The Legacy of Unbelief
Do You Remember Madalyn Murray O’Hair? No. Why would you?
But her hatred for God destroyed education for generations of Americans.
The evildoer quickly sprouts like grass but soon withers away. Ps 37:1-2
Madalyn Murray O’Hair may no longer be a household name, but her influence continues to cast a long shadow over American education and public life. For four generations, her legal activism and ideological militancy helped sever American students from the Bible—once a central text in the nation’s moral and civic formation. It is possible that we are now witnessing the slow unraveling of the legal reasoning she helped inaugurate, but not before her efforts did lasting damage to the moral literacy of the American public.
O’Hair was, in every sense, a radical. She identified as a communist, atheist, radical feminist, and even, disturbingly, a Holocaust denier. Her personal life was as tumultuous as her ideology. She endured multiple failed marriages and carried on an adulterous affair, which resulted in the birth of the son she would later use as a legal pawn in her landmark lawsuit. She once declared that she wanted three words engraved on her tombstone: “Woman, Atheist, Anarchist.” In the 1950s, she tried—more than once—to defect to the Soviet Union. Failing that, she resolved to remake the United States in her own ideological image.
In 1960, O’Hair brought a case against the Baltimore City Public School system, objecting to the practice of Bible reading in the classroom—a routine still observed in many districts at the time. The case, involving her son William, would ultimately be merged with Abington School District v. Schempp and brought before the Supreme Court. The Court ruled in 1963 that Bible reading in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
This decision became a legal watershed. The Court adopted what would become known as the doctrine of strict neutrality, insisting that government—at all levels—must remain religiously neutral. Justice Tom C. Clark wrote in the majority opinion that the government “must be neutral in matters of religion, and neither advance nor inhibit religion.” This, he argued, precluded even the passive reading of the Bible in classrooms. Significantly, the Court also resisted an originalist interpretation of the First Amendment, suggesting that America’s increasing religious diversity required a new legal posture—one that departed from the Founders’ own practices and assumptions.
But the logic of the decision went far beyond prohibiting the establishment of a national church or the coercion of religious belief. No child was being forced to worship; they were merely hearing the Bible read aloud, as had been customary for generations of Americans. The decision marked a dramatic expansion of what counted as “establishment,” effectively treating exposure to religious ideas as a constitutional offense. You will often find that Europeans know the Bible better than Americans because it is taught in their schools as an important part of world history, even though these same Europeans do not believe in the Bible. In other words, she might have left well enough alone and achieved her goals even better!
The irony of this case deepened over time. William Murray, the son at the center of the lawsuit, later converted to Christianity and became a Baptist minister. He would later describe how his mother used him as a prop to pursue her personal vendetta against Christianity. In a chilling response, O’Hair once referred to him as a case of postnatal abortion.
Undeterred by controversy, O’Hair went on to found American Atheists in 1963, an organization dedicated to the public removal of religious influence from civic life. She frequently mocked religion as “a crutch,” and relished the public attention her litigation brought. But beneath the noise, her arguments remained superficial and ideological—strong on outrage, but weak on logic and substance.
I was recently reminded of O’Hair’s strange legacy while watching an episode of Forensic Files. In 1995, she, her son Jon Murray, and her granddaughter Robin were kidnapped and murdered by a group of fellow atheists, led by David Waters, a disgruntled former employee of American Atheists. Waters, it seems, believed that O’Hair had slandered him in a public article and sought brutal retribution. Their bodies were dismembered and buried in a remote Texas field.
It was a grisly and ironic end for a woman who had lived by ideological hostility, controversy, and personal bitterness. But her impact—especially on the American educational system—has lived on far longer than her cause of death.
Neutrality Is Not a Virtue—Why the Court Was Wrong
The Supreme Court’s decision in Abington v. Schempp (1963), which effectively removed the Bible from public education, was not merely a misreading of the Constitution—it was a radical departure from the American legal tradition. The ruling did not uphold religious liberty; it redefined it, flattening the rich moral and theological inheritance of the American founding into a vague, contentless “neutrality” that has, in practice, served as a cover for ideological radicalism.
The Court was wrong.
The First Amendment prohibits the establishment of a national church—something akin to the Church of England—and protects citizens from religious coercion. But reading the Bible in school, or even praying, does not establish a national church. Nor does it compel anyone to attend religious services or profess a faith. The amendment was never intended to sever public life from theological truth, nor to protect students from exposure to the Bible. That interpretation would have been unthinkable to the Founders, most of whom commended the Christian faith even while holding public office.
The truth is that the United States was founded on Christian beliefs, not by accident but by design. The biblical view of God as Creator, of human beings as fallen but redeemable, and of moral law as revealed and intelligible—these are not private, optional commitments. They were understood to be public truths, foundational to civic life and coherent governance.
One need not imagine a theocratic state to affirm this. The U.S. government can affirm—and once did affirm—that God is real, humanity has sinned, and Christ is the only way to be reconciled to God. These claims, while theological, are also rationally defensible and morally presupposed in the rest of our legal system. A pluralistic society may host divergent beliefs, but that does not mean the truths upon which it was founded are negotiable. The government may not require you to believe anything, but neither can you demand that the government pretend it has no philosophical and theological foundation. Even if a member of another religion is elected to office, it remains true that the American legal and political tradition is built on biblical foundations.
To abstract our legal and educational institutions from these foundations is to render them incoherent. A system of rights and laws detached from any account of human nature and divine authority becomes a fragile construct—one that can only answer its children’s questions with tautologies: “Why do we do this?” “Because this is what we do.” But once we admit again that our freedoms and laws are grounded in eternal truths revealed by God, then those same children can be told: “Because this is what is true and right, and it was given to us for our good, let me show you how you can prove it by reason and argument.”
We can go further. The Bible should not be taught in schools merely as a historical artifact or literary text. It should be taught as true. Students should be invited to examine it alongside other world religions—not for the sake of superficial tolerance, but in pursuit of truth. Let them compare:
- The Bhagavad Gita, which teaches pantheism and claims that the self is God.
- The Qur’an, which affirms God the Creator (theism) but denies original sin and the need for vicarious atonement.
- The Tao Te Ching, which teaches monism—that all is one, including good and evil.
And then let them read the Bible, which alone presents a coherent and complete vision of reality: God the Creator, man the sinner, and Christ the Redeemer.
To remove the Bible from the classroom was not a move toward fairness. It was a philosophical act—one that robbed generations of students not only of biblical literacy, but of the intellectual tools to evaluate competing worldviews. What the Founders understood, and what modern secularism has tried to forget, is that education is not neutral. It cannot be. Every curriculum carries with it a vision of the good, of what is eternal, of the human. By expelling the Bible from public education, we expelled the very foundation of moral formation for Americans.
This kind of neutrality is not real. It was a tactic in the atheist-communist war on Christian America. Having removed the Bible, they were quick to insert their own ideological teaching and defend it by saying, “This isn’t religion.” Look at our schools today. The nightmarish gender philosophy of John Money is taught as the truth of the matter, and young people are told by their teachers they must cut up their bodies to match their current feelings. That’s not neutrality, but that was their goal all along. They knew nature abhors a vacuum, and when the Bible was out, something else would be put in.
The kind of neutrality the court wanted is impossible. The government can be neutral about whether or not you attend church. But it cannot be neutral about logic or values. The American governmental system presupposes Christian beliefs about reality. By leaving the Bible and prayer out of education, the school is not being neutral; it is teaching these students that they can lead a good and fulfilling life without God and Christ. The government schools will teach one message or the other–education is not neutral. Education is not merely facts; it involves the interpretation of facts and the meaning of life itself. The atheists want your children to have their interpretation forced on them in school; they are in favor of coercion.
And we are now living with the consequences.
The students who graduated in 1967—the first to complete high school after Schempp—did so without the daily hearing of Scripture. This is not to absolve them of personal responsibility. But many of their teachers had been told it was no longer appropriate to instruct students in the moral law of God. What followed was not a morally neutral society—it was the sexual revolution, a cultural unraveling that substituted pleasure for purpose and identity for nature. Today, its consequences reach absurdity: a university culture that teaches a man is a woman if he thinks he is.
No, we cannot trace every cultural failure back to Madalyn Murray O’Hair and Schempp, nor am I making a direct causal argument. But we must understand that the destabilization of truth begins with the rejection of its Source. The Soviet Union understood this well, which is why it targeted Christian belief. O’Hair, whether knowingly or not, became a useful instrument in that project. Her end—violent, isolated, betrayed by fellow atheists—mirrored the ideological legacy she left behind.
It is time to recover what was lost.
We must restore the Bible and prayer to public education, not as sectarian mandates, but as the moral and metaphysical foundations of the American order. Our children have the right to hear what is true, to be taught how to reason about deep theological truths, and to be equipped to judge all other claims against it.
The Founders would have expected no less.
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