Secularists at Work

"What happens to China's 450 million infidels when they die?" eight-year-old William McCarthy asked the Campbellite circuit-rider. "Son," answered the preacher, "they all go straight to hell." Then & there Ohio-born William McCarthy decided that there was no God. Last week, at 83, white-haired Atheist McCarthy, still of the same mind, was hard at work fighting religion in the New Jersey superior court.

Over the years, as he recalls them, old "Mac" McCarthy had seen and heard enough to satisfy himself that his childhood decision was right. Traveling through a good part of the world, observing the contrast of rich churches with peasant poverty, shocked by hypocrisy in high places and evil deeds done in religion's name, he finally decided to devote his time and money to combating humanity's yearning to believe and worship. He spent five years writing a 725-page diatribe against Christianity, called Bible, Church and God. Four years ago he organized a few of his fellow thinkers into the "Secularists of New Jersey" (membership 150). Two years ago his group joined with other societies throughout the country to become the "United Secularists of America," with headquarters in Chicago.

Parent & Taxpayer. Last week, sparked by William McCarthy, the United Secularists were fighting their first court case. Atheist McCarthy had been thinking about it ever since the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled on the suit of Mrs. Vashti McCollum against the board of education of Champaign, Ill. Atheist McCollum had sued to prevent the board from making school premises available for religious instruction of pupils, and the Supreme Court had upheld her (TIME, March 22, 1948). The decision had set in question the released-time systems of almost every state, but for the organized Secularists this was not enough.

In New Jersey, as in eleven other states, there is a statute which requires that the Bible be read without comment in every public school. To the Secularists, this was a violation of the "wall of separation between church & state."

What Lawyer Heyman Zimel of Paterson, N.J. wanted, to make a foolproof test case, were protests from 1) the parent of a schoolchild, and 2) a New Jersey taxpayer. Mrs. Henry O. Klein, ex-Roman Catholic and longtime Secularist, filled the bill for the parent: her 17-year-old daughter Gloria was a student at the Hawthorne High School. Donald R. Doremus, a mechanic of East Rutherford and director of the Secularists of New Jersey, was glad to protest as a taxpayer. With Lawyer Zimel, they filed their case before Superior Court Judge Robert H. Davidson.

"Religious Stigma." New Jersey's Attorney General Theodore D. Parsons moved for dismissal on the grounds that no proof had been offered that Gloria had suffered "any harm or damages from the reading of the verses"--especially since the law did not require that schoolchildren be present when the Bible is read. But Lawyer Zimel used the argument of Vashti McCollum in the Champaign case: he insisted that a pupil's absence during the reading inflicts upon him "a religious stigma and sets him apart from his fellows."

Judge Davidson took the case under advisement as the United Secularists settled themselves down for a long climb up the legal ladder to the U.S. Supreme Court. Last-week scrappy Octogenarian McCarthy's white frame house in Clifton, N.J. was piled high with broadsides, and almost every evening embattled Secularists were coming in to help mail out a special appeal for funds. Said McCarthy happily: "Nobody gets paid for this, you understand. We're all charity workers here--and we're giving the Lord hell!"

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