Atheists to Offer Winter Greeting
Gary Stern
The Journal News
December 17, 2000
Yorktown, Pennsylvania -- During this season of religious celebration, of menorahs and creches and illuminated expressions of faith, one town is reluctantly opening its public square to the nonbeliever.
On Thursday, two signs will go on display in Yorktown, next to symbols of Hanukkah and Christmas, offering the following holiday greeting: "American Atheists wish everyone a Merry Winter Solstice."
Yorktown resident Chris Morton is the new state director for American Atheists, a national organization founded in 1963. As part of a plan to increase atheism's local profile, he decided to make his hometown a test case for displaying the atheist position on public property.
He promises to place similar symbols of godlessness in other local communities next year.
Morton, 54, doesn't expect his initial greeting, however sincere, to go over very well with his neighbors. He half expects his signs to be defaced.
"We have a pretty conservative population here, so I don't think the reception will be very good," he said. "People prefer that we stay quiet, and sometimes discriminate against us when we don't. But atheists are the last group to come out of the closet."
To prove his point, Morton noted that it took months of negotiations with town officials before he received permission to put up his signs in Yorktown's Rexall Park and outside the town-owned Yorktown Community and Cultural Center. An interfaith clergy group in Yorktown has been displaying menorahs and creches in those spots for several years.
Patti Malone, assistant to Town Supervisor Linda Cooper, said the town talked to its legal counsel about Morton's application before deciding he could display his signs.
"As long as they're in compliance with our regulations, we're an equal-opportunity town," Malone said.
Town officials warned Yorktown clergy of Morton's request weeks ago. With the holidays approaching, pastors are resigned to the solstice greetings, which celebrate an ancient seasonal event with pagan roots.
"He has as much right to do this as we do," said Monsignor Dermot Brennan, pastor of St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Church in Yorktown. "I don't want to sound like I'm in favor of it, but the law says he has the right."
The Rev. Angela Skinner, associate pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Yorktown, said religious freedom has to apply, in this case, to the nonreligious.
"Just as we have a right to express our beliefs, he has a right to his beliefs -- or nonbeliefs," she said. "I don't think it in any way diminishes our expression of faith."
Rabbi Stanley Urbas of the Yorktown Jewish Center said he suspects Morton is trying to ridicule the whole idea of promoting religious symbols on public grounds.
"He probably wants to make the whole thing look silly," Urbas said. "It's kind of odd that they're making this into a religious race, but if they want the publicity and it's OK with the town, it's OK with me."
Morton, a consultant on educational technology, agreed that he is trying to make a point. As a believer in a strict separation of church and state, he would prefer there be no religious symbols on public property. But if clergy and town officials insist on promoting their holidays, he said, he will insist on atheists' freedom of expression.
"Either they take theirs out," he said, "or we get ours in."
Morton's stand is the latest wrinkle in a growing social debate over how schools and municipalities can observe religious holidays without offending anyone or threatening the separation of church and state. Normally, communities are divided over whether to display any symbols at all and, if so, which.
In Ossining, for example, Christian members of a ministers group recently asked the Board of Education to display religious symbols of Christmas instead of Santa Claus and his elves.
Rabbi Leonard Shofer of Temple Beth Am in Yorktown said the atheist application shows what can happen when church and state mix.
"Once you crack the dike, you have to say 'yes' to everyone," he said. "It's a mess. But how can you fight it?"
Morton was born in England and raised in South Africa, where he was baptized in a Presbyterian church and attended an Anglican boarding school. At the age of 14, he was confirmed.
"I was expecting a blinding light, but nothing happened," he said. "It became more and more obvious to me that the whole thing was concocted. I guess I was a precocious child, but I gave it all up. I still toed the line, though, because in South Africa, saying you were an atheist was like saying you were a communist."
Morton volunteered this year to become the first New York director of American Atheists. The group was founded by Madalyn Murray O'Hair, a key player in a federal lawsuit that led to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1963 decision banning prayer in public schools.
O'Hair became a nationally recognized and often-reviled spokeswoman for atheism before her widely publicized disappearance in 1995. Last June, a federal jury in Austin, Texas, convicted a part-time handyman on charges related to the kidnapping of O'Hair and two relatives.
Morton plans to expand the group's membership and to get involved in church-state disputes across the state.
Copyright 2001 The Journal News, a Gannett Co., Inc. newspaper