Barbara Ehrenreich - Blue collar atheists

I’m researching journalist Barbara Ehrenreich’s ancestry and found this fascinating anecdote from her own research into it.

http://www.ffrf.org/legacy/fttoday/2000/april2000/ehrenreich.html

I have to talk about my family a little bit. There is a reason in my case why the constant linkage of God, family, and flag is upsetting to me, and it has to do with the history of my particular family. I am a fourth-generation atheist. My freethinking ancestors were not members of the "liberal elite" who are always getting bashed for being anti-religious, who are so hated by the current conservative elite. My atheist ancestors were miners, railroad workers, farmers, farm workers. Once they had been religious people, many of them Catholics.

The story is told that my great-grandmother, a Montana farmwoman named Mamie O'Laughlin, sent for a priest when her father was dying. The priest did not want to be bothered. (This is western Montana, the late 19th century, the trip would have been dangerous.) And he sent back a message to Mamie that he would come but only if she would pay him a fee of $25, which was a huge sum in those days and way beyond the means of my great-grandmother. So her father died without the consolation, whatever it may have been, of the sacrament.

A couple of years after her father died, Mamie herself lay dying in childbirth at an all-too-young age. This time a priest showed up without being called to administer last rites to her. Good Catholic woman, right? Mamie O'Laughlin, she had to have last rites. She had never forgiven the church for the circumstances of her father's death. So when the priest placed the cross on her chest, she sat up, with her last burst of strength, and threw it across the room. Then she lay back and died.

This is the story I was told as a child to explain how my family had become atheists long ago. It had nothing to do with going to places like Harvard or Yale and getting all kinds of higher learning in our heads. But as I learned later, my family was hardly unique. It wasn't until I was an adult that I found this out. I grew up thinking that we were very strange, that there's nobody like this; I'm the only one that doesn't go to religious education when you get time-out for that on Wednesday afternoons from public schools. I'm the only one that doesn't put my head down for prayers. I thought we were just bizarre.

As an adult I found out that there was a big tradition of blue collar atheism in America, not only just in Butte, Montana, where my family had come from. I learned through my research that there is a vast and largely forgotten tradition of blue collar atheism in America, usually called freethought, in the nineteenth century, appropriately enough. I learned this through books. I had to research this in libraries. That was my moment of discovery of my roots. These people weren't my genetic ancestors that I was reading about but I found the tradition that my family came out of. I realized that I wasn't just part of some bizarre little family that didn't fit in but that I was part of a tradition which had been almost eliminated but that went back at least to the 19th century in this country. ….