A public high school in Cranston, Rhode Island, had a big banner hanging in the auditorium, with an official school prayer on it. The school’s first class (1959) had been told to create it. The prayer would have been uncontroversial and unexciting (“Help us to be good sports and smile when we lose as well as when we win”) if it hadn’t been addressed to “Our Heavenly Father.” And if it hadn’t been on display. In a public school.

Someone finally made a serious stink about it in 2010, when a parent who didn’t wish to be named asked the ACLU to help. Hearings ensued. A student who read about it, Jessica Alhquist, decided to go to the hearings. When the school dug in its heels, and the ACLU needed a named plaintiff, Jessica (and her father, Mark Ahlquist) agreed to do it. Possibly not foreseeing how this would shake out.

Things got odd and very ugly. A lot of people decided Jessica was a person to hate.

People said horrible things about her. Florists refused to deliver flowers to her. State Representative Peter Palumbo called her “an evil little thing.” Hate mail. Death threats. Her fellow students did not form a phalanx of protection and support. They were vicious. She had to have police escorts between classes. Imagine what her Twitter and Facebook pages were like.

Atheists and freethinkers stood up for her, which added fuel to the fire.

But the prayer banner was blatantly illegal. A district court ruled against the school. The school decided not to appeal and took the banner down. They reimbursed the ACLU $150,000. Over $60,000 from the sale of “Evil Little Thing” T-shirts went to a college fund for Jessica. She was invited to speak at many events celebrating atheism and freethought. Most of the hate died down.

She recently spoke at a Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) convention in Los Angeles. The FFRF been supportive during the legal action – they were the first to try to send her flowers, only to be refused by vigilant florists (who say it wasn’t because of Jessica’s atheist views, it was because they were afraid they’d get hurt).

Her talk was thoughtful, and there’s an apology in there. Ahlquist didn’t want to continue preaching to an atheist choir. Although she did express appreciation for the fact that “the secular community found me. I had no idea that it existed, and I can’t be sure that I would ever have found it on my own.”

Ahlquist tackled the question of why secularist points of view are so often greeted with hostility, using her own experience as an example. She divides approaches into legal/historical, logical/scientific, and emotional/personal.

Before the lawsuit, when she went to the first school meeting about the prayer “I brought some index cards” with phrases like “church and state” and “First Amendment.”

“Being so naive, I actually believed that would be enough, that they would be like ‘Oh, well, obviously it’s illegal. We’ll just take it down, no problem.’” Nope.

That was a legal/historical approach, which didn’t sway minds in her community (though in the end the lawsuit was successful in changing the situation, if not people’s hearts).

Apparently the logical/scientific approach – arguments for atheism – was even less well-received.

What Ahlquist feels worked best was an emotional/personal approach. A CNN interviewer asked her why she didn’t believe in God. (Presumably not beginning, “You evil little thing…”)

“[I]nstead of taking the scientific route… I just explained that when I was about 10… my mother had become ill with a mental illness.” She began praying for her mother’s recovery. Then she felt guilty “because if I had a sick mother, you know, there are people in the world who don’t even have parents. Who am I to be asking for help when there are so many people… who need help more? One thing led to another and I ended up deciding… that I didn’t believe in God at all.” This was sympathetically received.

Other people became sympathetic to Ahlquist after hearing about the hateful attacks directed at her. Or witnessing the attacks. Or taking part in the attacks.

Ahlquist read aloud a message she got on Facebook, from a female classmate, right after she’d won the case:

Hey, I know I was part of the whole Twitter rampage against you, but I’d like to apologize for the hurtful things that I did say. I was kind of just going along with it for the sake of being a goofball and because my friends were doing it and encouraging me to do it as well. Still, that doesn’t give me an excuse to treat someone like that and say such ignorant and downright stupid, hurtful and disgusting things. I’m sure you get countless amounts of mail on here everyday, whether it be fan mail or hate mail, but looking back on the fool I made of myself, I wanted to give a sincere apology for the things myself and my friends said to you. I recently saw some news segments about your case, and I’ve come to believe that what you did was really the right thing, and I support it completely. As I looked on from afar, watching how adults. people’s parents, and even political figures ridiculed you, I realized how horrid it really was. I’m so very sorry. For a 16-year-old kid, only two years younger than me, I’m sure you’ve achieved more than I will achieve in a long time and I really respect that. Thank you for doing the right thing and not giving up, even when idiots like me tormented you. Keep up the awesome work.

That’s a really great apology. Ahlquist said, “It gives me goosebumps when I read it.”

Also a nice change from murder threats.

Ahlquist concludes “In a lot of ways, I feel the emotional or personal approach is one of the most effective, at least because we [atheists] probably already have won over all the people who are going to be won over by scientific debates.”

In Ahlquist’s view, freethinkers need to do better public relations. “We can start by recognizing our weaknesses and working really hard to fix them. We can smile more. We can go into it as 15-year-old girls who have no idea what to expect and just pretend that we are blissfully unaware that atheists are hated…. It’s much harder to be aggressive toward somebody who is very, very likable.

“We can really just focus on showing the world how lovable atheists are and how good we are without God. I sincerely believe that is the best direction our community and movement can be going in.”

I might be an evil little thing, because I have as much trouble with smiley lovable atheist outreach as I do with smiley lovable evangelical outreach. (And when I say “trouble,” I mean “urge to avoid.”) Ask Joan of Arc how well that likable thing worked for her.

And wasn’t Ahlquist just as lovable when she was getting death threats?

In other words, she makes an interesting argument, and I’d love to discuss it with her.

One more apology from the case: Rep. Palumbo later went on a morning TV show with Steve Ahlquist, Jessica’s uncle, to discuss the Woonsocket war monument case. (That story’s a mess.) Steve Ahlquist asked Palumbo to apologize for his remarks about Jessica. He did, eventually.

I’d like to apologize to that young lady. I was a little out of line when I said that she was an evil little thing.

No. He was a lot out of line. Maybe the voters agreed – he was voted out in 2014. But Jessica’s so likable she might accept his apology.