Dana is a psychologist at an Army base in South Texas. It's a very conservative environment, she says, one where she has to make sure her patients don't get wind of her atheism.
But in her small community, even off the clock, she can never quite relax. "I'm always careful about what I'm going to say," she says. "Or worried I'll offend someone."
Mark Graham
Zachary Moore predicts a new world, one in which more people will be unaffiliated with religion.
Mark Graham
Aron Ra says atheists aren't forcing their views on anyone, unlike the religious right.
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Liz, the red-haired call-taker, agrees. Both her neighborhood and her job trend toward the religious, she says. If it weren't for that, she probably wouldn't even come to a convention like this. "If I lived in San Francisco, I wouldn't need to go."
Although they often feel like the odd ones out, nonbelievers have had a home in this state since the mid-19th century, when the Freethinkers, a group of no-nonsense Germans, settled in the Texas Hill Country. According to historian Glen Lich, the Freidenkers thought of the concept of a deity as "irrelevant," and opposed organized churches or clergy.
"If they acknowledged the existence of a traditional Judeo-Christian God," Lich says, "they did not do so with friendliness or affection but as the impatient successors of such belief systems." In Comfort, Texas, where one of the largest communities was formed, organized freethinker groups met regularly for more than 100 years, from the 1850s until the mid 1970s.
The most famous Texas atheist, though, is the one from Pittsburgh. Madalyn Murray O'Hair moved to Austin in the mid-1960s and founded the American Atheists, which described its mission as defending "the civil rights of nonbelievers" and zealously guarding church-state separation. She did that mainly by filing lawsuits, including the landmark Supreme Court case that banned the Lord's Prayer and Bible reading from public schools.
O'Hair was a notorious figure throughout the 1960s and 1970s, fanning the flames of her infamy on her radio and television shows and in frequently outrageous interviews. In 1989, the now-defunct magazine Freedom Writer asked if she "supported religious freedom."
"Oh, absolutely!" O'Hair responded. "I feel everyone has a right to be insane."
O'Hair disappeared abruptly, along with her son and granddaughter, in 1995. A note on the door of the American Atheists headquarters said, cryptically, that the family had been called away on "an emergency basis." It was later discovered that David Roland Waters, a former AA employee, had kidnapped and murdered the trio with help from two accomplices (one of whom he promptly murdered as well). It wasn't until 2001 that Waters led police to the remote ranch where he'd buried the bodies after dismembering and mutilating them. The Austin Chronicle accused the Austin Police Department of taking too relaxed an approach to the case, possibly because of O'Hair's unpopularity.
A less gruesome chapter in atheist history began in 1994 in Irving, when Tim Gorski and Mike and Marilyn Sullivan founded the North Texas Church of Freethought, which has met monthly in one hotel ballroom or another ever since. The church, the group says on its Web site, "does most everything every other church in the DFW Metroplex does, but without the supernaturalism." It counts around 300 members, about 100 of whom actually show up for services. Around 2009, a group of NTCoF members spun off to form the Fellowship of Freethought (FOF), which is now the area's largest group, at least online, where they count around 1,100 members.
Despite these sputters of public activity, nonbelievers have mostly remained out of sight, both in Texas and throughout the Bible Belt. But lately, a small army of determined atheist groups throughout the state has begun working to raise the profile of the not-God-fearing any way they can: engaging in well-publicized charitable work; buying roadside billboards; launching print and television ads; and, in FOF's case, strategizing on how to turn their following online into a larger, flesh-and-blood organization. The activity is especially concentrated in Dallas and Houston: The Houston Atheists are the single largest group in the state, with around 2,000 members, while the Dallas Fort Worth Coalition of Reason, an umbrella group for all of the DFW area's atheist, agnostic, skeptical and freethought organizations, has an estimated 3,000 members.
Texas's skeptical have an uphill battle. A November poll by the University of Texas and the Texas Tribune found that about half of voters "believe faith is a better guide than scientific evidence on most important questions" of science and public policy. At the Texas Freethought Convention, though, the mood is both celebratory and determined. A couple dozen Dallas atheists have made the trip down; one of the largest contingents is the students from the North Texas chapters of the Secular Student Alliance (SSA). On Saturday afternoon, they've set up in a table in the hallway of the Austin Marriott, along with a half-dozen other organizations. Kevin Butler, a representative with the SSA, clad in a suit and tie and looking exhausted, is handing out SSA pens and pamphlets and busily signing up new members.
There are already ten different student groups at various schools in the area, including UT Dallas, UT Arlington, University of North Texas, Tarrant County Community College and Texas Woman's University. There are also four high school groups, according to Butler. Since last year, there's even a fledgling atheist group at the deeply religious Baylor University in Waco.
