbol is not appropriate in a project financed with public money.
The overarching goal of atheists, however, is to achieve normalcy and equality, Silverman said. He cited a 2012 report by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which found that about 20 per cent of U.S. adults — and one-third of adults under 30 — do not identify with any religion, up from 15 per cent five years ago.
