In memoriam: FFRF columnist James Haught was skillful writer
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is saddened to inform our members that FFRF columnist James A. Haught, 91, died on July 23 after a recurrence of cancer.
“Jim was an adept writer — sending us fresh columns until the end — and a delight to work with,” noted FFRF Communications Director Amit Pal. He wrote more than 150 columns for FFRF, many of which ran in Freethought Today, and all of which are available on FreethoughtNow.org.
In April 2020, at age 88, Jim wrote about his impending death:
“I have no dread. Why worry about the inescapable, the utterly unavoidable, the sure destiny of today’s 7 billion? However, sometimes I feel annoyed because I will have no choice. I’m accustomed to choosing whatever course I want, but I won’t get to decide whether to take my final step. Damn!
“I have no supernatural beliefs. I don’t expect to wake up in paradise or Hades, surrounded by angels or demons. That’s fairy-tale stuff. I think my personality, my identity — me — is created by my brain, and when the brain dies, so does the psyche. Gone forever into oblivion.
“My journey on the road has been proceeding for eight decades. Actuarial tables make my future so obvious that I can’t shut my eyes to it. Life proceeds through stages, and I’m in the last scene of the last act.
“While my clock ticks away, I’ll pursue every minute. Carpe diem. Make hay while the sun shines. And then I’m ready for nature’s blackout, with no regrets.”
Jim was a lifelong reporter/editor/columnist, who spent most of his career working for the Charleston Gazette in a number of capacities. Haught’s post-newspaper writing career included serving as a senior editor of Free Inquiry magazine and writer-in-residence for the United Coalition of Reason, along with his prolific freelancing for FFRF.
He was born in Reader, W.Va., and moved to Charleston in 1949 after graduating from high school, working first as a deliveryman for a typewriter company that did business with the two newspapers then operating in Charleston.
Two years later, Haught began working as a typesetter in the Charleston Daily Mail’s print shop. In 1953, he volunteered to work in the Daily Mail newsroom on his days off, without pay, to try the writing end of the newspaper business. Within a few months, the Charleston Gazette offered him a job as a reporter, which Haught accepted, despite a $2 per week cut in pay from his typesetting job.
He worked at the Gazette and Gazette-Mail for the rest of his newspaper career, except for a seven-month hiatus in 1959 when he took a job as a press aide for Sen. Robert Byrd.
During his time at the Gazette, Haught worked as a police beat reporter, features writer, religion columnist and investigative reporter before being elevated to associate editor in 1983 and editor in chief in 1992. Following the Gazette’s merger with the Daily Mail in 2015, Haught served as editor emeritus of the Charleston Gazette-Mail. He continued to contribute to the newspaper’s editorial pages into his late 80s.
Haught earned more than 20 national awards for his reporting, editorials and columns. He also was the author of 12 books and more than 100 magazine articles on such topics as religion, religious doubt, science and West Virginia’s history, politics and colorful — sometimes criminal — personalities.
In a February column, he wrote of his hope for humanity: “Here’s a reason I feel inner peace about my approaching end: Our secular humanist cause has won hundreds of victories during my nine decades, and I have a wishful faith that it will continue to win after I’m gone.
“Now in this 21st century, supernatural Christianity is collapsing rapidly in Western democracies. Intelligent people no longer swallow it. I have hopeful confidence that the struggle to help humanity and wipe out fairy tales will keep on winning, without me.”
Haught and his first wife, Nancy, who died in 2008, had four children and 11 grandchildren. In 2013, he married retired teacher Nancy Lince, who died in 2021.
