An atheist whose $100 donation to a Baptist charity in Oklahoma was declined has turned the gift into seed money for a GoFundMe campaign fund that now has drawn tens of thousands of dollars and is growing.
Matt Wilbourn of Fort Gibson, Okla., made a $100 donation Aug. 22 to the Murrow Indian Children’s Home, a residential facility for Native American children founded more than 100 years ago by a Baptist missionary from Georgia. The gift honored the Muskogee Atheist Community, an organization Wilbourn founded with his wife, Keli.
Officials at the children’s home posted a statement on Facebook saying that while they appreciate the couple’s generosity, listing a gift in the program of its annual pow wow “in honor of” an atheist organization would be contrary to Christian principles.
“To accept money for an advertisement which would indicate ‘in Honor of the Muskogee Atheist Community’ in the advertisement, would be contrary to those Biblical principles upon which we at Murrow stand,” the statement read in part. “We are Christians, believing in God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.”
The Wilbourns upped the amount to $250 and set a $1,000 goal for a GoFundMe account created Aug. 22. The account raised $24,224 from 1,084 people in two days and was labeled as trending as of Thursday morning, Aug. 25. Some donors left comments identifying themselves as Christians who disagreed with the home’s refusal to take the money.
J.S. Murrow
Missionary J.S. Murrow, who left his native Georgia in 1857 for Oklahoma Indian Territory to serve among the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole, opened a school for orphaned Indian children in Atoka, Okla., in 1867. Ownership transferred in 1888 to the American Baptist Home Mission Society, and the home was moved to the campus of Bacone College in Muskogee, Okla., in 1910.
Today Murrow Indian Children’s Home is the only residential facility in Oklahoma that provides a home solely for American Indian children and one of 16 Neighborhood Action Program Christian centers across the country supported by American Home Mission Societies, a division of American Baptist Churches USA.
With the GoFundMe balance growing and Murrow officials standing by their decision, Wilbourn posted an update Aug. 24 saying most of the money will be now given to Camp Quest Oklahoma, a residential summer camp offering the children of “freethinking parents” dedicated to “improving the human condition through rational inquiry, critical and creative thinking, scientific method, self-respect, ethics, competency, democracy, free speech, and the separation of religion and government.”
Wilbourn said the remaining $5,000 of the money will be donated to the Murrow Indian Children’s Home anonymously. If they connect the dots to him and still won’t accept it, he will donate it to a local church that will in turn donate it to the charity.
“We’ve had support from churches all over this nation today and I’m sure that one of them would be glad to donate the money to Murrow and I trust that they will,” he wrote. “Whether the Murrow Home likes it or not, they are getting $5,000 for those children from all of this. Keli and I would like to thank everyone for their donations and support. We will continue to let the GoFundMe account rise until it stops.”