Atheists: The Woman Who Hates Churches

Atheist Madalyn Murray boasts that “we do everything properly, through the courts.” What she has already done through the courts, however, strikes millions of people as so improper that she has earned the epithet: “the most hated woman in America.” Last year the belligerent Baltimorean won a Supreme Court ban on school prayer. Last month she started suit again to kill a new Maryland law permitting compulsory school “meditation.” Next month she goes for the brass ring: a suit against the State of Maryland that is clearly aimed at destroying tax exemption for all U.S. church property. Churches are “leeches on society,” she says. “If no other American has enough guts to fight them, then I will.”

Unbeliever Murray is a tough, wisecracking divorcee of 45 whose forebears arrived in Massachusetts in 1650. Daughter of a Pittsburgh contractor, she served on Eisenhower’s staff in World War II as a WAC officer-cryptographer, later studied law at Ohio Northern University and South Texas College; she has spent 17 years as a supervisor of social workers. A former member of the leftish Socialist Labor Party, she claims to have forsaken Christianity at 13, after reading the Bible; since then, reason has been her only faith, and she boasts: “Nobody has ever beaten me in an argument yet.”

“Christian Neighbors. “Wildly irreverent, she sprinkles her conversation liberally with “Oh God.” After giving her father a religious funeral, she cracked: “People god-damned well better not do that to me.” When someone painted “Communist” on her fence, she named her dogs Marx and Engels.

Not surprisingly, her oldest son Bill, 17, rebelled in 1961 against “that hogwash” of school prayers. Delighted to assault what she calls “hypocrisy,” Mrs. Murray then and there embarked on a new career as a kind of court mother. The Baltimore public welfare department fired her from her supervisor’s job. Various persons—whom she delights in describing as “My Christian neighbors”—have trampled her flowers, broken her windows, beaten up Bill and his young brother more than 100 times. Flooded with abusive letters, she has received everything from a psychotic document endlessly repeating the word “kill” to a newspaper picture of herself smeared with excrement.

But she has also been deluged with dollars (top source: doctors), now runs both the Freethought Society of America, Inc., and Other Americans, Inc., a legal-action group whose 5,000 members pay at least $1 per month to fight her court battles. Among her future targets: Government-paid military chaplains, courtroom oaths, and income tax deductions for church contributions. Other Americans already owns 80 acres in Kansas for a projected “Atheist University of the Americas.”

Lease-Back Loophole. Whatever their personal feelings, lawyers concede that Mrs. Murray’s tax-exemption suit is not without merit. She argues that such exemption forces her to pay higher taxes and support churches—in direct conflict with the First Amendment’s prohibition against laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” All 50 states, including Maryland, repeat this prohibition in some form in their own constitutions. Yet 33 state constitutions also make church property taxfree. All other states accomplish the same end under other statutes.

No one is quite sure how much potential revenue is involved. One study shows that church groups own 14% of all taxable property in Pennsylvania, 17% in Maryland, 18% in New Jersey. In other areas, churches own relatively little of total tax-exempt property; in Baltimore, for example, where $528 million worth of property is taxexempt, only $80 million worth is owned by churches (schools and hospitals account for much of the rest). Even so, few dispute the fact that church property is widely undervalued.

As Mrs. Murray sees it, the most blatant constitutional violation is church-owned property that is not used for religious purposes. Many state laws are so broad that churches—and fraternal organizations—may buy such property with leaseback arrangements under which they rent it to the former owners; income from the rents and leases is taxfree. The Roman Catholic Knights of Columbus do not pay income taxes on their rental revenue, which comes from such sources as the land on which Yankee Stadium stands, a Detroit steel warehouse and a Connecticut steel mill. In New Orleans, Jesuit-run Loyola University pays no federal income tax on its revenues from its radio and tele vision stations, and thus is in a better position to compete for business than is its leading rival.

Determined to launch equity suits in eleven states, Mrs. Murray has begun at home. Maryland forbids church lease-backs, exempts only property used for church purposes. The state’s lawyers will argue that limited tax exemptions are not grants that provably infringe on church-state separation. Moreover, they will claim that Mrs. Murray’s financial loss is too small to make her case justifiable.

The Catholic and Episcopal dioceses of Baltimore have joined the case as co-defendants because they want a definitive constitutional decision. Church lawyers will argue that tax breaks spur vast church contributions to the public welfare through church schools, orphanages and hospitals. Another argument: tax breaks may actually be mandatory under the First Amendment’s guarantee of “free exercise” of religion.

Some churches—notably the Methodists and United Presbyterians—concede that there is an inequity in the laws and either pay their full taxes or a sum equivalent to levies from which they are exempt. But a majority of the clergy probably agree with Mrs. Murray’s Baltimore opponents, who are determined to battle her up to the Supreme Court over what one Roman Catholic lawyer sees as “the beginning of a hostile interpretation of the First Amendment.” Says he: “As a person, Mrs. Murray is not important. But what she’s trying to do is important.”