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How hard is it to find a conservative Christian pastor who isn’t problematic?

Recently, at a campaign event, North Carolina Republican Senate candidate Michael Whatley had Pastor Daimon L. King deliver the opening prayer. The prayer itself was predictably hypocritical, with King calling for “integrity and honesty” in a room full of voters who don’t care about either one.

But that’s not why the event made news. After the event, the Associated Press’ Brian Slodysko pointed out that King was a registered child sex offender who’s gone to prison two separate times for his crimes.

While there’s no video of the campaign event, Whatley posted a video from the event in which King could be seen giving a double thumbs-up behind Whatley and Dr. Mehmet Oz.

So what did King do that everyone organizing the event decided to ignore?

Some 30 years ago, King was a marching band assistant at a high school outside Raleigh when he was charged with statutory rape and indecent liberties with a 15-year-old student, The News & Observer reported at the time. King, then 31, was convicted in 1998 and served nearly five years in prison before being paroled, according to state department of corrections records.

In 2010, he pleaded guilty to having sex with an underage female relative and served close to three years in prison, state records show.

King is required under North Carolina law to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

Nothing like a sex predator to tell Republicans about honor and integrity…

It’s not like any of this was a secret, though! This is information organizers could have discovered via an online search, but all of that was ignored, perhaps because King leads New Beginnings Celebration church, served as precinct chairman in the Craven County Republican Party (which put together this event), and is a Black MAGA shill. They thought the optics would work to their benefit. Now it’s backfired for an obvious reason: A guy who constantly talks about Jesus turned out to be someone you can’t leave your children with.

King’s church posted about the event the next day, saying the “atmosphere was charged with prayer and patriotism” and that “We fully support and are behind our US candidates, [House candidate] Col. [Laurie] Buckhout and Mr. Whatley.”

With supporters like that…

Whatley’s campaign denies having anything to do with selecting King to speak at the event, blaming everything on the Craven County organizers. But it doesn’t help that Whatley is already trying to distance himself from a different incident in which he was tied to a sex predator. When he served as head of the North Carolina GOP, one of his key leaders was Harvey L. West Jr., a congressional district committee chair, who had previously pleaded guilty to “five counts of indecent liberties with a child and served six years in prison.” He continued to be involved with the state’s Republican Party until they finally passed a rule banning convicted sex offenders from their leadership roles. Which is a rule they somehow needed to pass.

Ironically, West of all people says he raised red flags about the party having any kind of working relationship with King:

West also said he was familiar with King’s convictions and warned others in the party about associating with the pastor when he was considered for a GOP position. “I just said, ‘Hey, y’all might want to take a look at this,’” said West.

So a convicted sex offender warned Republicans against working with another convicted sex offender in order to help out the guy who downplayed his connections to the first convicted sex offender. All to help out the party that’s covered up the Epstein files.

All of this is another self-inflicted disaster for Whatley, who’s running to keep a Senate seat in Republican control. Democrat Roy Cooper, the state’s former governor, has a sizable polling lead over Whatley in what’s supposed to be a very close race.

It also raises a question of why voters should trust a party that cares this little about the safety of children. It seems that if you have a R(ev) before your name or an R after it, everything else can slide.

These are the people whom the overwhelming majority of white evangelicals Christians support.

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This past March, Kansas State Rep. Carolyn Caiharr, a first-term Republican who also serves as a local mayor, visited Edwardsville Elementary in Wyandotte County as a guest judge for their “Read Across America” door decoration contest.

It’s not often that you get to see a politician face-to-face, and Barbara Williams, a paraprofessional staffer who worked in the building, was eager to see her because they’re on opposite sides of the political aisle.

As Caiharr (pronounced KAY-har) walked down the hallway to look at the doors, Williams came up to her and said “Trans rights are human rights” and that “diverting taxpayer [money] to private schools is not right.”

During a conversation we had last night, Williams told me that she did this before the official school day started and before she was contractually obligated to clock in. Caiharr, she added, never acknowledged what she said. No response. No nod. So as they walked down the hallway (in the direction of Williams’ office), she said it again: “Trans rights are human rights.” She said it once more, too. There was never any response from the state representative.

Those seem like fairly innocuous statements.

But according to a lawsuit that Williams filed against the Bonner Springs-Edwardsville Unified School District last month—by herself because she doesn’t have a lawyer—she was fired later that day.

The Kansas City Star reports that Superintendent Richard Moulin “drafted up paperwork announcing that the district was putting Williams on administrative leave and would recommend that the board vote to fire her.”

The paperwork he formally filed (which I have now seen) said this about the incident:

On March 6, during a visit to the school building by a community guest who was present to judge the Read Across America door contest, you accessed the building as an employee and followed the guest down the hallway while expressing your personal opinions and disrupting the activity. The building principal addressed the situation and instructed you multiple times that it was not the appropriate time or place for such comments and directed you to return to your classroom. Despite these directives, you continued to follow the principal and the guest down the hallway and persisted in disrupting the activity. As an employee who was not involved in the activity, your actions were unprofessional and disruptive, particularly in the presence of a community guest.

…

Your decision to disregard direct instructions from your principal and continue the behavior in front of a district guest undermined the professional standards expected of all employees. Due to the seriousness of this conduct and its impact on the integrity and reputation of the district, you are being placed on administrative leave without pay effective immediately, pending a recommendation to the Board of Education for termination of your employment.

Not all heroes wear capes. What Williams did is what we call “good trouble.”

A few days after that paperwork was sent to her, Williams responded to Moulin by noting how he “mentioned the timing was wrong” but not “when the correct timing” would have been. Furthermore, she added, “I didn’t shout nor was I disruptive.”

She also says in her filing that “I was on school property but not on the clock. I was exercising my freedom of speech at a local [government] institution, which is legal.”

Williams is now asking for $50,000 in lost wages and punitive damages, in part so that “the defendants won’t do this again, especially when they allow folks who come into the school who do not have public schools as a priority in their session in the state legislature.”

She’s not wrong about Caiharr’s priorities.

In fact, it’s deeply ironic Caiharr was judging a celebration of reading when just a few years ago, she made headlines after calling for the punishment of school and library officials for giving kids books that contained “obscene” material. (While other cities had ordinances granting immunity to those professionals, the city of Edwardsville said librarians could be charged with a crime for alleged obscenity.) Obviously, we’re not talking about adults giving kids books with X-rated material. Conservatives have long argued that books with LGBTQ characters or even young adult novels that merely talk about sex are inappropriate for kids. Caiharr wanted to weaponize that irrational bigotry and take it out on librarians.

It hasn’t gotten any better since Caiharr got appointed to office. Earlier this year, she supported a bill to expand tax credits for private schools, though Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, vetoed it.

What about trans rights? Caiharr voted for a bill this year that would punish transgender people for using the “wrong” bathroom in public spaces and having driver’s licenses with the “wrong” gender identity. Gov. Kelly vetoed that one, too, but there were enough Republican votes to override it, and it has created chaos for trans residents.

So that’s why Williams made her comments about private schools and trans rights. It was an opportunity to tell an elected official how disgusted she was by that member’s votes. She told me she had no regrets about what she did and that she’d do it again.

The district has not yet responded to the lawsuit. Oddly enough, the Kansas City Star’s Sofi Zeman reported that the district “had only recently found out about the lawsuit.” But the lawsuit was filed over a month ago and there’s simply no way anyone involved is only now realizing it.

Will it be successful? That’s a harder question to answer. Besides the fact that Williams is fighting this battle on her own, one website noted that the lawsuit may hinge on whether the district can prove Williams’ actions were truly “disruptive.” They’ll have plenty of legal firepower to make that case even if Williams’ description of what she did is true.

Maybe the best thing happening right now is that this story is getting out there. The district invited an opponent of public schools as well as the freedom to read any book to judge a “Read Across America” contest without realizing the hypocrisy. That was bad enough. And when a staffer called her out on it—in the mildest way possible—they appear to have overreacted by getting rid of the staffer. It makes no sense.

We don’t need to wait for a judge’s decision to know that we’re all better off if more people speak out against bad politicians. Williams knew it was a risky move, but silence wasn’t an option for her.

Meanwhile, silence appears to be the only option for Caiharr. She issued a statement to the Star that basically amounted to I have nothing to do with this so ask the district about it. But for all the right-wing talk about free speech and cancel culture, it’s telling that she can’t even bring herself to say Williams had every right to speak her mind, that politicians aren’t afraid of hearing from members of the community, and that she doesn’t support the district’s overreaction.

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A Denver church has been sued for allegedly failing to prevent a 13-year-old girl from getting sexually assaulted by the school’s music director—and then failing to take the matter seriously enough after that abuse came to light.

The troubling situation arose at St. John's Lutheran Church and School in 2022 when the victim’s family says she was assaulted by the school's interim music director Diego Marroquin. According to the lawsuit, the school never even ran a proper background check on the 34-year-old, because if they did, they would have known that he didn’t have legal authorization to work in the country. And yet he was allowed to work with children unsupervised.

It gets worse.

The girl became pregnant after the incident, secretly acquiring abortion pills to prevent further consequences. She told two of her friends what happened the following day. And Marroquin apparently stayed in touch with her over the summer, leaving voicemails that allude to their “relationship.” Those messages are referenced in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit also says the Plaintiff wasn’t the only student who was subject to his disturbing actions:

The lawsuit alleges Marroquin engaged in inappropriate behavior with two other students, including showing underage girls sexually explicit photographs and videos, including videos of himself having sex.

One student, according to the lawsuit, was allegedly shown sexual text messages, photographs of women, naked images and videos of Marroquin having sex with a former girlfriend. The lawsuit also alleges he showed the student a photograph of a naked girl he said was 15.

Another student allegedly was taken to a restaurant after band practice and shown pornographic videos, including a video of Marroquin having sex. The lawsuit alleges Marroquin also showed the student text messages with a 14-year-old girl that included topless photographs.

Those girls didn’t come forward with their stories, though. They said Marroquin was well-liked among the students and “no one believed [the 13-year-old girl] when she reported her rape.” Therefore, they didn’t think anyone would believe their stories either.

In the case of the assault victim, when her parents discovered what had happened a few months later, they went directly to school officials. Jessica and Aaron Vandam had a meeting in which those officials said their daughter was lying, that this was all gossip, that she needed to ask for forgiveness, and that she should recant her allegations. The girl acquiesced under that pressure, and the church’s pastor, Andrew Farhat, didn’t follow-up, the lawsuit says, with any meaningful investigation.

Farhat also urged the Vandams not to take this matter to local law enforcement:

“Nothing bad happened,” Farhat said in one of the messages. “I knew it was a lie so I wanted to squash it right away so that no one would think that the police need to be involved. Now we’re protecting victims of slander, don’t want that at our school.”

The proverbial last straw, however, was the fact that Marroquin kept working at the school even after these allegations came to light. At that point, the Vandams knew school officials weren’t going to do the right thing on their own, so they went to police.

An arrest warrant was soon issued against Marroquin, who had fled Colorado. He was eventually found and arrested in Texas—after the Vandams, who had been tracking him on social media, saw him playing guitar during a livestream at his brother’s church. It soon led to a criminal charge of “sexual assault on a child under the age of 15 by a person in a position of trust.”

Unfortunately, the criminal charge didn’t stick. In 2025, Marroquin struck a plea deal that led to prosecutors dropping the sexual assault charge in return for Marroquin pleading guilty to a lesser felony charge. He was sentenced to “four years of sex-offender intensive supervised probation.” After that, he was deported to Guatemala, where he’s a citizen.

But even if the case against him is effectively over, it doesn’t absolve the people who allowed him to be near children and who subsequently tried to squash the case against him.

The lawsuit, which I have not seen but which has been reported on extensively by Brian Maass of CBS Colorado, includes damning details about what school officials allegedly knew:

The complaint says church officials knew Marroquin was communicating inappropriately with underage girls.

It alleges church pastor Andrew Farhat specifically warned Marroquin not to text minors but failed to monitor whether he followed that instruction.

There are also details suggesting church leaders knew this could be a potential problem for them—to the point where they literally transferred property so that, if they got sued, church assets couldn’t be seized. After all, it turns out, they didn’t have sexual-assault liability insurance, so anyone suing them could go after everything they had.

According to the lawsuit, April 2025 minutes said placing the property in a separate LLC was worth considering because of the church’s fiduciary obligation to protect itself and because “it’s a deterrent to lawsuits.”

In May 2025, the board allegedly decided to move forward.

…

The lawsuit says the properties had a combined appraised value of approximately $29.3 million and were transferred for $10.

The plaintiffs allege the transfer was designed to protect church assets from potential litigation.

The lawsuit says this transfer was fraudulent. It was, they say, just an attempt to stop or delay the Vandams from suing the church.

On Saturday, the church sent a letter to member families saying the allegations in the lawsuit were untrue, specifically the parts where Farhat said the victim was lying or didn’t take the alleged abuse seriously. They said staffers followed all mandatory reporting laws and took immediate action when they learned what may have happened. But they didn’t go into more detail than that, and they didn’t even bother addressing the property transfer.

According to the Denver Post, the family is trying to move on despite everything they’ve been through. (The family’s name is spelled two different ways in the two major news articles about this issue.)

The Van Dams’ daughter, who is now 17, hasn’t been able to attend school in person since the attack, and she struggles to trust friends and adults. The family moved out of Colorado and finds it difficult to attend church and maintain their faith.

If these allegations turn out to be true, think about what that means. Church officials didn’t just fail this girl. They put all their students in danger by allowing an alleged predator to continue working with kids. It’s never a good sign when a pastor’s first instinct is to shut down allegations instead of assuming the worst and proceeding accordingly. It’s clear what their priorities really are.

The alleged property transfer makes that moral failing look even worse. Church leaders did everything in their power to move nearly $30 million in assets—but they didn’t even go to local law enforcement with the assault claims. They treated a teenage girl as a bigger threat to the church’s well-being than the alleged predator they hired.

Thank goodness the parents knew better than to trust church leaders. They knew they couldn’t rely on Farhat to take this matter seriously, so they went to the police. When Marroquin fled, they knew school officials weren’t spending any time tracking him, so they did it themselves. And now, through this lawsuit, they’re demanding accountability because the church has proven incapable of policing itself. What does that tell you about their supposed moral high ground?

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There’s a longstanding belief that openly non-religious candidates are unelectable in the United States. After all, only 60% of Americans say they would vote for a “generally well-qualified” atheist even if that person was from their own party, and there’s only one openly Humanist member of Congress (Rep. Jared Huffman).

But a new crop of openly non-religious candidates, both challengers and incumbents, are challenging that stigma this November.

With the help of the Center for Freethought Equality PAC (the political action arm of the American Humanist Association), I’ve compiled a list of all the openly non-religious candidates running for office at the state and federal level.

This year, there are more “Nones” on the ballot than ever before: Nearly 200 candidates. They use a variety of labels to describe themselves, but they are all people who don’t subscribe to organized religion.

You can check out the full list here:

Because primary season is not yet over in a few states, the list will be updated in the coming weeks leading to November’s elections. But a few things stand out right now:

• There are no non-theistic Republicans currently on the list. The few who had appeared on it in the past are no longer in office, including one who resigned last year.

• There are a record 12 “Nones” running for Congress, including one (Chris Rabb of Pennsylvania) who has no Republican opponent and one (Kristi Burke of Tennessee) who was an outspoken atheist on YouTube before running for office.

• There are over 70 “Nones” running for re-election to the State House or State Senate. (Who knew there were that many openly non-religious lawmakers serving in office right now?!)

While many of the people on the list will not win their races, given that they are in ruby-red districts where they face a steep uphill climb, they have greater freedom to be themselves and not “play it safe” politically. By coming out as non-religious, while never making it the centerpiece of their campaigns, they’re making it much easier for others to follow suit in the future.

This list is bound to change as the election approaches—sometimes because readers inform me about candidates in their districts who are non-religious and sometimes because those candidates out themselves wanting to be included in this particular community! (If that’s you, get in touch!)

Whatever the case, if you notice any errors or omissions in the list, please let me know and I’ll fix it.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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When you spend as much time as I do tracking the intersection of politics and religion, it’s hard not to notice an obvious reality: Many of the problems we currently face stem from the scourge of right-wing Christianity. It’s not that all white evangelicals think alike; it’s that our government is controlled by a hell of a lot of white evangelicals who do think alike and they’re supported by an army of white evangelical voters who won’t waver no matter how bad things get.

We know there are religious zealots in the White House, the Cabinet, and Congress who make political decisions based on what conservative Christians want instead of what’s good for the country, or what experts say, or what the facts show. White evangelical voters have been led to believe it’s a moral imperative to vote for Republicans no matter how corrupt or blatantly evil they are, even if it goes against their own interests. And many of the most powerful conservative Christian leaders in the country refuse to speak out against any of this. Whether it’s due to ideological conviction, partisan loyalty, cowardice, or simple careerism, supporting Republicans remains good for business—and the people harmed by that alliance remain an afterthought.

So when someone like Bonnie Kristian, the deputy editor of Christianity Today, is out promoting her new book In Defense of Evangelicalism (affiliate link), you might think it’s a perfect opportunity for someone with her credibility in that world to point out how conservative Christians have done untold damage to the country… while still making some kind of argument for why believers shouldn’t abandon the faith. (I’m not saying that would be a good argument, only that it would be an argument.)

That’s not what she does. Instead, she argues we are unfairly criticizing white evangelicals as a whole for the actions of some.

And she opens a recent essay with the most inflammatory example she can find.

The target in this case is an episode of the “I’ve Had It” podcast. Earlier this year, progressive podcaster Jennifer Welch and her co-host were discussing the brutal treatment of children at the hands of ICE. Welch pointed out that this was happening in part because Republicans in power didn’t have the “courage to confront the cult nature of evangelical Christianity.” She went on to talk about how Erika Kirk (the widow of Charlie) was speaking at an event called “Make Heaven Crowded”—suggesting that conservatives like her and the attendees there were going to be rewarded in the afterlife for the cruelty they’re inflicting right now. The leaders of that movement were all about getting rich while “hoodwinking their flock into thinking they're super moral.”

And then she said this:

This is a cancer. White evangelical Christianity is a cancer. These are the worst of our country. These are the worst people in our country because they use their religion in two ways: as a weapon and as a shield.

They weaponize it whenever they want to and say, “We’re on the moral high ground. You’re a lesbian—you deserve to die. You’re a lesbian—the cops shouldn’t have revived you. Oh, your parents are Mexicans and they brought you over here? Yeah, you should go to jail and eat worm food.”

And then when you call them out on it, “Oh my god, they’re after the Christians. How dare they?! How dare they? We’re so oppressed. White Christians are so oppressed in this country!”

And they want it both ways, because in the religion, that duplicity is taught. You can be morally duplicitous. You thrive in cognitive dissonance. And so this is just a massive, massive problem.

And it should come as no surprise to anyone that, of this cult that I’m talking about—white evangelicals—I think over 80% went and voted [triple-Trump].

Kristian had made the same case against Welch earlier this year in The Free Press, citing several other clips in which Welch called evangelicals racist, judgmental, and abusive.

To be fair, Welch’s words are sweeping. Saying white evangelicals are “the worst people in our country” sure sounds like a condemnation of “every individual evangelical,” including those who oppose Trump and reject the cruelty committed in the name of their faith. Kristian has every right to object to that.

But Welch’s larger argument is about white evangelical Christianity as a political and cultural force—and on that point, Kristian offers almost no rebuttal. She focuses on whether individual evangelicals are capable of kindness (of course they are!) while largely avoiding how the movement has empowered the worst kinds of people who do the worst kinds of things. No doubt evangelicals bring casseroles to sick neighbors. But private kindness doesn’t erase the fact that the vast majority of white evangelical voters have repeatedly supported politicians who bully vulnerable people—and that many of those voters portray themselves as victims when anyone holds them responsible for the consequences.

That “cancer” clip went viral in certain right-wing corners of social media. Christian Nationalist musician Sean Feucht posted it, only quoting this part: “White Evangelical Christianity is a cancer… These are the worst people in our country.”

And that’s the quotation Bonnie Kristian now uses as evidence of growing contempt toward evangelicals. In an essay for the Washington Post (naturally), Kristian objects to this language in a piece with the headline: “I’m an evangelical. My faith isn’t ‘a cancer.’”

I’m an evangelical woman and a frequent critic of President Donald Trump. I don’t believe evangelicals are above reproach. But legitimate criticism of their political choices has shaded into something darker: contempt for an entire group of Americans.

Kristian is careful to say in the piece that evangelicals are not being persecuted. But she still steers the conversation away from those suffering under white evangelical political power and toward the hurt feelings of the very people who helped create that suffering.

To that end, she lists several examples of Christianity’s critics in an effort to show how these criticisms have “unleashed an outpouring of anti-evangelical sentiment.” She points to books that portray evangelicals as “dangers to democracy” and dismisses those characterizations as “sweeping” and “inaccurate.”

For example, she insists white evangelicals are treated as hypocrites for opposing candidates like James Talarico in Texas but notes how that outrage is muted if, say, “a pro-choice Episcopalian won’t vote for a pro-life Republican who’s also a Christian.”

But there’s a reason for that: They are hypocrites.

Kristian is right that no one owes a candidate a vote merely because that candidate shares her faith. The hypocrisy isn’t that white evangelicals refuse to vote for Talarico. It’s that many of the same people who spent decades demanding public displays of Christian faith from politicians now declare Talarico’s Christianity to be fake because it leads him toward compassion instead of conservative policies.

The same people tolerate Donald Trump’s corruption, look the other way when it comes to Ken Paxton’s scandals, and aren’t troubled enough by endless Republican cruelty, but they somehow rediscovered the theological high ground the moment a devout Christian Democrat appeared on the scene.

Kristian herself has called Talarico’s Christianity “undeniably heterodox, if not outright heretical.” Other conservative voices have labeled him a “fake Christian,” distorted his comments about God and falsely claimed he is gay and vegan. Talarico’s Christianity isn’t being questioned because he lacks faith; it’s because his faith leads him to conclusions conservative evangelicals reject.

That is the hypocrisy Kristian’s Episcopalian analogy misses. The objection isn’t that evangelicals must vote for every fellow Christian. It’s that many of them tolerate nearly non-stop personal corruption from Republicans but impose impossibly high religious standards on Democrats whose faith inspires them to help marginalized people.

That’s not all Kristian gets wrong.

At one point, she offers statistics meant to show how practicing evangelicals behave better than people who have left evangelical churches.

But the broad-brushed dismissal of evangelicals by figures such as [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom and Welch overlooks the reality of evangelicalism in churches across America. Research shows that practicing evangelicals are markedly more likely than those who leave the church to “avoid discrimination based on race,” to provide “financially and/or practically for the poor and oppressed” and to avoid lying, stealing and greed. Evangelicals donate twelve times as much to disaster relief and missions as they spend on politics.

The first problem is Kristian’s category switch: Jennifer Welch and many of the political critics Kristian cites are specifically talking about white evangelicals, while Kristian responds with favorable data about evangelicals as a whole.

The second problem is that her evidence doesn’t establish what she claims it does.

Consider the research she points to. It doesn’t measure whether practicing evangelicals actually avoid racial discrimination or help oppressed people. The link she provides—to a book written by two conservative Christians—asks which standards respondents say they “seek to follow in good faith.” In other words, the authors are measuring aspiration, not conduct. Kristian quietly converts “I want to be this kind of person” into “research shows I behave this way.”

We shouldn’t be surprised that people who go to church want to be better people. But that doesn’t mean they consistently live out those stated values—and their collective voting habits give us plenty of reason to doubt their self-reported intentions.

So she’s misinterpreting what that survey says. Not a good sign.

By the way, in a book written by PRRI president Robert P. Jones, who does plenty of polling himself, he came to a very different conclusion with regards to evangelicals and race. And he brought receipts.

For example, surveys conducted by PRRI in 2018 found that white Christians — including evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics — are nearly twice as likely as religiously unaffiliated whites to say the killings of Black men by police are isolated incidents rather than part of a pattern of how police treat African Americans.

And white Christians are about 30 percentage points more likely to say monuments to Confederate soldiers are symbols of Southern pride rather than symbols of racism. White Christians are also about 20 percentage points more likely to disagree with this statement: “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for Blacks to work their way out of the lower class.” And these trends generally persist even in the wake of the recent protests for racial justice.

These findings don’t directly contradict the first survey. That first survey measured the standards evangelicals say they aspire to follow; Jones examined their positions on concrete racial issues. And as soon as the questions moved from abstract opposition to racism to things like policing, Confederate monuments, and the lasting effects of slavery, the flattering portrait of evangelical Christianity fell apart.

There’s a saying on the left: Judge them by what they do, not what they say. Similarly, we shouldn’t judge a political movement by the values its members claim to hold. We should judge them by the attitudes, leaders, and policies they repeatedly support.

What about Kristian’s claim that evangelicals spend “twelve times as much” on disaster relief and missions as they spend on politics? Her citation leads to a Ross Douthat book, which in turn relies on a claim published in 1998. Even if the figure was accurate then, it’s nearly three decades old. And spending on “foreign missions” cannot automatically be equated with humanitarian charity, since that category may include evangelism and institutional support like churches.

Kristian also cites a more recent American Bible Society study, conducted with the National Opinion Research Center, which found that evangelicals led the religious groups surveyed in charitable participation and average giving, including donations to nonreligious organizations. Fine. I won’t dispute that. Generosity is good.

But it isn’t a rebuttal to the political indictment. People can donate generously to disaster relief while empowering politicians who deny health care, civil rights, and basic dignity to vulnerable people.

Private charity doesn’t cancel out public harm.

Elsewhere in her piece, Kristian cites a steep decline in how Democrats view Christian fundamentalists. In 2008, according to one study, 52.8% of Democrats “had a positive view of Christian fundamentalists.” By 2024, that number had dropped to 32.2%.

But declining approval isn’t proof of irrational bigotry, especially when that decline coincides with white evangelicals’ overwhelming support for Trump, and an aggressive campaign to weaponize the government against LGBTQ people, immigrants, religious minorities, people who need abortions, and public schools.

When you do unpopular things, don’t be surprised when your popularity fades.

Kristian concludes by asking critics to distinguish legitimate condemnation from broad contempt:

Like other religious bigotries, animus toward evangelicals harms the civic friendship on which democracy depends. Like their Muslim, Jewish and secular neighbors, evangelicals don’t deserve broad-brush dismissals. They’re people with whom you may have grave disagreements, but they’re also people capable of extending grace — and receiving it in turn. Evangelicals are people you can have a country with, people not deserving of scorn.

She’s absolutely right to say no one deserves broad-brush dismissals, but come on. Powerful white evangelical leaders and institutions have repeatedly treated Muslims and atheists—not just individuals but entire communities—with contempt. Hell, as I recently wrote, conservative Christian activists in Texas are attempting to drive Muslims out of public life. (The New York Times’ headline about that? “Islamophobia’s Rise in Texas: ‘I Won’t Rest Until Every Muslim Is Gone’.”) One Republican is promising to rewrite a law to make it easier to restrict the civil rights of Muslims.

We can’t have “civic friendship” with people who don’t think Muslims, LGBTQ people, immigrants, atheists, and women should have the same rights they do.

Who’s to blame for that? It’s not Christianity as a whole or every individual evangelical. It’s the white evangelical political bloc—the constituency that has supplied votes, money, theological cover, and institutional support for authoritarianism and Christian nationalism.

So if “cancer” is too inflammatory, choose another word. Call it a decades-long moral failure. Whatever the label, the movement has spread through our government, made life worse for vulnerable Americans, and prioritized loyalty to the Republican Party over every principle its members claim to hold sacred.

Objecting to the “cancer” metaphor does nothing to treat the underlying disease.

In a different interview, Kristian complained that attention-seeking blowhards like Pastor Greg Locke are constantly presented as representative of white evangelical pastors. It’s true that Locke doesn’t represent every pastor. But that raises a more important question: Who does represent white evangelical power?

Franklin Graham has influence. Pete Hegseth has power. Paula White-Cain advises Trump. Mike Johnson is Speaker of the House. Kristian can’t dismiss every destructive leader as an unrepresentative anomaly while defining evangelicalism by the kindest and least powerful people in the pews. A movement should have to answer for the people it elevates, follows, funds, and repeatedly places in power.

Remember: MAGA allegiance remains perfectly acceptable in most white evangelical spaces. It rarely costs anyone their church membership, leadership positions, Christian media platforms, or the respect of their fellow Christians. That tolerance is a choice. If authoritarian cruelty isn’t a deal-breaker, what the hell is?

Kristian is right to say individual white evangelicals shouldn’t be reduced to a stereotype. There are white evangelicals who oppose Trump, defend LGBTQ people, welcome refugees, protect church-state separation, and reject their faith being used as a political weapon. They deserve to be recognized. We can work with them.

But that minority can’t absolve the larger movement.

For three consecutive presidential elections, roughly 80% of white evangelical voters have backed Donald Trump. Their churches, institutions, media outlets, and celebrities have turned the GOP into a vehicle for Christian Nationalism. As a result, Americans are losing their rights, health care, safety, education, and freedom.

Kristian may want critics like me to see evangelicals as kind neighbors who stop by when you’re sick rather than as caricatures like Locke. Fine. But white evangelical leaders should also be willing to see the immigrant taken from her family, the transgender child terrorized by right-wing lawmakers, the Muslim treated as an enemy by evangelists, the pregnant woman denied medical care, and the students forced to go to class under the shadow of a Ten Commandments poster. Those people aren’t caricatures either.

Kristian has publicly said Trump is a terrible president and shouldn’t hold the office. That matters, and it separates her from many of the evangelical figures I’m criticizing here. But her essay spends far more energy policing Jennifer Welch’s language than confronting why roughly 80% of white evangelical voters supported Trump in three consecutive elections. Personal opposition to Trump doesn’t answer the institutional question her defense of evangelicalism keeps avoiding.

She does try to explain the 80% number, though. Kristian says that normie white evangelicals felt obligated to vote, limited themselves to viable major-party candidates, and prioritized abortion. See? They didn’t necessarily love Trump! They voted for the Republican candidate for other reasons! That may explain their votes, but it doesn’t exonerate them of the consequences.

White evangelicals are not unfairly criticized because we’ve failed to notice their private kindness. We’re looking at their public cruelty—or at least their tacit support of it. They’re facing a credibility crisis because their collective political behavior has unleashed harm that will last for decades.

Until influential evangelicals demand meaningful change from their own institutions, leaders, and voters, complaining about the tone of their critics isn’t a defense of evangelicalism. It’s just another way to avoid accountability.

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The Supreme Court will soon decide if Colorado lawmakers violated the rights of Catholics when the state’s universal preschool bill included a Don’t Be Bigots clause. As the justices consider the case, a number of atheist and church/state separation-focused groups are asking them to think about the harm they’d cause by reversing an earlier decision in favor of the state.

Here’s how this became an issue in the first place: In April of 2022, Democrats in Colorado (with very little GOP support) passed a law establishing free pre-school across the state beginning in 2023. Children can now access half-day programs at no cost to their parents. The governor’s office now says it saves families over $6,300 a year and gives kids a head start in their education. It’s just an incredible opportunity for people who might not have been able to afford such programs.

Since the $322 million program launched in August of 2023, it has helped 40,000 four-year-olds attend 1,900 participating schools. Importantly, even faith-based schools are eligible to participate in the program provided they follow some basic rules. (More on that in a moment.) According to a press release from this past July, “at least 79 faith-based providers [have] participated, serving at least 2,052 students and receiving more than $9.5 million in payments.”

In order to receive funding, schools aren’t allowed to discriminate against students. They have to accept kids regardless of their (or their family’s) race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc.

It’s that restriction led the Denver Catholic Archdiocese and two of its parishes—the St. Mary Catholic Parish in Littleton and the St. Bernadette Catholic Parish in Lakewood—to sue state officials in 2023. They wanted to receive taxpayer funding without giving up their bigotry.

Their argument was that Catholicism required them to reject students who have gay parents and staffers who are in same-sex relationships. They said they couldn’t recognize the existence of transgender people or even use their pronouns if they conflicted with whatever was written on a birth certificate. They wanted to ban students from wearing the “opposite sex’s uniform” or using what they deemed were the wrong bathrooms. They also wanted to prioritize the acceptance of kids from Catholic families over, say, Jewish ones, even though the law already permitted them to accept kids from their own parishes.

(It’s important to stress that we’re talking about pre-school kids. The idea that there would be conflicts about pronouns or uniforms is almost laughable.)

But it didn’t take a genius to understand the real goal here: This was always about Catholics retaining their ability to discriminate against LGBTQ people.

The lawsuit said enrolling children with gay parents into an Archdiocesan school “is likely to lead to intractable conflicts” because a “Catholic school cannot treat a same-sex couple as a family equivalent to the natural family without compromising its mission and Catholic identity.”

There was a simple solution to that, of course: Just don’t accept the state’s money.

No one was forcing the Catholic Church to participate in the program. If families wanted to send their kids to Bigot Factories, they had every right to do so, and no one was stopping them. The Archdiocese could just do everything it was doing before this law went into effect.

The Catholic Church knew this. Which is why they were also arguing that the new universal Pre-K program was bad for business. Because if pre-school was free elsewhere, why would anyone give them money? And if enrollment went down, they would have to charge their own members even more. Why didn’t state officials care about the Church’s bottom line, dammit?!

This is seriously what they wrote in their lawsuit:

By creating a program that provides “universal” funding for preschool programs, Colorado has cornered the market for preschool services.

Any providers who do not participate in the UPK program will be severely disadvantaged since they will be forced to charge significantly higher prices than the participating programs—both secular and religious—which aren’t religiously barred from participating in the UPK program.

A press release from the conservative legal group Becket added:

This ban forces parents to choose between paying out of pocket for the cost of faith-based preschool or receiving a free preschool education at any other private school in Colorado. It also hurts the ability of schools like St. Mary’s and St. Bernadette’s to compete with other preschools that can offer free preschool education.

In the marketplace of ideas, the Catholics were admitting they were losers—and that the neutral rules were so unfair to them, it was literally illegal. Therefore, the rules needed to change, not their beliefs. (Never their beliefs.)

That’s the epitome of broken brain religion for you: A program that would lift up families that can’t afford early childhood education, and which could help students get a leg up on their formal schooling, was a problem for these Catholics because they prioritized their own bigotry and ignorance over the needs of children.

It’s not that the Archdiocese wanted to end the program. They just wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted to be able to discriminate against LGBTQ staffers and kids and families while still being eligible for government funding.

It was also revealing that there was nothing in the Archdiocese’s lawsuit about their right to reject divorced parents or anyone who’s had an abortion. Because even though those things also violate Catholic doctrine, the Church has never really had a problem looking the other way on those “sins.” (They have their own made-up sin hierarchy.)

In any case, the lawsuit began its journey through the federal court system. (You can read more details here.) After the state won in district court, that victory was upheld in an appellate court. The 10th Circuit correctly said the Catholic schools had no case because Colorado’s non-discrimination rules were neutral and applied to everyone. In other words, a previous Supreme Court ruling from 1990, Employment Division v. Smith, was still in effect.

But lawyers for the Catholics asked the Supreme Court to weigh in. They now want the Court to decide what kind of “proof” is needed to show that a law isn’t actually neutral and generally applicable—because they believe they were discriminated against even if the law was said to be neutral—and whether a more recent SCOTUS decision that’s friendly to faith-based schools, Carson v. Makin, can override Employment Division v. Smith even in situations where a government doesn’t explicitly exclude religious people or institutions.

Even though that all sounds very niche, the worst-case scenario here is that SCOTUS could say states are required to let religious groups apply for taxpayer dollars to provide certain services… but the state can’t impose the same kind of rules on them if those rules burden their religious beliefs. Churches could be eligible for taxpayer dollars while being allowed to play by a different set of rules. It would be a disaster.

Last week, a number of atheist and church/state separation groups urged the Supreme Court to affirm what lower courts have already said.

In their amicus brief, American Atheists offered numerous examples of non-religious families who have been victims of religious discrimination to make the point that if faith-based schools are allowed to discriminate with taxpayer dollars, it will only make the problem worse.

… Secular preschool deserts (ie., communities in which there are no practical secular preschool options for nonreligious parents) exist in communities around the United States. Multiple participants in the U.S. Secular Survey reported having no choice but to enroll their child in a religious preschool or daycare because secular options simply were not available.

…

… Were this Court to side with the Petitioners in this case, it would be enabling preschools providing a government-funded service to engage in all the discriminatory conduct described by these nonreligious Americans.

The schools could turn the family away because of their (lack of) religious beliefs, requiring them to pay more or travel further to receive the same benefits. Or, if they enroll the kids, the children could be required to participate in religious rituals despite the family’s atheism… all with the help of taxpayer funding.

AA Legal Director Geoffrey T. Blackwell added in a press release: “Colorado, rightly, imposes its nondiscrimination requirement in order to avoid exactly this kind of damaging behavior. It must be allowed to continue protecting its residents.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation also filed an amicus brief focusing on another aspect of the case. Colorado allowed some preschools to prioritize students in Head Start or who have Individualized Education Programs (IEPs). In other words, they allowed certain exemptions to their non-discrimination rules for secular reasons. But the Tenth Circuit didn’t believe that was hypocritical at all. Instead, they said giving preferences to low-income students or those with disabilities was meant to keep the program inclusive while the religious exemptions were all about exclusivity.

FFRF says the Tenth Circuit had the right idea, and the Supreme Court shouldn’t overturn it on account of that.

FFRF’s brief points out that mandating religious exemptions whenever any secular exemption is allowed would create a chaotic system and would require lawmaking to a degree that legislatures are not prepared to handle. The First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause does not give an individual the ability to avoid compliance with a “valid and neutral law of general applicability.” The fact that Colorado allows preschools to prioritize serving low-income preschoolers and preschoolers with disabilities does not undermine Colorado’s interests in nondiscrimination.

“Americans with disabilities have fought long and hard to be able to participate as full members of society,” FFRF’s brief asserts. “Petitioners’ argument threatens to callously use those efforts towards inclusion to instead nullify anti-discrimination laws across the country.”

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, in coalition with a number of other civil rights groups, made the broader argument that “religion-neutral” requirements are perfectly constitutional, and public-benefit conditions (like helping low-income students or those with disabilities) don’t give faith-based groups carte blanche to challenge the law.

“Religious liberty is not a license to discriminate and deny children access to a taxpayer-funded educational program,” said Americans United President and CEO Rachel Laser. “We urge the U.S. Supreme Court to protect the religious freedom of Colorado taxpayers and LGBTQ+ children and families by ensuring public programs are not funding discrimination.

“This is another case spearheaded by religious extremists who have made Colorado a target in their quest to impose their beliefs on everyone and turn religious freedom into a license to harm vulnerable communities. We need a national recommitment to the separation of church and state. It is the shield that protects everyone’s religious freedom, regardless of their identity — so long as we don’t harm others.”

These briefs have it right because the churches aren’t asking for religious freedom. They already have that. They want something far more radical: the ability to discriminate using tax dollars. They want all the benefits of participating in a public program with none of the obligations.

The best-case scenario here is that SCOTUS does nothing with this case, allowing the earlier rulings to stand. Colorado never targeted Catholics or excluded religious schools. Dozens of faith-based providers are already participating in the program. If these Catholic schools can’t play by the rules, they shouldn’t be in the game.

The oral arguments in this case are scheduled for November 3. A final decision will be issued sometime next year.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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Burning Man, the massive event held annually in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, has been accused of unfairly kicking out a group of Christians “for being Christians.” But as usual, the actual story has nothing to do with persecution and everything to do with Christians assuming they could get away with breaking the rules.

John Hinerman is a member of the missionary group Shift the Atmosphere, which aims to convert people, and on Wednesday, he posted a video claiming that he and his buddies were getting booted from their campsite because the organizers hated Christians. The event is known for welcoming everybody, but Hinerman said that didn’t apply to the missionaries: “Radical inclusion for everybody except Christians,” one caption in the video stated. He added that “Satan’s mad” because they had already converted 600 people.

It was certainly an unusual occurrence. While Burning Man regularly kicks out individuals for bad behavior, it’s rare to kick out an entire camp.

The actual reason they were kicked out, though, was far more mundane: They were taking pictures and videos of people without consent and posting them on social media. Burning Man has very strict rules against that sort of thing:

“Burning Man takes participants’ right to privacy seriously,” said Burning Man spokesperson Dominique Debucquoy-Dodley. “Seeking permission and consent before filming or engaging other participants in Black Rock City is a requirement and responsibility for anyone at the event. This camp received multiple warnings and opportunities to correct their behavior, yet continued to violate our policies and were therefore evicted.”

Would you look at that? Another story of Christians assuming they can break the rules and get away with it because of their faith. Another violation of consent. Another example of Christian privilege followed by false accusations of persecution.

Journalist Trevor Hughes, who’s at the event, offered even more clarification on the matter: The Christians were basically harassing people without getting their permission to be filmed.

Organizers of the “Shift the Atmosphere” complained on social media that they were targeted over their expressions of faith, which included preaching and on-site baptisms. But witnesses told me the group used aggressive tactics on both adults and children to share the gospel of Jesus.

…

As a private, ticketed event, Burning Man's annual Black Rock City gathering is subject to strict privacy rules set by the organization. Those restrictions, which also apply to the media, include limiting photography and video, typically by requiring prior consent of anyone being filmed. (As a journalist, I have to wear an official credential and get permission from anyone I photograph.)

That wasn’t the only issue with the group. Apparently, they were also conducting baptisms in small tubs… even though Burning Man has rules against public pools or showers, stemming from Nevada’s health code.

Another regular Burning Man attendee said that the missionaries “were aggressively proselytizing and actually physically restraining participants while doing it.” And in addition to filming people without their consent, when Rangers investigated the matter, “these people proceeded to film the Rangers… while at the same time denying that they were filming.”

She added:

One parent who encountered them near Kidsville said they were extremely aggressive, were pushing Jesus figurines into the children’s hands and separated the kids across the room to talk to them. The parent said they then tried to take their child into a separate side room with a closed door flap to witness a baptism without even asking the parent first. I want to be clear that particular story did NOT come from the Rangers. That’s an individual parent’s account of their experience with this camp, but if somebody tried to take one of my kids into a closed room without asking me first, holy shit would we have a problem.

I should note that multiple copies of that post are circulating online with no credit given to whoever wrote it first.

SFGATE notes that the targeting of children didn’t end there:

Shift the Atmosphere was located directly across from the Kidsville camp, with one 12-year-old who’s attended the Burn every year of his life noting that he was offered matcha and coffee, but before receiving them, he had to listen to prayers and was given a yellow cartoon pamphlet whose cover proclaimed, “For God so loved the world.”

Wait, there’s more.

According to another attendee, the missionaries were playing “Christian EDM” unusually loud. They were asked to lower the volume and eventually did, but not before multiple requests.

While you consider all that, watch this video from other members of the Christian group complaining about their eviction. In this one, a member says, “All we were doing was preaching the Gospel and sharing the love of Jesus!” He says they never filmed someone without consent, contrary to what the Rangers (and other attendees) said, before adding, “We never touched someone when they didn’t want to be touched” (which just sounds way worse than it needs to). Also, of the idea of radical inclusion at Burning Man, he wonders, “Does that end for Christianity?” (Answer: No. Just you guys.)

Even as they left, they continued to violate the ethos of the event. They were given three hours to break down their camp and leave the premises, but “Nearby campers noted that the group had left much of its gear behind, breaking Burning Man’s leave no trace rule.”

They whined as they did that too. A video posted by another member of the Christian group argued that Burning Man’s demand that they leave within a few hours caused several injuries among the missionaries:

Teardown was dangerous. Every member of our team had minor injuries. Heavy equipment nearly fell on us, and some team members fell from ladders.

The storm made setting up tents unrealistic. Some interactions with Rangers were difficult, but I don’t want the actions of a few to define the whole Burning Man community. Burners are some of the kindest people I’ve met. Two Rangers helped us generously, other Burners helped clear debris, and even Christians who heard we were being removed came to help.

It’s almost like they never thought through the consequences of their own actions…

So that’s the real story here. These missionaries repeatedly violated rules designed to protect people’s privacy, consent, safety, and health. They received multiple warnings. But they refused to stop what they were doing. And then, after they were booted from the camp grounds, they left out every inconvenient detail from their public posts in order to boost their persecution narratives.

They almost certainly weren’t the only Christians at Burning Man. Hell, their own account admits that other Christians heard about the eviction and came to help them pack. So why weren’t those other Christians kicked out of the event? Because they weren’t harassing everyone else. The point is: Christianity was never the problem here.

If Burning Man is all about radical inclusion, that still very much extends to people with absurd religious beliefs. But their rules don’t have exceptions for followers of Jesus. The missionaries’ dishonest attempt to turn their eviction into a story of persecution is just another reason you should always fact-check Christians’ stories whenever they claim they’re the victims of discrimination.

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Weeks after the Trump administration announced that it would be giving a two billion dollar handout to faith-based non-profits, ostensibly so they could perform charity work, at least one prominent preacher is saying that money should be used to convert people to Christianity.

Ever since the start of this term, the Trump administration has been broadly criticized for cutting funding for projects like USAID which saved lives around the world. Evangelist Franklin Graham was among those who defended that decision, which was bizarre since a lot of the work done by USAID funding recipients included faith-based groups with the resources to help those who need it. So while the $2 billion infusion feels like a bandage (USAID received $63 billion in 2023), it’s still a much needed booster shot for groups doing good work, even if they are faith-based.

But the expectation is that even if money is going to faith-based groups, the work being done is still secular in nature. That’s how taxpayer funding is supposed to work.

That’s why it was troubling that the Trump administration said the money would go “to an extensive network of internationally recognized and local faith-based partners including World Vision, Compassion International, and Samaritan’s Purse.” While all three have done commendable work in certain areas, they’ve also been criticized in the past for prioritizing their faith over the needs of the people who need help. These groups have No Jews, No Muslims, No Atheists Allowed hiring policies. And they also make clear that their real goal is to spread the Gospel.

As the Freedom From Religion Foundation pointed out:

Samaritan’s Purse is not just any old charity. It explicitly identifies itself as an evangelical Christian organization whose mission combines aid with spreading Christianity. Its own mission statement says it assists “with the purpose of sharing God’s love through His Son, Jesus Christ” and “serves the Church worldwide to promote the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.” The group says its mission is to help people in need while “proclaiming the hope of the Gospel.”

So there’s an open question about how this money will be used and—given this administration—whether any of it would even be tracked. What are the safeguards? Will there be any oversight? How do we know the $300 million promised to Franklin Graham and Samaritan’s Purse for “immediate life-saving assistance to people affected by natural disasters and sustain humanitarian operations in protracted emergencies” over two years will go toward that purpose?

To be clear, the issue isn’t that these groups are getting the money. They do genuinely important (secular) work and have long been part of the nation’s response to disaster relief. The question is how this money would be used given that the Trump administration was openly crowing about how they’re giving hundreds of millions of dollars to faith-based (read: Christian) groups. The entire press release could have been delivered with a series of sly winks.

But interestingly enough, weeks after that announcement was made, Graham said his group didn’t want any of the money.

… We were honored to be a part of this proposal. While we deeply appreciate the confidence that the State Department has placed in Samaritan’s Purse, after prayer and discussion, we have withdrawn from being a recipient of these funds.

Throughout my history leading Samaritan’s Purse, we have always relied on God, not government, for funding. We thank God for the incredible donors he has led to be a part of upholding this ministry. As we have done for decades, we will continue sharing the hope of the Gospel of Jesus Christ—his death, burial, resurrection, and coming return—always responding to crises in Jesus’ Name.

Never in history has a Christian evangelist said no to a giant bag of cash. So the idea that they would say no now seems… curious at best. We still don’t know the real explanation for why they’re declining the award. Are there strings attached that we don’t know about? Do they not want to be associated with an administration in rapid decline? In case you’re wondering, though, they’ve received about $94 million in taxpayer dollars for similar work in the past, so the issue isn’t really taking money from the government. Not only are they okay with that, they’ve openly advocated for it. In this case, though, the simplest answer may just be that this much government money with this many strings and all the (theoretical) oversight that would come with it isn’t worth it to them.

Beyond that, The Bulwark actually makes a compelling case for why Samaritan’s Purse stood to gain quite a bit from the destruction of USAID and why its own finances are under unique scrutiny these days after it resigned from the pro-transparency Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. It also doesn’t help that they’re sitting on mountains of cash (which is strange for any non-profit) and paying Graham obscene amounts of money.

Whatever the reason, Christian Nationalist and self-described prophet Lance Wallnau—who believes Christians should take over every aspect of the country through the Seven Mountain Mandate—was overjoyed by the idea that Christian groups might get all this money because he fully believes proselytizing will be permitted.

Right Wing Watch has the clip:

"There's billions [of dollars] right now that are on the table for a transfer of wealth into the Kingdom of God, if we can hold on to the government to be able to access it," Wallnau declared earlier this year.

…

"You don't have to bow the knee to Baal and sign away your right to pray and talk about Jesus," Wallnau promised. "You don't have to do that because this is a government that understands why Christians don't want to get involved with government stuff, so they're working to make sure that you don't have to lose your faith or compromise your faith."

Wallnau revealed that the ultimate benefit is the Christian organizations can use the money they receive to fund programs that will allow them to evangelize all those whom they serve.

"That turning of $1 trillion that can be now loosed in the greatest transfer of wealth that's ever happened in American history to energize the local church, because every single one of these projects, one of the things they're looking at is get the local church involved with the project so the church can have a renaissance and a reformation of culture in America," Wallnau gloated. "You know what that means? They don't pay you to evangelize. The government will never do that. They'll shut you down. But if you've got a men's program that can take care of men that are alcoholic or they're not paying their child support or they got a drug addiction problem, and you can get them healed, you can get them help, and you can invite them to church. You're allowed to do that. You're allowed to be their friend and bring them with you. You can befriend anyone that you're helping and these people are getting saved by the thousands because of Christians reaching out to help them."

In his mind, if the grant money is supposed to be used to help people in a foreign country after a natural disaster, then Christian groups can now try to win converts as they provide the help. There’s no longer any obstacle in the way. In Wallnau’s mind, the only reason to help people is for the added bonus of trying to convert them, as if humanitarian relief isn’t enough.

Wallnau seems to know something the rest of us don’t, and he’s saying the quiet part out loud. It’s revealing that even if the Christian charity groups’ leaders won’t admit proselytizing is their unstated priority, one of their biggest mouthpieces is telling Christians it is—and that it now has the blessing of the U.S. Government.

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Christian evangelist David Grisham thinks it’s disturbing that flags at government facilities were at half-staff in honor of Dolly Parton—even though Donald Trump ordered them to be—so he personally raised the flags back up at the Borger Post Office in Texas on Friday evening and documented it all for the world to see. The video was posted online on Sunday.

Hi folks, this is Pastor David Grisham [of] Official Street Preachers.

Today, I’m at the post office, United States Post Office, here in Borger, Texas. And what I’ve done here is: They were flying this flag at half-mast under the orders of the president—half-mast for Dolly Parton—and since she’s never served in the United States government in any capacity, officially, I don’t think this is an appropriate way to honor her. I don’t… I don’t think that it’s the United States government’s business to be honoring some country western star. Many of our troops don’t get this honor.

So what I’ve done is I’ve untied the flag and ran it back up to the top of the flagpole in protest. And I’m just going to leave this sit here for the weekend and let them come back and find it Monday morning, knowing that this flag should have been flying at top mast—not half-mast—for Dolly Parton.

So I fixed that problem. It’s not done anymore. If you want to protest, this is what you can do. It’s not illegal. You’re not—you’re not damaging anything, not doing anything illegal.

So guess what? Now, the flag is back at full-mast, just like it should be. And this honor should be reserved for people that have served our country valiantly and not for country and western stars.

God bless you all. You have a good day.

(He uses the term “half-mast” in the video but later acknowledged he meant “half-staff.”)

Grisham is fully entitled to his (utterly wrong and thoughtless) belief that Parton wasn’t worthy of a high honor. It’s not like he’s alone. One mayor in Mississippi made headlines for saying virtually the same things as Grisham on his city’s official Facebook page, though even that mayor didn’t go through with raising the flags higher on his own. As many people have pointed out, though, Parton was far more serving of this particular honor than certain politicians.

But the selective outrage is telling. The half-staff honor was also done after the deaths of Charlie Kirk and Pope Francis. Parton was arguably more beloved than the former, more influential than the latter, and more unifying than either one. But were these people mad about those incidents? A quick search of Grisham’s Facebook page revealed he had no complaints when flags were lowered for those two men.

He explained in a separate post why he didn’t appreciate Parton like everyone else:

If any flags get lowered to half staff to “honor” this fake Christian’s death then lower the flag of the community she honored. She honored the LGBT community, transgenders, and supported gay marriage so they can lower that rainbow flag over every sewage treatment plant and garbage dump in America.

…

… But for a nation that is forgetting God this doesn’t shock me. It saddens me but our nation is headed towards the hell that God promised the disobedient and rebellious. Do better America, do better.

In that same post, however, he said the flags should be lowered to half-staff to honor Jesus Christ… who, if my memory serves me correctly, also “never served in the United States government in any capacity.” That contradiction appeared to be lost on him.

But this isn’t just about being wrong.

It’s the audacity of unilaterally deciding to make this change at a federal facility on his known, assuming he’ll never get in trouble for this. To be clear, there doesn’t appear to be any legal problem with what he did; to my understanding, there’s no fine or punishment associated with raising or lowering a flag, especially when you’re not damaging the property.

But Grisham didn’t do this because he was willing to be punished for his beliefs. He did it—and documented it—because he knows damn well Republicans are never going to go after a white Christian man for living out his faith this way. It’s a form of Christian privilege that he refuses to admit.

That said, he seemed to know this wouldn’t go over well since he waited until after the post office’s closing on Friday night to do the deed since they probably wouldn’t revert the flag until Monday morning.

In case you’re curious, Grisham has a long-standing habit of trying to convert people to Christianity by doing the most bigoted, thoughtless stunts he can think of. He plans to honor the anniversary of September 11 by protesting outside a Texas mosque (that obviously had no connection to the incident). He proudly wore a shirt with a silhouette of a weapon and captioned his post “Black Guns Matter.” And he and his preaching buddy Rich Penkoski were recently threatened with arrest for disorderly conduct at a local Pride event, though they were never charged with anything. (Officers later said the issue was the preachers’ use of a bullhorn, not their hateful speech, though there’s video of an officer saying otherwise.)

Oh. Grisham has also stood outside an elementary school in a Grinch costume, with a sign reading, “Santa is Fake. Jesus is Real.” It didn’t go over well.

Why he thinks any of this is effective is beyond me since I would argue it just repels people from Christianity. But Grisham has shown over and over he doesn’t actually care about that. He’d rather make headlines than make his religion look appealing.

I recently had the chance to ask him about all this. Over the course of a half-hour phone call, Grisham told me he didn’t think he’d get in trouble for the flag stunt because he didn’t desecrate the flag in any way. There’s a law against tampering with public property, but that likely won’t be used against him since the property wasn’t damaged.

I asked him why he didn’t say anything about the flags when Kirk died, and he simply said he had no idea the flags were lowered in his honor—though he insisted that never should have happened either. The Jesus comment, he said, was more tongue-in-cheek.

Grisham told me he’s received several death threats—or at least threats of physical harm—since he posted the video on Sunday, but he hasn’t been contacted by any law enforcement officials yet. He doesn’t expect to be. After all, he argued, he did what he did because of “love of country.” He just wanted “honor restored to the flag,” he said.

I also wondered why he was going through with preaching outside a mosque on 9/11, and he said it wasn’t some personal attack against the Muslims inside, but a critique of their “ideology,” as if everyone who believes in Islam are identical.

Wasn’t it strategically stupid, though? He didn’t care. As a Christian, he argued, it wasn’t his concern how people respond to his message. If the world hates them, so be it.

He did admit, though, that a lot of what he does is a form of real-life clickbait. He wants the attention, because when people come to argue with him, he can lower the temperature and try to convert them. Whether that’s successful is debatable.

I also had a chance to speak with Grisham’s partner-in-crime Rich Penkoski. He said he agreed with what Grisham did: Celebrities shouldn’t be honored like that whether they’re Dolly Parton or Charlie Kirk. He said he didn’t think his colleague would get in trouble for what he did because it felt like a low-priority sort of protest.

Since I had him on the phone, I also asked him why he was protesting outside a mosque on 9/11, and he didn’t have much of a response to the obvious bigotry of it all. He said he just wanted to “remind people of 9/11” (which, of course, can be done far away from a mosque). He told me he wasn’t just targeting them; hell, he was also protesting outside a Republican event the day before.

“I’m an equal opportunity bigot,” he joked.

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The Maine Supreme Court has just ruled that a father can have veto power over where his daughter can attend church—after the mother took her to one that was objectively dangerous for the child in many ways. The mother had said this was a violation of her religious rights.

The case involves Matthew Bradeen, Emily Bickford, and their 12-year-old daughter Ava. When the parents separated over a decade ago—they were never married—they agreed to “share parental rights and responsibilities regarding religious education and upbringing.” And none of that appeared to be a problem until 2021, when Bickford began taking Ava to Calvary Chapel, a church in Portland.

Bradeen soon noticed some major changes in Ava—harmful ones—and asked a judge to modify their parenting agreement so that he could have control over Ava’s religious upbringing.

That’s a big ask, obviously, and he needed some damn good reasons for a judge to sign off on his wishes.

In 2024, that’s precisely what a Maine District Court judge did. In an 18-page ruling, Judge Jennifer Nofsinger laid out all the reasons Bradeen’s argument was compelling—and why he deserved to have control of Ava’s religious upbringing.

The justification boiled down to a few major issues.

The church’s teachings were frightening and psychologically harmful

The pastor routinely delivered fire-and-brimstone sermons vividly describing Hell, full of “burning and torment.” He also focused on the Book of Revelation, talking about the reign of the Antichrist. All of this scared the shit out of Ava. She started having panic attacks, tried to convert him, and asked her dad why he wasn’t going to Heaven with her. All of this, Bradeen said, led to Ava experiencing “fear and anxiety” with the church’s teachings.

It didn’t help that Ava went to the church a lot. There were services on weekdays and multiple services on Sunday, all of which Bickford and Ava attended. On some of those Sundays, Ava had to listen as people testified about how Jesus saved them from “sexual and physical trauma, gay and lesbian relationships, and infidelity.”

Despite all that, Bradeen never let Ava think her mother was wrong or brainwashed. He just told Ava that different people believed different things, and that he simply didn’t agree with what that church taught.

Bickford hid from Bradeen how much she was indoctrinating her daughter

Bickford once told Bradeen she was taking Ava out of school to visit the state capitol, but that was a lie. She and Ava attended an anti-abortion protest.

She also sent Ava to a church-sponsored overnight retreat without telling him. Bradeen wasn’t told the location, and Ava wasn’t allowed to have a phone there, so he couldn’t communicate with her as it happened.

At another point, Bickford was on the verge of baptizing Ava without telling Bradeen. (He only found out through a third party.)

When your custody agreement says both parents have shared control over the daughter’s religious upbringing, those are all things they should have discussed together. But even when Bradeen was on his own, Bickford forced her religion into the picture anyway. She sent Ava to his house with “more religious paraphernalia than typical.” She also demanded that they homeschool Ava in order to avoid public schools that she believed posed a “danger” to kids. (The judge said of Bickford: “Ironically, her explanation is that she ‘wants to be able to review what her child is learning,’ but she has not given Mr. Bradeen the option to weigh in on events that Ava attends.”)

An expert testified that the church was cult-like

At one point, the judge heard from Dr. Janja Lalich, an expert on cults. (Bickford and her lawyer did not object to Lalich when she delivered testimony, though they tried to have it all tossed out afterwards.) Lalich explained that “closed social systems” like this church had certain elements in common: A charismatic and authoritarian leader who could not be questioned, the promise of salvation, a demand for loyalty, etc. They also promoted “hateful rhetoric,” opposing science, public schools, and homosexuality.

That sort of indoctrination, Lalich explained, could have a serious impact on a developing child, filling her with inferiority and doubt. It was also problematic that Ava didn’t appear to have a choice in the matter; she was pressured to “comply and conform.”

Importantly, Lalich never said the church was a “cult.” She just said it shared some characteristics with them.

Bickford’s new medical views were harming her daughter

There was a time when Ava was up to date on her vaccinations. She had an inhaler for her allergies and asthma. But since joining this church, Bickford had become an anti-vaxxer—rejecting shots for COVID and the flu—and fought Bradeen when he wanted Ava to get the HPV vaccine.

The anti-science mentality also extended to antibiotics. When Ava got pneumonia, Bickford refused to let her take the proper medicine to treat it. (Ava’s doctor was eventually able to prescribe an alternative medication that Bickford allowed.)

When Ava was dealing with anxiety, Bickford never even considered taking her to see a professional. She dismissed the very idea of anxiety, saying that prayers alone would solve the problem. She also argued that mental health care was a “hoax.”

In short, Bradeen’s decision-making when it came to medicine and health was seen by the judge as “more rational” and in Ava’s best interests while Bickford’s decision-making was not.

The church started a war against Bradeen

Shortly after their custody trial began, in August of 2024, Bickford took Ava to church where Pastor Travis Carey delivered a diatribe about the situation. Carey implied that Bradeen’s issue was with Christianity (and not the extremism inherent in this particular church), that Dr. Lalich was paid a lot of money to “find dirt” on them, and that the judge’s ruling would ultimately depend on whether or not she believed in God.

Ava was forced to listen to all of it.

… Let’s begin by prayer. There is a dear sister in the church. You guys know Emily Bickford. And for months in preparation for what really is a… I guess a custody battle—there’s been 50/50 with dear Ava—eleven-year-old Ava who’s been with the church family. She’s had teen camp with the teenagers this past weekend and Ava’s grown in the lord. And Emily’s made a priority that when she has the custody over her daughter, that they’re here. And they’re here all the time. But Ava’s father has had a difficult time with that. We’ve been praying for Matt and his salvation for a long time…

…

… It’s a unique situation because you guys probably are aware that justice is so much now in the hands of a judge, and no matter what area of civilization, culture, politics, you’re looking at, that can go one way or the other depending on who appointed that judge…

…

… Matt’s side—Ava’s father—has hired what they call an “expert witness” and this expert witness out of California was hired for a large sum of money to find any dirt they can on Calvary Chapel, on Pastor Ken Graves, and on… myself and on… Ava’s faith and Emily’s faith...

…

… depending on where this judge stands with god and his word will depend on how the decision goes forth…

…

… It’s hard to imagine that when you’re 11 years old and… you’re dealing with a level of persecution that young Ava is dealing with…

The judge was so appalled by that sermon that she transcribed the entire excerpt from that sermon—more than six minutes of preaching—and concluded that it was completely inappropriate:

Sadly, Mr. Carey went far beyond simply referencing the litigation. The court is further influenced by the fact that at no point did Ms. Bickford remove Ava from the congregation once it became clear that Mr. Carey was not going to offer a simple prayer. Instead, Ms. Bickford allowed Ava to receive the message that her father was the enemy and was persecuting her. The court finds that, more likely than not, Ava’s receipt of this message, delivered with the blessing of her mother, was psychologically detrimental.

After considering all of this, the judge came to some straightforward conclusions. For example, when it came to Ava’s health, Bradeen could make all final decisions, since the mother clearly wasn’t interested in following the advice of medical experts.

When it came to Ava’s religious upbringing, the legal reasoning was more complicated, but the evidence was clear that Ava’s psychological health was in danger and that Bradeen should be allowed to make those decisions as well:

The court finds that Ms. Bickford’s unquestioning loyalty to the church and abdication of independent decision making has placed Ava in situations where she receives messages that pose an immediate risk of significant psychological harm. Further, the court finds that due to Ms. Bickford’s level of commitment to Calvary Chapel, there is little to no room for the parties to co-parent on religious decision making.

…

Because the parties cannot effectively co-parent on this issue, one of the parties must be vested with the right and responsibility to make decisions. Ms. Bickford has handed over that right and responsibility to the church and is no longer exercising independent decision making regarding the messaging that her daughter receives.

…

Accordingly, the court concludes that a narrowly tailored restriction of Ms. Bickford’s rights is as follows: Mr. Bradeen is allocated the right and responsibility to make decisions regarding whether Ava attends any services, gatherings, or events associated with Calvary Chapel; whether and what material, literature, video, or other messaging associated with, or created or published by, Calvary Chapel she reviews; and whether she associates or communicates with any member of Calvary Chapel other than Ms. Bickford.

That wasn’t some rash anti-Christian decision. That was a tough analysis of a complicated issue. But after weighing the extremism of this church’s beliefs and how it was quite literally harming Ava, the court came to a thoughtful decision. It’s not like Bickford wouldn’t have contact with Ava; Bradeen just had veto power in a few key areas.

How the Christian Right distorted the facts of the case

When that decision was handed down in December of 2024, it didn’t make much news because it was just a private conflict. But it created a firestorm in the conservative Christian universe after right-wing legal group Liberty Counsel (no longer able to fundraise off of Kim Davis) decided to make it its next culture war battle.

For months, they fought to overturn the judge’s decision, and they eventually got the Maine Supreme Court to consider their appeal.

That also led to countless fundraising emails claiming Dr. Lalich was a “Marxist,” that a liberal judge decided Christianity was a “cult,” and that the judge was anti-religious because she “purposefully refused to capitalize the word ‘God’” throughout her ruling.

Liberty Counsel also claimed that Bradeen, whom they portrayed as horrible father, didn’t want Ava to “hang out with her friends from church,” that Ava was banned from reading the Bible or even talking about religion with her mom, and that Pastor Carey just wanted to “pray over [Bickford] and Ava.”

They twisted the ruling to say Bradeen thought the Bible itself was “psychologically harmful” (which is not what anyone said) and that he had some kind of vendetta against religion and not just the way this particular church was harmful to his child. One fundraising email even pretended the judge said Bickford was a fit parent “EXCEPT for the fact that she is a Christian.” (That’s not even close to accurate.)

In fact, every article written about this case in conservative publications appeared to distort the facts more and more. The Christian Post allowed Liberty Counsel’s leader to get away with several lies in a single sentence without noting that they were indeed lies:

“Calvary Chapel is not a cult. This custody order banning Emily Bickford from taking her child to a Christian church because of its biblical teachings violates the First Amendment,” Liberty Counsel founder and Chairman Mat Staver said in a statement shared with The Christian Post.

No one called it a cult. The custody order didn’t ban Bickford from taking Ava to a Christian church. And the “biblical teachings” weren’t the issue. (It’s not like the judge said Bradeen deserved custody because this church focused way too much on the Sermon on the Mount.)

But this is how groups like Liberty Counsel operate. When the facts aren’t in their favor, they make things up because they know their donors are too stupid to realize they’re being scammed. And Christian media outlets are happy to act as stenographers for them. Just look at this headline from an opinion piece on a website run by Focus on the Family, suggesting an extremist judge blocked a Christian mother from taking her daughter to church:

But fundraising letters and propaganda aside, the ball was eventually in the hands of the Maine Supreme Court. Bickford’s lawyers from Liberty Counsel asked them to take up this case and overturn Nofsinger’s ruling giving Bradeen power over Ava’s religious upbringing. They said the entire case boiled down to a “simple” question: “Does a district court have the authority to prohibit a parent from taking her child to Church?” What the lower court did, Liberty Counsel said, was a violation of Bickford’s First Amendment rights.

They said in the brief that the judge’s repeated use of “god” instead of “God” revealed “some disdain and hostility for Bickford’s monotheistic religious beliefs.” They said giving Bradeen final say over Ava attending that church amounted to handing him a “heckler’s veto over a fit parent’s right to direct the religious upbringing of their minor child.” And they insisted that what this church told Ava amounted to “mainstream and conventional religious beliefs, based on the Bible,” therefore the ruling was a form of religious persecution.

Legally, their argument was that religious beliefs didn’t need to be “logical” to warrant protection. (It was downright hilarious to watch Liberty Counsel freely admit this church’s beliefs were illogical.) But even that argument failed because the issue at hand wasn’t that the church’s beliefs were wrong or ridiculous. If that were the issue, then every religion would fall under that category. The problem was how the church was psychologically harming Ava, and Liberty Counsel refused to address the substance there. Instead, they talked about how, for example, it wasn’t psychologically harmful to denounce homosexuality,

It was as if Liberty Counsel never read the lower court’s decision. Instead, they just looked for a handful of buzzwords, then blew them entirely out of proportion. They believed that any insane belief, as long as it was cloaked in a religious shield, had to be respected.

The Maine Supreme Court justices were skeptical of the Christian side’s arguments

The Maine Supreme Court heard oral arguments last November:

A lot of the discussion was rehashing what had already been said in writing, but one of the justices asked Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver what an acceptable line was regarding when a church caused harm. Staver seemed to want no limitations whatsoever, but was there a line that even he agreed a parent could not cross?

His response: If the church sexually abused the child, that would be a bridge too far. (The judges seemed shocked by that response, with multiple people asking him, “Anything short of that?” Staver didn’t answer that one. Instead, he pointed out that, in other cases involving a snake-handling church and one in which children were groomed to become underage brides, judges still allowed kids to attend those places of worship… which was not the flex he thought it was.)

The judges didn’t seem to buy what Staver was saying. They noted that the lower court’s ruling documented actual harm to Ava—with anxiety and panic attacks—not just theoretical harm. So did none of that matter to him? Nope, he said, adding “That is not sufficient.”

The judges also pointed out that the issue wasn’t whether one religion was unacceptable to the courts, but that the case “centered on the inability to co-parent and the denigration of the other parent.” (Staver said: “Well, she didn’t denigrate the other parent!” The chief justice responded: “But she allowed others to.”)

Bradeen’s lawyer Michelle King simply reacted to all this by telling the judges that all that mattered here was “preventing further harm to the child” and “maintaining the child’s best interests and well-being.” She noted the lies, too: First, no one was saying prayer was inappropriate, only that Carey’s diatribe was inappropriate. Second, it was wrong to dismiss what Dr. Lalich said because she was an expert in her field, and both sides agreed on that point. Finally, when there were religious differences between co-parents, it made sense to draw the line whenever harm came upon a child, and this was a case where there was documented harm against Ava.

The judges asked whether the lower court’s ruling exhibited any hostility toward religion and whether it was truly neutral with regards to religion. The response? All that mattered was the harm to the child, and Ava was harmed by what was said. In other words, no one was judging the church’s beliefs, only the impact they had on Ava.

Staver’s rebuttal to all of this? The lowercase “G” is hostility against faith: “That’s an assault to both Christianity and Judaism and Islam. And that’s what this order does. And that order reeks with that kind of hostility by intentionally doing that.”

How the Maine Supreme Court ruled

On Tuesday night, the Maine Supreme Court finally ruled on this case. And it was a unanimous decision in favor of Bradeen, affirming the earlier decision (thank goodness).

When it came to allowing Bradeen to have veto power over religion, Bickford had said the court violated her rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Chief Justice Valerie Stanfill didn’t buy that at all, and her colleagues didn’t see any evidence of religious bias or hostility:

The court found that the child was harmed by Bickford’s decisions to expose the child to messages that characterized Bradeen as an “enemy” who seeks to “persecute” the child and her faith, and by Bickford’s unwillingness to prevent the child from receiving those messages or to take any other steps to reduce the risk of alienating her from Bradeen. Thus, far from “declar[ing] that the Christian religion is psychologically harmful,” the court’s finding reflected simply that it is harmful for a child to hear negative and frightening messages about one parent from the other parent or the other parent’s authority figures.

They also didn’t care about the use of the word “cult,” which they rightly explained Lalich used as shorthand for “closed social systems” like that church.

In short? There was no evidence of anti-Christian bias and no evidence the lower court judge abused her authority in making that decision.

So naturally, Liberty Counsel is already trying to claim persecution, promising to appeal to the Supreme Court.

After the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision was published, Liberty Counsel announced that it will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case.

“This opinion rejects the First Amendment right of a fit parent to raise her child consistent with her Christian faith,” Staver said in a statement. “This opinion goes against other state court decisions involving custody in the context of religious free exercise rights and ignores precedent from the U.S. Supreme Court. We will ask the High Court to take this case and overrule the decision.”

Staver argued the implications of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court’s decision pose a serious threat to religious freedom.

There’s no threat to anyone’s religious freedom. This is a custody battle where one parent was dragging her daughter to a church that actively harmed the kid and disparaged her father in front of her, so a judge put a stop to it. If the mother attended a “normal” Christian church where the pastor didn’t butt into everyone’s personal life and take sides in a custody battle and traumatize children, there wouldn’t be a controversy.

Liberty Counsel often threatens to appeal cases to the Supreme Court. It doesn’t mean SCOTUS will take up their cases, but it’s great for fundraising. They don’t give a damn if this is bad for Ava. As long as it’s good for Mat Staver’s bottom line.

That strategy is very familiar to Bradeen’s lawyer:

Bradeen’s attorney Michelle King said in an email that the court’s decision “was well-reasoned and affirmed the lower court’s authority to make decisions based on the best interests and well-being of the child, even in cases involving religion.”

She was not surprised by Bickford’s plans to involve the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It has been anticipated all along,” she said. “That’s why the church hired Liberty Counsel for Ms. Bickford.”

Hopefully, though, this is the end of the line. There’s no reason for the Supreme Court to take up this case. It’s a waste of their time.

Ultimately, this case cut to the heart of a serious problem: Are courts allowed to admit the truth when religion is causing harm to a child? Or is religion immune simply because it’s… religion? When faith crosses a line into fear, coercion, medical neglect, and psychological terror, the damage is real regardless of how many Bible verses are used to justify it all. Bickford didn’t just practice her faith; she allowed a religious institution to make parenting judgments on her behalf, letting them act like Ava’s father was a spiritual enemy.

That wasn’t good co-parenting. That wasn’t good parenting. That wasn’t good adulting. That was just abdication of responsibility.

What Bradeen argued in court wasn’t radical or anti-religious in any meaningful way. He just wanted to protect his child. I’m sure the mother wants to do that too. The difference is his side has evidence backing it up. She has conspiracy theories. His side is objectively better for Ava, which is why the lower court was right to give him power over religious and medical decision-making.

If the courts rejected that logic, the consequences would have extended far beyond this case. It would have meant that fear-based indoctrination, medical neglect, emotional coercion, and psychological abuse could have become legally untouchable as long as a pastor blesses them. It would have meant that the state had to look away even when children suffered—not because the harm was disputed but because it was faith-based.

Thankfully, that’s not what happened. The judges all acknowledged that Ava should not be treated like a symbol in a culture war fundraising campaign. She is a real child who suffered real panic attacks, real anxiety, and real distress. Giving Bradeen veto power over the source of that harm wasn’t irrational.

They made the right call. The only people trying to drag this case out even longer are the ones who are willing to ignore Ava’s well-being in favor of their own selfishness.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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Christian Nationalist preacher Andrew Wommack wants you to know that if you’re a Bible-believing Christian, you have the power to raise people from the dead. And it’s not just hypothetical. During an interview with "FlashPoint" host Gene Bailey last week, he delivered one lie after another about all the people he’s brought back to life.

Wommack declared that he knew “well over 50 people that have been raised from the dead” through his ministry. In fact, he added, he knew a preacher in Uganda who visited a hospital with roughly 100 patients, and that man “emptied the entire hospital.”

BAILEY: You told me something. We were sitting at lunch one day and… we were talking. I think we were actually talking about this story. And you said, “Well, Gene, we’ve had… there’s been a lot of people here raised from the dead, right here in this campus.” Talk about that.

WOMMACK: We’ve seen… I’m guessing now… I haven’t sat down and counted. But I could say: We probably have seen four or five people raised from the dead right here on our campus. And if you go to all of our schools—we got schools all over the world—and our missions trips—we have, before a person can graduate, they have to go on a foreign missions trip—and if you were to add them all together, we have well over 50 people that have been raised from the dead.

We’ve got one guy in Uganda that—he went in to a hospital in Uganda and emptied the entire hospital. There was a hundred-and-something people in there, and he emptied the entire thing.

And the news of that got out. And so… people contacted him and they were bringing someone for him to pray for. And in the journey—it was about a 4-hour trip—the man died.

And so when they finally reached where he was, they called him and they said, “We’re sorry, but, you know, he’s already died, and so you don’t need to come.” And he says, “No, I’m coming.” And he went over there and he spent four hours praying over that man. And that man came back to life. And 13 members of his family got born again because of that.

BAILEY: I bet they did.

WOMMACK: And so… we see a lot of people raised from the dead. We’ve seen it in Chicago. We’ve seen it in Atlanta through our schools there… One in Grand Rapids—they were having a Bible study and they heard this terrible crash, and then they heard the sirens, and they went out, and a motorcycle… had a wreck and a person was dead, and while they were waiting on the ambulance to come, the Bible study group just got together and prayed over him, and this guy came back to life, raised from the dead. So it’s become a fairly common occurrence for us. Praise God.

BAILEY: That’s wonderful. That’s just amazing.

In true televangelist fashion, not a single follow-up question was asked.

Somehow, Wommack claims the people in his ministry have these incredible powers, and yet they don’t spend all day, every day, in hospitals or in children’s cancer wards. The man from Uganda, as far as we know, has not visited another hospital. There are never any cameras around when these “miracles” happen. No medical professionals ever write about these “miracles” after the fact. No one working in the hospitals ever confirms Wommack’s version of the stories. And at no point do Wommack or these unnamed survivors ever release medical records confirming their deaths and resurrections.

Because of course they haven’t. We just have to take Wommack’s word for it.

At best, these people are sick or injured and get better—but that means they were never “dead” to begin with.

What makes these claims even more ludicrous is that Wommack has been making them for years. In 2021, for example, he told an audience that his own son rose from the dead:

And so [my wife] Jamie and I had just gotten back from Mexico. We went to bed, I think, at 2:15 in the morning, from a trip, and at 4:15, my oldest son called and he said, “Dad, I’m sorry to tell you this, but Peter”—my youngest son, he said—”he’s dead.”

… And when we finally got into Colorado Springs, my oldest son came out and he said, “I don’t know what happened, but 5 or 10 minutes after we called you, Peter just sat up and started talking.”

… When my oldest son called, [Peter] had been dead over four hours. He was already stripped naked—he was a white boy, he turned Black—and he had a toe tag on, stripped naked on a cooler, in a morgue, and he had already been pronounced dead and put in a morgue. And he just sat up and started talking.

Between four and five hours with no oxygen to the brain, and he came back with no brain damage—no more than he had before [laughter].

Amen.

Your brain cannot survive more than a few minutes without oxygen without permanent damage kicking in, but Wommack wants everyone to believe his son made it several hours that way. You can imagine how many doctors might want to figure out how Peter and his brain survived that ordeal… and yet no one’s ever bothered to check any of this out.

You’d think it’d be easy to offer proof of all this when it concerns your own family instead of random strangers, but Wommack never released it.

Wommack delivered a similar lie in 2019 when he spoke about a “healing conference” he hosted at Charis Bible College in Colorado (which he founded).

… It was awesome. We saw a little baby raised from the dead... The baby was dead and the mother just came and put the baby on the stage, and we prayed, and this baby came back to life.

We saw a man that carried his wife up. She was probably 80 [years old], and probably 60 pounds or less, and had a brain disease. Couldn’t talk or move. And after a few minutes praying, she started talking. Then she sat up. Then she stood up. And then she walked.

We saw over a thousand people miraculously healed and saw lots of people saved, born again.

It was a special, special time.

If that story is to be believed, a woman’s baby died, but instead of going to a hospital or police department, she brought the dead corpse to a conference at a Christian college, and the baby came back to life, and not a single reporter was told about this so that the story could travel far and wide.

Wommack also said “over a thousand people” were “miraculously healed” at the conference… even though, according to him, only 2,500 people attended it. Quite the ratio.

And apparently not a single person in attendance had a video camera to document any of this.

When I first heard that story in 2019, I contacted Charis to see if they could provide any proof a baby had come back from the dead. They sent me video of a different session of the conference (not helpful!) before adding, “Unfortunately, the session with the baby being healed was not recorded as the healing occurred when a private panel was taking place at the Conference.”

How inconvenient. And how utterly unsurprising.

All of this might be less disturbing if Wommack was just a standard scamvangelist, lying to Christians to get their money. But he’s not just some charismatic huckster. He’s a power broker who wants Christians to control local governments, not unlike Doug Wilson. There are countless stories, in fact, of how Wommack’s people have tried to take over the town of Woodland Park, just outside Colorado Springs. They won a majority on the public school board in 2021… only to destroy the district. Thankfully, Wommack then failed in his attempt to take over the city council after residents realized what was happening, though that hasn’t prevented further attempts by him to acquire power.

So why does any of this matter? Because Wommack is trying to convince his followers that he (and those who believe what he believes) are supernaturally powerful and that faith involves never asking even basic questions about supposed miracles. Every unnamed patient and missing medical record are just tests of loyalty.

Wommack knows that if his followers are ignorant enough to believe his claims, he can persuade them to accept almost anything, including why they and they alone should take over public school boards and local governments. He wants to build a Christian Nationalist movement where his absurd and exaggerated statements are trusted far more than claims from any doctor, journalist, educator, or scientist.

You would hope that as his lies get bigger—and is there really any lie bigger than bringing someone back from the dead?—his army of sheep would wake up to the fact that they’re being conned. But religion has a way of telling people to ignore common sense.

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On Thursday, the Justice Department’s “Weaponization Working Group” issued a report supposedly explaining how, in 2023, an FBI field office unfairly targeted conservative Catholics, concluding “that the Biden FBI engaged in improper and unjustified law enforcement and intelligence activity.”

It was released in response to Executive Order 14147 (“Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government”), issued by Donald Trump on the first day of his second term in office.

The entire report is utterly ridiculous, and that becomes evident once you understand the actual story. But the Trump administration knows damn well no one’s going to pay attention to the details, so they’re loudly proclaiming that the Biden administration was somehow anti-Catholic, assuming no one’s going to dig into the details and hoping that their right-wing allies in the media will just amplify the headline they want to see.

That’s why it’s important to dig into those details.

I’ve written about this story before. But it’s worth describing again because this may be the most egregious example I’ve ever seen of how Christian Nationalism isn’t merely unconstitutional and unethical but quite literally putting our lives in danger.

The background information that I found most helpful in understanding this situation comes from a report written by former Department of Justice Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, who investigated the matter in 2024… and found no evidence of religious discrimination.

What the investigation was all about

Beginning in 2019, the FBI began tracking a(n unnamed) man who advocated civil war and the assassination of politicians… and then purchased semi-automatic weapons and ammo. He was then arrested for other reasons, but in jail, his online threats grew even worse. He would make phone calls to family members during which he talked about the need to “build guns, explosives, and other forms of weaponry and store them in [his] room without fear of the law finding out about it.” He also said he needed to “make total war against the Satanic occultist government and the Zionist devil worshiping bankers who control it.”

He completed his sentence in June of 2021, and once he was released, there was reason to believe this guy wanted to put his violent rhetoric into action—specifically against “pro-choice, Jewish, and LGBTQ individuals.”

Because of his status as a convicted felon and due to his plea agreement, however, he couldn’t actually purchase any weapons to carry out his planned attacks. But he did have social media accounts in which he posted Nazi symbols and talked about killing police officers, “ganging up on and beating” racial/religious minorities, carrying out a mass shooting at a “school for special needs children,” etc.

Then he took a step that could help him close the weapons gap.

In early 2022, the guy began attending a church that’s not formally affiliated with the Catholic Church but pushed “traditional Catholic theology and liturgy.” He also described himself on social media as “‘Fascist and Catholic’ and a ‘[radical-traditional (rad-trad)] Catholic clerical fascist.’” Even worse, it appeared that he was recruiting members in that church to carry out an attack.

He even made comments to members of the church saying he was going to commit violence and suggested he was building a pressure cooker bomb. (The church members were not on board with any of this.)

At that point, the FBI office in Richmond, Virginia sent an undercover agent to the church to interact with the man and find out how serious these threats were. The answer? Very. It led the office to declare the man to be their “highest priority domestic terrorism subject.”

The man kept taking steps indicating he was going to kill people. He even purchased equipment that would let him lock the doors of commercial buildings, preventing hostages from exiting. He then bought a truck and posted a video on social media saying that was his final step before the attack.

On November 12, 2022, investigators obtained a search warrant for his home and found all kinds of disturbing stuff inside: ammo, a 3D printer, lock-picking devices, “multiple Molotov cocktail-type improvised incendiary devices.”

They felt like they had enough to work with and arrested him. Crisis averted. (In June of 2023, the man was indicted in federal court and pleaded guilty.)

The FBI agents tried to document what they learned

But part of building their case meant talking with people who may have communicated with him during his planning process. So FBI agents interviewed the church’s priest, choir director, and other members. It seemed that all of them knew exactly why the FBI wanted to speak to them.

It was that guy, wasn’t it?

They cited his “unusual” and “concerning” behavior and racism. The FBI considered reaching out to nearby churches just to let religious leaders know what potential warning signs to look out for, and to give them a way to reach out to the FBI if they saw anything suspicious.

The point is: The church wasn’t the problem. It was just that one guy.

When two FBI analysts—both with decades of experience—began drafting a memo about all this (called a Domain Perspective), noting potential areas of concern for the future, one possibility was the link between the man’s extremism and his faith. But even that possibility was dismissed by the very same analyst, who pointed out that this guy was already on the FBI’s radar before he ever joined this church.

Still, if he was recruiting members for an assault through this church, perhaps there was reason to investigate further—if for no other reason than to help churches like theirs identify potential threats in the future.

Why did their memo include language like “rad-trad Catholic clerical fascist” and “radical-traditionalist Catholic”? Both analysts said those were the words the man himself used and that phrasing was common in his corner of the internet. They never defined it, though, which became an issue later on.

In fact, when the analysts did more research, they learned there were two other men on the FBI’s radar—through their offices in Portland and Milwaukee—who had similar extremist ideologies and a connection to the same kind of church. That’s what led to the publication of a report suggesting the link.

That report even included a legal caveat saying they were not infringing upon anyone’s First Amendment freedoms to practice their faith and they weren’t monitoring anyone in this church solely because of their religious beliefs:

Potential criminality exhibited by certain members of a group referenced herein does not negate nor is it a comment on the constitutional rights of the group itself or its members to exercise their rights under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The FBI does not investigate, collect, or maintain information on U.S. persons solely for the purpose of monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment.

After they wrote up that Domain Perspective, the analysts hoped to create a different, more simplified, version of the report that could be shared with others within the FBI—beyond their own office—so they enlisted the help of additional colleagues in drafting it.

But the FBI never got around to that.

The draft report was leaked to right-wing outlets

The original draft report—never meant to be seen by the public—was somehow leaked to right-wing media outlets, and conservatives began running with the story that the FBI, under the Biden administration, was targeting Catholic churches.

That was a lie. There was no anti-Christian bias here. It was a valid documentation of a potentially dangerous phenomenon. It wasn’t even against the Catholic Church, but rather a potentially extremist sect calling itself Catholic.

To ignore that possibility would have been malpractice on the FBI’s part. But right-wing websites were quick to claim the FBI was targeting Catholics who preferred a “Traditional Latin Mass.” (That was one of many descriptors of those churches.) They were misinterpreting everything those analysts had said, but true to form, conservatives began spreading those lies to feed their claims of religious persecution.

When word about this leak got back to the FBI, then-director Christopher Wray rescinded the original document, saying it “failed to adhere to FBI standards.” The agency also “formally admonish[ed] the employees involved.” Former Attorney General Merrick Garland said he was “appalled” by the memo, but he dismissed any claims that there was discrimination against Catholics. (Because there wasn’t any.)

Conservatives used those actions to insist the FBI was trying to cover up for religious persecution... AND THEY WOULD HAVE GOTTEN AWAY WITH IT, if not for the whistleblower who shared the original document.

But as the Inspector General later explained, that wasn’t the case. Documents like these go through layers of editing and there was no evidence of any malicious intent against a religious group. Just because this memo didn’t meet expectations, it didn’t mean anyone did anything wrong.

He said that the Domain Perspective didn’t include enough evidence of a link between extremists and Rad Trad Catholic ideology, and because of that, it looked like the FBI was targeting people’s religious beliefs, even though that wasn’t the case at all. Furthermore, he said, the document included incorrect terminology for cases involving domestic terrorism.

The [FBI Inspection Division (or INSD)] report found that although there was no evidence of malicious intent or an improper purpose, the [Richmond Virginia Domain Perspective or DP] failed to adhere to analytic tradecraft standards and evinced errors in professional judgment, including that it lacked sufficient evidence or articulable support for a relationship between [Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists or RMVEs] and so-called [Radical Traditionalist Catholic or RTC] ideology; incorrectly conflated the subjects’ religious views with their RMVE activities, creating the appearance that the FBI had inappropriately considered religious beliefs and affiliation as a basis for conducting investigative activity; and reflected a lack of training and awareness concerning proper domestic terrorism terminology. As a result, the INSD report concluded that the employees involved in drafting, editing, and reviewing the Richmond DP failed to adhere to FBI standards. The INSD report also examined the approval process for the Richmond DP, concluding that it was insufficient, and the circumstances surrounding its removal from FBI systems following the disclosure of the document into the public domain. Based on the results of the FBI’s Strategic Review, the FBI instituted a number of corrective actions, including enhancing approval requirements for intelligence products involving a sensitive investigative matter and formally admonishing the employees involved in the Richmond DP.

It was a perfectly normal explanation for why a Domain Perspective might have been rescinded, but that wasn’t how everyone took it.

Wray, who was appointed by Trump during his first administration, said the memo “violated the agency’s policies on conducting investigations based on religious affiliation,” which was a ridiculous reason to dismiss a memo that necessitated the mention of a guy’s religious affiliation.

Whether or not you agreed with the FBI’s assessment on the memo, though, it appeared that they handled it all internally. The report never should have seen the light of day for reasons they explained and the analysts were, fairly or not, admonished. That sounds like the government working as it should.

It didn’t matter to right-wing propagandists. They ran with the lie, as they so often do.

Republicans used the incident to rile up their base

The GOP-led Judiciary Committee, run by Rep. Jim Jordan, said in its report in December of 2023 that this proved the “FBI abused its counterterrorism tools to target Catholic Americans as potential domestic terrorists,” saying that the FBI “singled out Americans who are pro-life, pro-family, and support the biological basis for sex and gender distinction as potential domestic terrorists.”

None of that was accurate.

But Republicans got the headlines they wanted, and this past June, FBI Director Kash Patel fired all the agents involved in this investigation.

Several FBI analysts tied to the creation of a 2023 memo warning of a potential threat from Catholic “violent extremists” were fired Friday, according to their lawyer, the latest wave of terminations under the leadership of its director Kash Patel.

The fired employees included four intelligence analysts and a supervisory analyst. The FBI declined to comment.

“This action is manifestly unjust, completely unsupported by the facts, and subverts standard FBI policy and procedure,” their lawyer, David Laufman, said in a statement. “These individuals deserved far better for the exceptional and faithful public service they rendered to protect our country.”

The lawyer, of course, was correct. There was no indication of any anti-religious bigotry on the part of the analysts. They successfully prevented a domestic terrorist attack, and this was their reward. Their only mistake, if anything, involved more technical elements of producing a report based on their findings. Substantively, however, they didn’t do anything wrong. They were just trying to protect the country from a potential attack.

Yet it was easy for Patel to get rid of them because the entire incident had become a cause célèbre among conservatives to the point that the memo was even included in a report by Trump’s sham “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.”

The Trump administration was so dead-set on pretending they’re saving the country that they quite literally fired the very people who keep the country safe.

What the “Weaponization Working Group” claims really happened

And that brings us to the Justice Department’s “Weaponization Working Group,” which, last week, issued its own report on the matter attempting to prove that the Biden administration was out to get conservative Catholics. The 231-page report, mostly consisting of internal documents, sets out to justify the right-wing outrage, even if the details within the report point in the other direction. The group claims without evidence that “To many Americans, the Richmond Domain Perspective came to embody the misuse and weaponization of government power.” (I assure you “many Americans” have no idea any of this happened.)

They specifically make three claims to bolster their argument that religious conservatives were unfairly demonized while the people who supposedly went after them were rewarded:

1. FBI agents “made extensive inquiries into two priests and monitored their travel and communications.”

2. The FBI relied on “biased and unverified materials, including Southern Poverty Law Center publications and foreign intelligence materials, without assessing their credibility.”

3. The FBI’s office in Richmond didn’t do enough to punish the agents, giving them “positive performance reviews” and “openly defend[ing] their work.”

It’s worth explaining why all three of those conclusions are ridiculous.

Why FBI agents investigated two priests

I mentioned that the suspected terrorist began attending a non-Catholic “Catholic” church. That church was the Our Lady of Fatima Chapel and it’s associated with the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), a breakaway sect that the Catholic Church formally disavows.

When the FBI agents wanted to know if their target was recruiting church members for a potential attack, they spoke privately with the church’s priest. At first, he was very helpful. He noted that he didn’t know the suspect well, but he knew the guy had never been to confession, had “crazy views on race,” and was a white supremacist. When the FBI agents asked if the suspect “ever discussed committing violence,” the priest got a bit jittery and said he wanted to speak to church leadership “and/or a lawyer.” That’s partly because the priest was new and “did not want this to look bad on the church.”

So the agents contacted the priest a week later for updates… but this time, the priest was less talkative. “I don’t want to be involved,” he told them. Naturally, this made it harder for the FBI agents to get information about the suspect.

Around the same time, the FBI agents realized that the SSPX was a radical group on its own and there was reason to believe it was “attempting to radicalize individuals through the Catholic religion towards Neo-Nazi extremism.” So was the suspect a lone wolf or was the church itself part of the problem? They weren’t sure. But they also found out that the priest’s uncle was a fairly high-ranking member of the breakaway sect. So the FBI agents began looking into that guy (“Priest 2”).

In short, the FBI was already worried about what their suspect might be doing. But they were also wondering how far the extremism rabbit hole went: Were the priests also involved in this? Lacking further information, they began investigating the priests just to be safe, looking into their travel history, contact with other government agencies, credit card records, and phone records.

What they found was… nothing of importance to their investigation. While their beliefs may have been considered extreme, there was no reason to believe the priests were doing anything the FBI needed to be concerned about.

So they stopped monitoring both priests.

That was it.

Were they monitoring those two priests because they were priests? No.

Were they doing it because they were Catholic (or “Catholic”)? Of course not.

They were doing it because, working off of minimal information, they wanted to know if those priests were involved in the kind of radicalization that could lead to a terrorist attack. Once they felt confident nothing of the kind was happening, they stopped looking into the priests and put their focused back on the suspect.

None of this, in other words, was religious persecution or anti-Catholic bias. But the Trump administration wants people to think otherwise.

Why FBI agents cited the Southern Poverty Law Center

What about the claim that the FBI agents relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center for information?

When doing background research on these breakaway Catholic sects in preparation for their Domain Perspective report, the FBI agents learned that the SPLC had reported on several “radical-traditionalist Catholic” groups in their database of “hate groups,” so they felt compelled to mention that.

In case you’re curious, the SPLC says that one church leader was obsessed with the “alleged evils of the Jews.” Another believes “every sane thinker must be an anti-Semite.” Another promotes books with titles like “Did Six Million Really Die?” and “The Hoax of the Twentieth Century,” both about the Holocaust. (A more updated version of the page is here.)

Is the Trump administration, which claims to oppose antisemitism, bothered by any of this? Apparently not.

The point is: These churches aren’t called hate groups because members are conservative Catholics. They’re hate groups because they espouse hate. It’s not that complicated.

In any case, while the SPLC’s website explains in great detail why these particular churches are considered hateful, the particulars were not included in the Domain Perspective. The report simply mentioned the SPLC’s labeling of those churches as hate groups:

As of 2021, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified nine RTC hate groups operating in the United States… Open source reporting and FBI investigations have noted a growing overlap between the far-right white nationalist movement and RTCs. Illustrative of this has been the increasing collaboration of the far-right Catholic media outlet Church Militant (and its activist wing, the Resistance network) with the America First “groyper” movement… The ongoing convergence of the far-right white nationalist movement and RTCs was further demonstrated through the increase in violent hostility toward abortion-rights advocates on social media sites in the run-up to and aftermath of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade… Far-right white nationalists and RTCs interact primarily online, and adherents of RTCs and other far-right white nationalist groups frequently share language and symbolism, such as crusader references or anti-Semitic discourses.

That’s it. That’s literally it. In a single paragraph explaining the growing, disturbing trend of Rad-Trad Catholics, they cited a report from the SPLC to point out that this is hardly a brand new phenomenon. And, again, the SPLC website explains in depth why the churches they included on their list were deemed extreme. (Spoiler: It’s not because they’re conservative.)

But this new report from the “Weaponization Working Group” acts like everything the FBI did was based on the SPLC—a group that conservatives have railed against for years because they don’t like it when groups highlight their hateful rhetoric and beliefs. (Just last week, the Trump administration announced that it’s going to try and revoke the tax-exempt statuses for liberal non-profit groups including the SPLC.)

It’s just not true, though, that the SPLC’s reporting played a significant role in anything the FBI agents did. The report would have stood on its own without the citation.

For what it’s worth, the report also goes after the FBI agents for citing articles in Salon and the Atlantic. But those articles merely point out (with citations!) that there are links between far-right Catholics and white nationalists. But because those publications are also deemed liberal by the right, they’re included as proof that the FBI is biased.

Why FBI agents were given positive reviews

What about the third claim that the Richmond FBI office gave the agents “positive performance reviews” and “openly defended their work”? OF COURSE THEY DID. Those agents didn’t do anything substantively wrong. Their work may have literally saved lives and the complaints against it were clearly politically motivated. Unlike FBI Director Kash Patel jetting around to parties and his girlfriend’s concerts, these people were actually doing their job.

One of the agent’s supervisors even wrote in an evaluation that the employee “oversaw an extremely difficult threat during the review period, which became increasingly so following the leak of one of the products related to the threat [the employee] resided over [and she led] her team despite the distractions and difficulties stemming from the aforementioned product.”

That sounds… like a perfectly sensible review given everything we know.

Anyone who’s had a real job knows that great employees can still make mistakes, and if you want to argue that these FBI agents made technical mistakes in the Domain Perspective, that wouldn’t negate the incredible and essential and potentially life-saving work they did to keep the country safe.

How the Trump administration is spinning all this

And yet this is how Trump’s bootlickers conclude the report:

… History will rightly judge the Richmond Catholic Memo as a grave failure of the FBI Richmond Field Office to uphold that responsibility.

Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel, this Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation will protect the constitutional rights of all Americans and ensure law enforcement activity is based on legitimate law enforcement interests.

The FBI personnel involved in the creation of the Richmond Catholic Memo have been terminated from their positions.

The press release for the report reads like a victory lap for Trump’s hand-picked allies:

“This Department of Justice will not tolerate a weaponized bureaucracy that chills First Amendment activity,” said Attorney General Todd Blanche. “The individuals who developed the Richmond Domain Perspective are no longer with the Department, and our Working Group’s efforts to investigate weaponization under the previous Administration will continue.”

“Weaponization will never be tolerated at this FBI,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “Even while those who developed the unacceptable Richmond Catholic memo under the previous administration have been held accountable, releasing information to the public about what occurred under the prior regime is an important part of the process. I want to thank the Weaponization Working Group for their partnership as well as Attorney General Todd Blanche for his leadership addressing these abuses and making sure they never happen again.”

Even Christian Nationalist Tony Perkins, who defends this administration no matter how corrupt it is, claimed that this report “further confirms the Biden FBI used the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center to target Catholic priests and parishes for simply practicing their faith.”

He’s lying because that’s what conservative Christians do when the facts don’t fit their preferred narrative.

Other right-wing commentators are cherry-picking elements from the report to pretend that the Biden administration was targeting conservatives. Eric Schmitz, who works for GOP Speaker Mike Johnson, falsely claimed that this proved the FBI was going after Catholics who appreciate a Traditional Latin Mass. A Justice Department communications official insisted this showed “More evidence of Biden-era weaponization.” Another White House staffer claimed this was evidence of the Biden administration going “against faithful Catholics.”

They’re all lying. They’re all delusional. They all don’t know how to read.

What’s truly disturbing about this entire situation is that the Trump administration transformed a successful domestic terrorism investigation into a pretext for purging the people who carried it out, all so they could convince gullible conservatives that the previous administration was out to get them.

Those FBI agents did exactly what they should have done and we owe them a debt of gratitude. Instead, they have to look for new jobs because the Trump administration would rather promote a false narrative than keep Americans safe.

The “Weaponization Working Group” had their conclusion before they ever began this report. All they did was repackage debunked right-wing grievances into an official-sounding report.

None of this protects religious liberty.

All this does is shield extremists so that Trump, Patel, Blanche, and their Christian Nationalist allies can keep pretending they’re the victims.

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Conservative Christians, faced with the prospect of not being allowed to get away with anything they want, are now falsely claiming New Jersey has made prayer illegal.

(They have not. Shocking, I know.)

Here’s what actually happened: Last Thursday, Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed a law that, among other things, makes it a crime to get in the way of anyone accessing or providing reproductive or gender-affirming health care. It’s a necessary way to punish anyone who physically blocks access to a health care facility or intimidates patients, especially in the face of the Trump administration already doing everything it can to make it harder for people to get the care they need.

The word “physically” is key there. The bill goes after anyone who tries to “inflict bodily injury” on a patient, obstructs their path into the building, intimidates or threatens staffers through force, etc.

But because women will be able to access abortion care without having to worry about conservative Christians blocking their path, those religious zealots are now lying to their supporters about what this bill does.

It may have started with this irresponsible bit of projection from one right-wing activist, who said that prayers could be construed as a form of intimidation, therefore this bill would prevent protesters from praying outside clinics:

“Peaceful sidewalk counseling, prayer, holding signs, or simply offering help and alternatives outside a facility can easily be labeled ‘intimidation’ by someone who claims to feel threatened, leaving pro-life advocates open to criminal charges that are difficult to disprove and chilling constitutionally protected expression,” said Marie Tasy, executive director of the anti-abortion group New Jersey Right to Life.

All of that is an exaggeration. Protesters still have their First Amendment rights even if patients and pro-choice allies don’t like it. This bill doesn’t prevent the prayers or legal protests.

In fact, that’s exactly what the governor’s office said:

… Maggie Garbarino, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office, said peaceful prayer is protected under the law.

“This legislation protects patients and providers from threats to their safety, and defends the fundamental freedom to make personal healthcare decisions without fear or intimidation. Nothing in this law prevents lawful, peaceful protest or the exercise of constitutionally protected speech,” Garbarino said in a statement to NJ.com.

“What is not protected is violence, threats, intimidation, physical obstruction, or property damage intended to interfere with someone receiving or providing reproductive healthcare,” she added.

Case closed. But being honest about this legislation doesn’t help Christian Right groups with fundraising, nor does it help zealots rile up their base.

That’s why the Christian group Intercessors for America sent emails to supporters over the weekend claiming “They Just Made Prayer Illegal,” directing people to a petition that included even more blatant lies about what the New Jersey bill does (emphases theirs):

New Jersey just signed the "shield law bill" that criminalizes prayer outside of abortion clinics statewide. This chilling eradication of the First Amendment for believers is now happening in New Jersey—it could be coming to a state near you. IFA is providing a way for you to make your voice heard to protect the First Amendment for people of faith. Sign the petition today to stop making prayer illegal and then be sure to pray for those leaders who represent you in government to protect religious freedom and freedom of speech.

Again, none of that is true. Prayer has not been criminalized. The First Amendment isn’t under attack through this law. And signing this petition won’t accomplish anything except getting your email address added to a Christian mailing list that will never stop spamming you.

But that group wasn’t alone.

The same lie was spread by anti-abortion activist Lila Rose who told her gullible followers that the bill is “effectively preventing Christians from praying outside abortion facilities,” adding that “No person should be punished for praying for the unborn.”

She’s lying. No one’s stopping Christians from praying outside health clinics. No one’s punishing them. Unless they’re praying in front of the door to a clinic, preventing someone from getting inside, they are still free to waste all the time and energy that they want. But notice she used that weasel word “effectively,” suggesting that even she knew prayer wasn’t under attack.

The website LifeNews.com didn’t even bother with that. Their headline made it sound like the New Jersey law banned prayer, period.

In fact, a lot of influential right-wing social media users put out statements saying the law CAN or COULD punish protesters. (Like Rose, a lot of them used the word “effectively.”) They’re equivocating because they know damn well the law doesn’t do what they’re saying, but they don’t care. They have to rile up their extremely ignorant base. By the way, good luck finding any prominent conservative Christians admitting that the law doesn’t do what these zealots are suggesting.

It’s honestly laughable to listen to these people whine because just think about what they’re saying. Can the prayers of anti-abortion protesters only be heard by God if they’re within a few feet of an abortion clinic? Are they admitting their God is hard of hearing? Or that their prayers aren’t as powerful as we thought? Can God not hear them if they’re praying against abortion from home? Apparently not! Who knew their God was this weak?

None of that logic, however, led any of these people to admit the law doesn’t actually prevent peaceful prayers and protests.

So why are they lying? Because they’re conservative Christians who aren’t interested in facts. These are the same people who overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in the past three elections despite all the cognitive dissonance and blatant lies. They lie because nothing in their faith convincingly taught them lying is bad. They lie because the truth gets in the way of their preferred narrative. They lie because they know, deep down, they’re the bad guys in this entire situation but they don’t want to admit it.

They’re also lying because this bill protects the rights of patients to get the health care they need from the doctors they want to see, and the Christian Right has spent years interfering with that bond. They see the space outside health care clinics as places where vulnerable patients can be confronted, shamed, frightened, and harassed, all while using euphemisms like “sidewalk counseling.” In New Jersey, lawmakers said that patients deserve to enter those facilities without threats or obstruction, so now these activists are screaming persecution. They don’t actually give a shit about prayer because even they know their prayers are ineffective. They just want to impose their will on patients who want nothing to do with them. This law prevents them from harassing people, and conservative Christians can’t handle being told “no.”

So they lie.

That’s why conservatives can’t honestly describe this law. If they admitted that peaceful prayer, even outside clinics, remains perfectly legal, their entire martyrdom narrative would collapse. Then they might have to confront reality: that they’re actually upset because the law prevents violence and intimidation and physical obstruction… and that’s exactly what they want to do. Saying New Jersey banned prayer is much better for fundraising than saying New Jersey won’t let us terrorize women, even though only the latter is accurate.

By the way, on Wednesday, the right-wing group 40 Days For Life announced that it would pay the legal bills for any Christians arrested under this law:

“Prayer is not a crime. Holding a sign is not intimidation. Offering a woman help is not coercion,” the group’s CEO Shawn Carney told The Post. “This law is designed to scare people of faith off the sidewalks outside abortion facilities by creating the constant threat of prosecution and costly lawsuits.”

“We will not be intimidated,” he went on. “If the state tries to weaponize this law against constitutionally protected speech, our Institute of Law & Justice will be there to defend them at no cost.”

Carney’s group stressed that the protesters must have been engaged in peaceful activity in order to get its legal support.

It’s a brilliant PR tactic. They get free press and they won’t have to spend a single cent on any legal bills since, again, peaceful prayers aren’t being targeted by this bill, and everyone knows that except for willfully ignorant Christians.

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For the past few days, right-wing conspiracy theorists have been furious with Girl Scouts of the USA because they learned that it was possible to earn rewards for visiting a mosque and learning about Islam. And just as you’d expect from a conservative outrage campaign, the buffoons spreading this information are falling for a bunch of lies spearheaded by someone who spreads them for a living and doesn’t know how to do basic research.

The backlash began when commentator and Steve Bannon’s podcast co-host Natalie Winters posted an “EXCLUSIVE” tweet claiming that this was all evidence of the “Islamization of Girl Scouts across America.” (People on the right insist a story is “exclusive” whenever they first learn about it even if the information is really old.)

The rest of the thread was just as overblown, saying that “Mosque-based programs [across the country were] embedding prayer, hijab rules, Ramadan, Islamic education and mosque outreach into Girl Scouting.”

Except the patches and medals weren’t made by the official Girl Scouts organization.

While the Girl Scouts has a program in place (“My Promise, My Faith”) to reward girls who learn about faith in a generic way, they don’t do anything to promote any particular belief system. (That’s in stark contrast to Scouting America, a.k.a. the Boy Scouts of America, where faith is imposed upon everyone.)

The bottom line is that the Girl Scouts are secular and these programs are purely optional.

What they do allow, however, is for third parties to offer patches to girls who achieve the goals of those outside groups. When those groups are religious, you might see patches awarded for religious reasons. This is so commonplace that there’s an entire Wikipedia page explaining which religious groups give out their own “rewards” to Girl Scouts. (This image just goes through the letter “C.”)

Here’s the thinking: The Girl Scouts, as a group, know there are a lot of faith-based organizations who want to participate in scouting, so this program gives girls a chance to see how their religious values overlap with the group’s mission. In the case that has conservatives all riled up, the Islamic Committee on Girl Scouting gives out their own awards for girls from Muslim families.

That’s why the pictures posted by Winters were from that group and can’t be found anywhere on the Girl Scouts’ official website.

All of this is innocuous. None of this is proof that the Girl Scouts of the USA is promoting any particular religion. It’s a way for girls from Muslim families to be rewarded for learning about the faith under the umbrella of scouting and for sharing basic information about their faith with people outside their community. (Because learning about different religions is a good thing.)

But people on the right hate education. So they’re claiming this is indoctrination. And the usual gang of the Dumbest People on the Internet began circulating the lies:

Again, the Girl Scouts are not rewarding girls for becoming Muslim. There are no official “Muslim badges.” You don’t get bonus points from the parent organization for wearing a hijab.

A Girl Scouts USA spokesperson sent me this statement in response to the misinformation being spread by right-wing liars:

Girl Scouts is proudly for every girl. Contrary to misinformation circulating online today, Girl Scouts is not a religious organization and does not teach religion. For more than a century, we’ve welcomed girls of every faith and background. Our national My Promise, My Faith pin invites girls to connect the Girl Scout Law with their own faith. Any other faith-based patches are developed by independent faith organizations, not GSUSA, and participation in these programs is always optional.

They issued the same statement separately on social media:

Naturally, the right-wing liars didn’t take it well. Winters doubled-down on her own stupidity: “This is modern feminism’s pathetic endpoint: Girl Scouts defending Islam’s incorporation into its programs—as Islamist regimes treat women as second-class citizens and stone them to death.”

Besides falsely equating the despicable acts of Islamic extremists with peaceful Muslims, she ignored the fact that the Girl Scouts is pretty damn open about saying religious groups can develop their own internal programs. They’re not interested in cherry-picking which religions are acceptable or not. None of this is exclusive to Muslims.

Maybe the funniest response came from the Washington Stand’s Joshua Arnold, who explained the (fake) controversy and the Girl Scouts’ response to everything… and still managed to come to the wrong conclusion (because his outlet isn’t interested in being honest with readers):

… the Girl Scouts’ approval of Muslim practice seems to go far beyond any favor it ever bestowed on Christianity. Did the Girl Scouts ever offer a badge for Christian evangelism? It appears that wokeness has once again led an organization into religious favoritism for Islam in the name of “diversity.”

…

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Girl Scouts approved the Muslim faith patches, thus allowing a very Islamic brand of scouting to advance under its auspices. At the very least, this seems to suggest a type of favor not shown to other religions.

All of that is bullshit. There are, in fact, badges that Christian groups give out and it’s not hard to find them. This is apparently the level of research you get from a “senior writer” at that conservative outlet.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group, issued a statement in response to the faux outrage:

In an emailed statement to Newsweek Robert S. McCaw, director of Government Affairs Department for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said, "Those seeking to manufacture outrage over Muslim girls and boys participating in scouting programs are not looking out for children but advancing an ideological agenda, using Muslim youth as fodder for sensationalism, clickbait, and the anti-Muslim hysteria that continues to plague public discourse in our nation."

Perfectly put.

Anyway, most of these conservatives are going to keep being angry over nothing, at least until next year when they have a chance to buy more boxes of Thin Mints and jump on it, because their brains are smooth and porous and they’re going to forget the entire incident by this time next week.

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Brittany Boltinhouse, the conservative Mormon woman who was named Miss North Carolina USA before her racist and bigoted social media posts led to her getting stripped of the title, has now filed a defamation lawsuit against the people who made that decision.

She says their statements led her to “suffer injury to her reputation, livelihood, professional relationships, and community standing.”

In case you need a reminder, Boltinhouse won the Miss North Carolina USA pageant back in June, which meant she would represent her state in the Miss USA pageant taking place this Thursday night.

But earlier this month, her victory was rescinded due to, as she put it, “my political stance and my belief system as a conservative Christian woman.”

Why was her title actually rescinded?

Turns out she had made several social media posts using racial slurs and promoting indefensible people and ideas.

The organization behind the pageant didn’t say any of this publicly. Instead, Miss USA’s President and CEO Thom Brodeur issued a statement saying his organization “does not tolerate racism, homophobia, transphobia nor language that strips any person of their dignity.” Furthermore, A Blaize Productions, which holds the license for Miss North Carolina USA, said that they revoked her title due to “previously undisclosed conduct and public content spanning multiple years that was inconsistent with the standards and responsibilities expected of a Miss North Carolina USA titleholder under the agreements governing the position.”

Despite all of that, Boltinhouse is now going after Brodeur, A Blaize Productions, and the company behind the Miss USA pageant for defamation.

In her lawsuit, filed on Sunday in the Duplin County Superior Court, Boltinhouse claims everyone she’s suing was out to get her… as if she did absolutely nothing wrong. It’s truly one of the most incredible “I’m the victim here” statements you’ll ever read and it reads like Boltinhouse is just ranting on social media.

… this case is about what Defendants did next: maliciously coordinating to publish a false public narrative portraying Brittany Boltinhouse as a racist, homophobe, transphobe, and intolerable bigot to be shunned from public life—then lied to the world that Brittany had confessed to being such an intolerant monster.

When these Defendants sicced an online mob on a young woman, they knowingly ensured her excruciating reputational destruction. Conspiring and understanding fully what they were unleashing, Defendants pretextually deployed Brittany’s nearly decade old social media posts as a teenager to remove her duly earned crown as Miss North Carolina USA. As the Defendants’ own audio recorded statements confirm, their true motivation was because Brittany’s political posts revealed she was a staunch supporter of President Trump, the assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk, and an open skeptic of President Biden’s “Transgender Day of Visibility.” Defendants’ coordinated publications generated devastating media coverage and instantly transformed Brittany’s public identity from the newly crowned Miss North Carolina USA into the target of widespread accusations of racism, homophobia, transphobia, and bigotry. Those accusations remain associated with Brittany’s name across the world.

First of all, if you’re a supporter of Trump and Charlie Kirk and an opponent of the Transgender Day of Visibility, then it’s absolutely fair to say you’re homophobic, transphobic, and a bigot. And if you use the N-word in social media posts (and you’re not Black), good luck fighting the racism charges. (Though she writes that her great-grandfather “ethnically self-identified all his life as a black, Afro Latino Honduran,” as if that makes her use of a slur okay.)

Boltinhouse also admits she was at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 (because of course she was) but that she went home right after Trump’s speech and never entered the Capitol. (Which could be perfectly true but still wouldn’t help make her look any better.)

It’s also ridiculous to pretend you were stripped of your title because you’re conservative when conservatives are basically the target audience for viewers of and participants in beauty pageants. (You think liberals are pushing to judge women for how they look in evening gowns and bathing suits?)

But this is a defamation suit. There needs to be proof that the Defendants purposely lied about Boltinhouse in order to defame her. What’s her proof?

Well, in regards to her use of the N-word, the lawsuit says Boltinhouse made those posts as a teenager and they “generated no comments, objections or outcry” at the time. But you could argue that she wasn’t a public figure then so no one was paying attention. If you run for office and people do a deep dive into your social media history (like people did with former Senate candidate Graham Platner), it’s fair game.

She also says the Defendants went after her because “she is a conservative Christian.” In that section, she admits that in 2024, she wrote that the mentality of Andrew and Tristan Tate (both alleged human traffickers) was “essential to have liberty and freedom.”

How can she possibly defend that? She writes that her “post about the Tate brothers… was no different from what prominent online members of the Trump family and Elon Musk have said.”

This woman is incapable of taking responsibility for any of the dumb shit she said, even in the recent past.

How does she prove the Defendants were out to get her? First, she claims they’re hypocrites. She says that when she competed in the Fitness portion of the Miss North Carolina USA pageant, the organizers played a Beyoncé song that includes the N-word in it. (It’s not clear from the lawsuit if that exact portion of the song was played when she walked across the stage, which seems like a very relevant detail!)

Another song that uses the N-word was also included in a social media post by Brodeur featuring a different contestant.

Boltinhouse writes:

If this conduct actually warranted removal from the pageant, surely Defendants would have immediately dethroned Miss West Virginia instead of amplifying her messaging.

That’s… an idiotic argument though. Playing a popular song with NSFW lyrics is very different from using the word in your own personal statements. Context matters. Boltinhouse seems unaware of that.

What’s her proof that her politics caused the Defendants to strip her of her title?

That section of the lawsuit is weirdly devoid of any proof. Instead, it notes how Brodeur posted on Instagram that “The Miss USA organization does not tolerate racism, homophobia, transphobia nor language that strips any person of their dignity”… followed much later by a section about how he had “seen Brittany’s statement [in response to all this]. There is ownership, accountability and apology. I respect that.”

In that same statement, by the way, Brodeur also writes about how “there is a young woman at the center of this… and she is still a human being with a family, a future, and a life ahead of her that is longer than this part of her journey” as a way to tell people to not treat Boltinhouse with disrespect.

Boltinhouse claims that Brodeur, with that statement, implied that she was apologizing for being racist and homophobic and transphobic. Which she did not do, she says, because she “is none of those things.”

Defendant Brodeur falsely, maliciously, wantonly and recklessly stated and implied that Brittany was a racist, homophobe, transphobe and bigot who should be shunned from public life, and that those qualities are why she lost her Miss North Carolina title.

(He very clearly did not imply she should be shunned from public life. If anything, he said the opposite.)

She hilariously adds that “No evidence exists to demonstrate Brittany Boltinhouse is or ever has been a racist, homophobe or transphobe” even though she spends a huge section of the lawsuit admitting to being a fan of Trump, Charlie Kirk, and the Tate brothers, and admits to using the N-word in casual posts on social media.

Another section of the lawsuit opens with a passage from Othello:

Calm down, lady.

Boltinhouse says in this section that she was sent a draft statement by A Blaize Productions that she could post on social media after losing her title. (This may have been the statement Brodeur was alluding to.) It gives her a chance to take responsibility for her problematic posts while also taking the high road. As far as a crisis PR statement goes, this one’s not bad.

… While this is incredibly difficult and heartbreaking, I respect the decision made by A Blaize Productions and the Miss USA Organization. I understand the responsibility that comes with representing an organization, and I recognize that my past actions and public statements have become a distraction from the mission and purpose of this title.

Over the past several days, I have been forced to confront parts of my past that I am not proud of. That has included a fight from my teenage years and social media posts I made as a young adult. Those words and actions were mine, and I take full responsibility for them. I do not seek to minimize them or make excuses for them.

To those who were hurt or disappointed by my past words or actions, I offer my sincere apology.

This experience has been painful, but it has also been humbling. It has reminded me that our words matter, our actions matter, and leadership requires accountability. While I cannot change the past, I can choose how I move forward, and I am committed to continuing to grow, listen, and become a better person.

Boltinhouse, however, never posted that. But everyone else was ready to move on and issued their own statements—including Brodeur, who referenced the statement from Boltinhouse that never ended up being public—which she now claims made her look bad.

She also cites, as evidence, an audio recording of the call she had with event organizers in which they told her why she was losing her title. At one point, an organizer says they’re personally offended she condemned the Transgender Day of Visibility because they’re trans themselves. In the recording, Boltinhouse openly admits she believes the Christian lie that then-President Joe Biden purposely designated that day to fall on the same day as Easter… even though, as many people have pointed out, that was purely a coincidence.

In other words, she cites the audio recording as proof that she was being picked on for her political views… even though her own transcribed comments make her look like a complete moron.

The organizers also told her in the phone call that there was no way to defend her statements because the repercussions would fall onto them. Supporting Boltinhouse’s bigotry would reflect poorly on an organization that celebrates diversity and inclusion.

Her defense? She had no idea the Tate Brothers were bad! Or that Charlie Kirk was a racist! She just “enjoyed their mentality” regarding finances and she had no idea Kirk said all these racist things (“You’re right,” she admits, when told about the horrific comments made by Kirk).

In other words, her defense for years of celebrating hate speech and awful people is that she’s too damn dumb to know what the hell she’s talking about. She believes that in itself should be proof that she’s not really bigoted. She’s just really fucking stupid. Therefore she deserves to be Miss North Carolina USA.

That phone call ended with the organizers telling Boltinhouse, “I’m so sorry, Brittany, again, to you”—their way of gently letting her down after explaining why they were revoking her title—which Boltinhouse then uses as evidence against them:

If the [Defendants] concluded her crown should be removed because Brittany was a racist, transphobe or homophobe, an apology would have been inappropriate to conclude the call.

Again, that’s just an idiotic thing to say. If you apply for a job and don’t get it, and the hiring person says, “I’m sorry, but you didn’t get the job,” that’s not proof of hypocrisy. That’s just them trying to soften the blow.

Boltinhouse then includes a transcript from a second call the same day, this one focused on what she should say to the public, including the pre-written statement she later chose not to post. Once again, the entire second call reads like someone trying to explain to an idiot why the totality of her public posts—and not just one thoughtless comment—is why she won’t be crowned Miss North Carolina USA.

Over and over, Boltinhouse doesn’t seem to understand any of this. She just acts like people are coming after her because she’s conservative, and religious, and a fan of the Tate Brothers’ financial advice.

The bottom line is that Boltinhouse is blissfully unaware of how racist, homophobic, transphobic, and downright stupid she is—and the moment people pointed it out to her, she decided to file a lawsuit that provides even more proof of her ignorance.

I guess she’s not familiar with the Streisand effect either.

The lawsuit doesn’t ask that Boltinhouse get the Miss North Carolina USA title back. Instead, it just goes after the Defendants for money for emotional distress, harm to her reputation, potential loss of income, etc.

You don’t have to be a lawyer to find the flaws in the case, though. You have a pageant winner who turns out to be a person with despicable, indefensible, bigoted views… to the point where organizers knew they couldn’t proudly promote her as their state winner. And when they tried to explain that to her, she doubled down on her own ignorance, claiming she had no clue any of these things were problematic. When the pageant organizers had to issue public statements, they were purposely vague, giving Boltinhouse the chance to leave with some dignity. She refused to take the offer. And now she’s decided that a lawsuit is her best path forward.

It’s just a whole series of bad decisions or bad advice. And there’s no reason this should get anywhere in a courtroom, much less lead to the jury trial she’s requesting.

It should be a reminder to everyone, though, that this is how conservative Christians act all the time when confronted with proof of their bigotry. Instead of just owning it, so many of them claim they’re victims of discrimination.

If only their faith taught them something about humility.

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Republicans are already shoving Christianity into the public school curriculum in Texas, but you’d be wrong to think they’re stopping there. The question conservatives are asking themselves is where else they can impose Christianity into schools with as little resistance as possible. A red state is one answer. Another is schools on military bases.

In fact, according to Associated Press, there are roughly “160 schools across 11 countries [which educate] roughly 70,000 students who are children of active-duty military or civilian service members.” And for high school students who need to fulfill a world history requirement for graduation, beginning this fall, one of their options will be to take a course called “Western Civilization to 1500,” that uses a textbook falsely suggesting Christianity has always been a force for good.

Titled “The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, Volume I: The Ancient World and Christendom,” it includes suggested lesson plans created in partnership with Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian school in Michigan that has also developed influential materials for K-12 schools.

Historians and educators who reviewed excerpts of the text told The Associated Press it depicts points throughout history in misleading ways, representing Western civilization and Christianity as one and the same and casting Islam as a threat to both.

A deep dive into the textbook shows how conservatives are lying to children about the country’s history in order to indoctrinate them early. It’s perfectly in line with what conservatives have been arguing for years now, that Christianity is and always has been amazing for everyonr, while Muslims and Islam are inherently evil.

The textbook’s authors credit early Christianity with promoting the idea that all people must be treated humanely. It argues that “Christian faith also supported a humane cosmopolitanism.”

The book describes Islam as inherently more violent than Christianity. In a chapter on the Middle Ages, the text describes Arabs as resentful or bitter toward Christians and Jews.

In a section titled “Holy War and Martyrdom in Battle,” the book describes wars fought by Christians, such as the Crusades, as intended to defend and protect other Christians. Islam, in contrast, glorifies violence and war, the book says, invoking the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and 9/11.

“In recent decades, Islam as a religion has, understandably, aroused acute hostility from a great many non-Muslims around the world thanks to the behavior of radical Muslim terrorists. Sometimes referred to as Islamists, their atrocities have been applauded by depressingly large numbers of ordinary Muslims,” the book says.

While the book goes through the year 1500, it’s safe to assume there’s nothing in the book about how “large numbers of ordinary Christians” in “recent decades” have celebrated ICE raids that terrorize communities of color, or the deportation of refugees who have lived in the country for years, or their tacit acceptance of Donald Trump’s constant stream of corruption and lies.

To argue that the Crusades were all about playing defense and to suggest the views of Islamic terrorists represent the official beliefs of Islam are exaggerations to say the least. That’s true now. That was true in the past.

But what do you expect when the textbook’s publisher is Roger Kimball, a conservative activist who unsurprisingly defended everything—literally everything—in the book?

The book’s publisher, Roger Kimball, said it was peer-reviewed by 15 experts. “As the proud publisher of this incomparable work, I stand behind it in every detail,” he said.

Creationists say things like that all the time. Getting 15 of your buddies to “peer review” your paper doesn’t make it legitimate. The AP managed to find multiple historians who said the book is trash, and I doubt they had to try very hard to find them.

All of this is in line with a broader push to Christianize the military in ways the American public probably won’t notice.

Last year, for example, the government announced that America’s military academies will begin accepting standardized test results from the Classic Learning Test (CLT), the shittier pro-Christian alternative to the more traditional SAT and ACT tests.

The AP also says the multiple administrators who run the schools on military bases have been replaced by right-wing alternatives. The chief academic officer, to name one, worked for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and “oversaw the rollout of a civics curriculum that was criticized for claiming America’s founders did not intend for a full separation of church and state.” Another administrator ran a series of charter schools in Atlanta that emphasizes “classical” education.

In other words, they were hired to push through these pro-Christian changes. It’s yet another example of how the Trump administration and Pete Hegseth don’t give a damn about service members or their families; now they’re screwing over the children of those members by indoctrinating them with a false sense of world history that will make them look utterly stupid if and when they go to a real college.

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In what feels like a callback to an ancient time of politics, a Democratic governor is attacking his Republican opponent by reminding voters he’s a Creationist who thinks humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time.

One of the benefits to living in a deeply blue state like Illinois is that statewide elections are mostly an afterthought. We have a fairly popular incumbent governor in JB Pritzker and a fairly unpopular Republican challenging him in Darren Bailey. When the two went head-to-head in 2022, Pritzker won comfortably. And because Republicans have no one on the bench eager to challenge a wealthy popular Democrat, Bailey is once again the nominee… which means Pritzker’s ads are essentially just reminding people of how batshit crazy the guy is.

One of his recent campaign ads is just a collection of Bailey’s past statements—saying he’s “pro-life” without exceptions, bragging about his AR-15, trashing LGBTQ people, etc.

Bailey’s only response to all this has been to say things like abortion is a settled issue in Illinois, so his views are irrelevant… which implies that he would gladly ban the procedure if he could, but the state’s Democratic supermajority won’t let him do it… which implies that voters should keep voting for Democrats.

But this strategy of reminding voters how extreme Bailey is hit hilarious and absurd heights last week during “Republican Day” at the Illinois State Fair when Pritzker decided to remind everyone that Bailey is also a Creationist.

In 2016, Bailey founded a private school called Full Armor Christian Academy that used textbooks from Bob Jones University Press. Those books famously say the Bible is literally true and inerrant… which is to say it promotes Young Earth Creationism… which is to say Bailey indoctrinated children into thinking humans and dinosaurs lived together. He’s off by over 65 million years. (The books also teach that slave owners were kind to the people they enslaved and it’s harmful to have women in the workforce.)

So at the fair, Pritzker had people in large inflatable dinosaur costumes running around with signs reading “dinosaurs against Darren Bailey.”

When Bailey was asked about those beliefs during an interview with WGN News, he had no good answers. If anything, he was mad anyone was asking him about his deranged Christian beliefs.

Appearing on WGN-TV’s “The Point,” Bailey was asked by the show’s host, Tahman Bradley, if he believed humans and dinosaurs coexisted. He never directly answered.

“Were you there?” Bailey responded.

“I wasn’t there,” Bradley said.

“I wasn’t either. I don’t know,” Bailey said.

The GOP gubernatorial candidate also said, “I think every day we’re learning wonderful things about history and the past.”

That’s obviously an idiotic answer. By his logic, it’s impossible to know anything that’s more than a century or two old. So Bailey was asked about it again.

Reporter: Could you comment on what they’re saying on their website, that you believe that dinosaurs and man walked the earth at the same time?

Bailey: Ask Fred Flintstone. It’s a shame that he’s doing this when Illinois is suffering. It’s absolute nonsense.

Reporter: So do you believe it though?

Bailey: It’s absolute nonsense. So Illinois is suffering with high expenses, with our safety. Our schools are failing and he’s focused on everything else besides that because he’s focused on running for president. Illinois, I hope wakes up and understands that and realizes we need something different.

And then, because that was another really idiotic answer, he was asked about it again:

Reporter: Darren there are voters who opinions will be swayed on whether people believe dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans. Do you believe it or not.

Bailey: I don’t [believe] anyone’s going to be swayed by that. I said it once. I’ll say it again, go ask Fred Flintstone and let him explain it because he needs to be focused and spending money on getting the message out on how he is going to make Illinois more affordable, safer and fix our schools and he’s refusing to do that.

It is deeply ironic that Bailey is reacting with a personal insult against Pritzker—”Fred Flintstone”—when he’s the one who thinks The Flintstones was a documentary.

In any case, it feels good to have a campaign that’s not directly about Donald Trump but about reminding voters that fundamentalist Christians like Bailey are too damn ignorant to run anything, much less an entire state. It’s also deeply funny that all of these criticisms of Bailey were part of Pritzker’s campaign four years ago, and Bailey still hasn’t figured out how to address them. The man hasn’t learned a damn thing—what else would you expect from someone who promotes textbooks from BJU?—and neither has the party that continues to nominate him as a sacrificial lamb with nothing of value to offer voters.

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There was a period in the 1990s when you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing the R&B band Color Me Badd and their songs like “I Wanna Sex You Up.” The band still exists and performs around the country as a nostalgia act, but that took a hit earlier this month when the daughter of one of the band’s original members, Kevin Thornton, shared stories about how he abused her in the name of religion.

Mikayla Thornton told the YouTube channel Soft White Underbelly that her once-famous father was a religious zealot who used a “rod of correction” on his kids, let her “date” a man who was 20 when she was only 15, and got away with this cruel behavior because he was considered a man of God. At one point, she even said her father’s behavior tainted religion for her sister: “To this day, my sister can’t stand to even look at a Bible because of the bruises she would have on her and the beatings she would endure… We were never safe.”

Saying that her parents were never charged by their behavior, Mikayla alleged, “They were so good at... They’re so good at making people believe that they are God’s, like, chosen people.”

“My relationship with my parents is so weird because all you want to do is love your parents. And all we ever have done is love our parents. We thought the world was against us because that’s what they would tell us,” she said. “It was a cult. My dad was the head; we were his disciples. We worshipped our father.”

A lot of what she describes, including the stick her father used to physically abuse her, appears to come right out of To Train Up a Child, the 1994 pro-child abuse manual written by conservative Christians Michael & Debi Pearl, though she doesn’t mention them or the book by name.

At one point, she says that when she began maturing and turning into a woman, her parents told her they hoped she would get in a car accident that would paralyze her—to the point that she would “become so dismembered and so disfigured in my face”—all so God would “humble” her.

The band has since responded to the interview by letting people know Thornton hasn’t been involved with the group since 2016 and their “hearts are with Mikayla”:

Color Me Badd is aware of the serious and deeply personal allegations recently brought forward concerning former member Kevin Thornton and members of his family.

We recognize the courage it takes for anyone to speak publicly about painful personal experiences. Our hearts are with Mikayla, her siblings, and all those affected by the circumstances described. We are lifting them, their families, and loved ones up in prayer during what is undoubtedly an incredibly difficult time.

…

Given the sensitive and deeply personal nature of these allegations, Color Me Badd will not comment on their substance or on private matters involving individuals who are no longer affiliated with the group.

Our sincere thoughts remain with everyone affected, and we continue to keep them in our thoughts and prayers.

It feels unfair to punish the band for what a founding member did when he hasn’t been involved with group in over a decade—unfair in the sense that headlines about this story invoke the band’s name because that’s the main way people are familiar with Thornton. But, sadly, the story itself is hardly unique. There are countless incidents like this one where men who claim to be serving God use that as cover or justification for abuse.

The irony is that Thornton has given interviews where he talks about how, when he was famous, “I used marijuana and alcohol but my real vice was girls.” And yet his worst behavior wasn’t connected to any of that. It was only after he claimed to be a devout Christian that his actions began to harm other people in a way that they still feel the effects of it decades later.

That’s why his daughter exposing what was happening behind the scenes is so important. She’s destroying the myth that a pop star who “finds God” and becomes religious becomes an inherently better person. If anything, Thornton went in the other direction.

Thornton himself hasn’t responded to the accusations, and he deactivated his Instagram page.

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A Christian metal band called Demon Hunter is suing Netflix for trademark infringement following the popularity of the movie K-Pop Demon Hunters and the announcement of an upcoming musical tour.

Is this the most important story ever? Not at all. But we all deserve some fun.

According to the federal lawsuit, the company behind the band, Hyde Lane, has been using the name “Demon Hunter” for nearly 25 years, and the band has “become one of the most successful and enduring bands in Christian heavy metal music... Blending metalcore, groove metal, melodic death metal, and alternative metal.”

But Netflix, “despite almost certainly being aware of Demon Hunter”—really?—released their movie anyway.

In short, in just a year’s time, Defendants have taken step after step to move into almost complete overlap with the goods and services offered by Hyde Lane under the DEMON HUNTER mark.

Hyde Lane says that the slight differences between their names doesn’t excuse what Netflix is doing. After all,

Netflix is no more entitled to use the mark KPOP DEMON HUNTERS than it would be to launch a recording artist, live touring show and merchandise under the marks KPOP METALLICA, KPOP U2 or KPOP BLACK SABBATH.

Except those bands are infinitely more popular than a genre-specific Christian artist that has had success within that bubble but is virtually unknown outside of it. (Admit it: This lawsuit is arguably the most attention the band has ever had.)

To be clear, the band isn’t going after the movie. They’re suing only after Netflix announced a global concert tour; the band says Netflix is now stepping into their lane, which is why they have to file the lawsuit.

But is there any actual proof that people are confused by the two? Did anyone hope to see the “Golden” singers only to realize they bought tickets to a Christian metal band? Apparently yes. In an email included in the lawsuit, someone messaged the band requesting a refund because she thought she was going to see the singers from the movie only to realize that’s not what she had paid for:

Hi Demon Hunter, I just purchased tickets to your show in Albany NY for May 2, 2026 and after I accepted the tickets I realized that you guys are not "K Pop demon hunters" and that my 5 and 6yr old girls will probably not fit in well at your concert. I thought I was purchasing tickets to a child friendly concet [sic]. I was way to [sic] excited and didn't pay attention. I spent almost $500 on the tickets because I wanted my girls to have a great view their very first concert and I really messed up. Is their [sic] anyway to refund me or get me a credit or something. If I dont get it refunded I will not be able to purchase tickets to the actual "K pop demon hunters show". Please help! Thanks for your time

That sounds more like a mother who didn’t do any research into what she was buying, no different from someone who buys tickets to a cover band thinking they’re about to see the real thing. Other pieces of evidence include an email from a TV producer hoping to speak to a songwriter from the movie, and people using the hashtag #DemonHunter to tag content about the film. (Hilariously, the lawsuit includes a screenshot of this, and it’s clear the person who posted it used a dozen hashtags covering anything and everything close to the film’s title, including #demonhunters and #demonhuntersgolden. In other words, the person wasn’t thinking about the Christian band at all.)

The band is also furious that when you search their name on Ticketmaster, the results prioritize movie-related events… since that’s what people actually want to see. Ditto with Google and Spotify. (It takes a certain level of Christian privilege to assume you should be ranked higher on those sites because you’ve been around longer.)

None of this, however, proves that Netflix is passing off its singers as members of a Christian metal band. It just shows that people make careless purchases, send misdirected emails, and use a variety of hashtags trying to cover their bases.

The lawsuit demands that Netflix stop using the name “KPop Demon Hunters” for anything music-related (like tours), along with payments for damages.

Netflix, not surprisingly, isn’t losing any sleep over this:

In a response statement Wednesday, Netflix said the lawsuit’s allegations were “without merit” and that the company would “look forward to vigorously defending this matter.”

While the band’s frustration is understandable, the question is whether this lawsuit has any merit. It’s worth noting that the lawsuit says the name “Demon Hunter” wasn’t trademarked by Hyde Lane until 2022… and yet Sony announced the film in 2021 (when Netflix bought it from them). Was there no evidence of confusion until the global tour was announced?

Obviously, I’m not a lawyer, much less a trademark expert. I’ll just say that commenters on the r/law subreddit argue that “demon hunter” is far too vague a name to win a case in this situation. There are also other technicalities with registering the trademarks that could make this a difficult case for the band to win.

It’s also not like “demon hunter” is a unique phrase. Hell, Wikipedia has a disambiguation page for the phrase because there are so many examples of it in use. The words come from centuries of religious mythology and decades of fantasy, horror, and popular culture. A Christian band chose a name built from those supernatural concepts, enjoyed some success within their Christian-metal ecosystem, and is now arguing that everyone else in the world of music and entertainment should have known to stay away.

The band is obviously entitled to protect its brand. Whether they can prove the Netflix movie is causing deliberate confusion, though, is going to be tough to prove in court.

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In a major ruling, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court will block the city of Quincy from erecting two expensive Catholic statues at the new “public safety headquarters.” The decision upholds an earlier preliminary injunction from a lower court judge while litigation proceeds. Church/state separation groups had sued to prevent the statues from going up, and those statues are currently sitting in storage.

I first wrote about this controversy last year when Quincy officials announced that their new $175 million headquarters, which would house the police department as well as the administrative offices for the fire department and emergency management, would include those religious statues. Specifically, the entrance to the building would feature two ten-foot-tall bronze statues of St. Michael the Archangel and St. Florian—the patron saints of police and firefighters.

Those statues were never presented to city council members when they were approving funding for the project between 2017 and 2022. Even more appalling, though, was the cost to taxpayers: $850,000, according to the Patriot Ledger, which first broke this story.

Not only were these statues religious icons that had no business in a government facility—much less at taxpayers’ expense—they were apparently approved by Mayor Thomas Koch without any feedback from or awareness by local officials.

Asked why the statues weren’t shown to councilors when they approved funding for the project at various points between 2017 and 2022, Mayor Thomas Koch said large projects like this one sometimes “evolve” and the idea “wasn’t on the table” when councilors cast their votes.

“You continue to revise,” Koch said. “The bottom line doesn’t change.”

These were Catholic statues that belonged in a church, not symbols of justice and safety meant for public consumption. They served no purpose. If you need religious icons to improve and beautify a $175 million facility, it’s time to fire the designers.

More importantly, these statues sent a message that non-Catholics were not welcome in this community. At the very least, non-Catholics were considered second-class citizens. It’s the worst possible message for public safety officials to send to people who may need their help. It’s the opposite of being welcoming and inclusive.

Koch is, not surprisingly, Catholic. But he attempted to convince council members that the statues had a secular purpose:

Koch said the saints “add interest” and “connect to the uses of the building.” Koch, a devout Catholic, pointed out that St. Michael is a figure common to Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

Neither statue carries strictly religious messages, Koch said, stressing instead their representation of bravery, courage and service, values which he said Quincy’s first responders exemplify.

“It seemed natural to do those images,” he added.

If you want to symbolize bravery and courage and service, and your mind immediately jumps to religion, you can’t argue it’s just “natural.” It’s natural only if you live in a religious bubble. This is the equivalent of putting up a giant Christian cross in front of the building and arguing it’s not religious but rather a secular symbol of peace. (That argument, sadly, has some precedent.)

But the questions didn’t stop Koch from moving full speed ahead with these sculpture. He hired Sergey Eylanbekov to make the designs—it’s not clear if there was even a bidding process for the statues—and they depict a winged St. Michael stomping on a horned demon and St. Florian pouring water on a burning building. (Why would the police department want their symbol to be a “good guy” stepping on the neck of a “bad guy”? Who knows. A depiction of police brutality seems like an image most officials would want to reject, not celebrate.)

One council member didn’t even try to hide the religious intentions of the statues:

Ward 1 Councilor Dave McCarthy, whose district hosts the new headquarters, approved of the statues. McCarthy said he was informed of the plans “a long time ago.”

The statues contain “a great message” and “will bless our first responders,” McCarthy said.

“It might help them,” he added. “They might say a little prayer before they go out on duty.”

If cops and firefighters need prayer to do their jobs well, perhaps the city should be investing more in their training instead of advertising for the Catholic Church.

In any case, once people learned about the statues, the backlash was instantaneous. City council member Dan Minton, a former police lieutenant himself, said on Facebook (in a now-deleted post) that he had no knowledge of these statues and categorically rejected them:

… Although this may provide spiritual comfort to some Officers, religion aside, the image of the angel brandishing a sword or spear to the devil to ward off evil, may not translate to contemporary times.

Although it is only a statue, the violent image is not the way Police Officers conduct themselves. I don’t know if this new statue is going to depict the same violent image but from what I have researched, most do. It made me think of brutal force and I don’t want citizens to connect this statue with the way our Officers treat anyone.

…

The Quincy Police Department has always had a solid reputation of compassion to all, often under unpredictable and stressful circumstances. The statue does not reflect this.

Generally, people don’t want to enter a police station -it is usually something bad that has happened, ranging from an act of violence to a simple parking ticket. The statue may not be a welcoming presence to someone already ill at ease.

The ACLU of Massachusetts also got involved, sending a letter to city officials that said the statues “violate the constitutions of Massachusetts and the United States” and also flew in the face of respect and religious plurality.

… the purpose of the statues is plainly religious. Although Mayor Koch has attempted to justify the statues as symbolizing the “universal concept” of good versus evil, saints are specific to certain sects of Christianity. They are neither ubiquitous nor secular…

By invoking the constitutions, the ACLU suggested that a lawsuit could be filed if the statues went up as intended. They urged the mayor and city council members to “cancel the plans to erect these statues.”

Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham summed it up well:

It’s one thing for a police officer to choose to carry around a medal that her faith says will offer divine protection. It’s entirely another to erect two giant effigies outside a public building that will be used by people of all faiths, or of no faith at all.

When the City Council held its next meeting—shortly after receiving that letter—there was an outcry from the public. An online petition to reject the statues said bluntly: “Mayor Koch, cut our losses and cancel this commission now.” It probably didn’t help that City Council President Ian Cain directed his anger at the anonymous person who informed the public about these statues:

… Cain went on to slam the “cowardice” of an unnamed person who leaked information on the statues to the newspaper.

“This wasn’t meant to open up a discussion with the people who work in government,” Cain said. “This was someone trying to embarrass us, which I don’t appreciate. The council should not be put in a position, whether by the mayor’s office or by anyone who wanted to subvert this, where we appear uninformed. That’s not good faith.”

It’s never good when a city official condemns a person for accurately telling a reporter what the city is doing. It’s only embarrassing because they got caught.

Mayor Koch resisted every attempt to reverse course. He was determined to let non-Catholics know they’re unwanted in this city and anyone who disagreed could just shut the hell up:

When a city councilor asked Koch’s chief of staff what those who oppose the statues should do, he essentially told them to go pound sand.

“Wait for the beautiful public artwork to appear on these buildings and enjoy it with the rest of the public,” advised Chris Walker. “The decision has been made.”

That stubbornness was opening the door to a costly court battle, though.

Shortly after that, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Freedom From Religion Foundation also got involved. AU noted it was acting on behalf of six Quincy residents who had a problem with the statues, and those residents could have standing in a future court case. They also pointed out that these statues were not legal because they were like putting up a Christian Nativity scene outside a courthouse: The only way you could get away with it was by including other religious (or secular) symbols alongside the Catholic ones.

“(Quincy) has far more in common with displays the Supreme Court has struck down as unconstitutional. ... Here, the two religious figures will be displayed by themselves and are designed to stand out and draw the eye.”

Courts particularly frown on religious messages from the police because they may foster belief that a benefit would come from conversion to Christianity, [AU attorney Ian] Smith writes.

What about the argument made by Koch that these are secular symbols akin to “In God We Trust”? The attorney also shot down that theory:

“The problem with this claim is that police and firefighters don’t invoke these figures for political reasons, they invoke them for religious protection,” Smith wrote. “These images have not been taken out of their religious context − they are used precisely because of their religious context.”

FFRF called on the city to “rescind its plan to place these religious statues in front of its new police headquarters in order to respect the diversity and First Amendment rights of Quincy residents.” Attorney Maddy Ziegler also pointed out the religious history of the statues:

Here, the statues are plainly religious in nature. Saint Florian was a Christian martyr who was canonized by Pope Lucius III. Saint Michael the Archangel is revered in the Catholic faith and plays a crucial role as a “defender of faith, protector of souls, and a symbol of divine justice.” Michael’s role in other faiths does not negate the religious nature of his figure—on the contrary, it further emphasizes that his statue serves no secular purpose. Neither of these figures have any significance outside of religious contexts.

The placement of statues of prominent Catholic figures in front of a government building indicates not only that the city favors religion over non-religion, but Catholicism over all other denominations. That members of a particular religion consider the two patron saints of first responders is irrelevant to the constitutional analysis. Patron saints are still unquestionably religious figures and their statues advance religion on government property.

But the city didn’t budge. Mayor Koch was more eager to promote his religion with taxpayer dollars than focus on the issues that would keep the city safer.

In May of 2025, FFRF, Americans United, the ACLU, and the ACLU of Massachusetts filed a lawsuit against the city. They represented clients “who practice a variety of faiths, including Catholicism, Judaism, and Unitarianism, as well as [clients who are] Humanist, atheist, spiritual, or do not identify with a single faith or religious organization.”

Those plaintiffs said the statues would, among other things, “violate her religious commitment to peace activism,” “have put her in the uncomfortable position of needing to speak out against statues of Catholic figures,” and “create an association between religion and the police department.”

The lawsuit, filed with the Norfolk Superior Court, said the city was violating Article III of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights (i.e. the state constitution), which protected religious equality. The plaintiffs were asking the court to block the statues from going up, to prevent any further funding of those statues, along with all associated legal costs.

“This is a clear breach of the constitutional wall of separation,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Quincy taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for an ostentatiously specific religious display.”

Rachel Davidson, staff attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts, says: “Mayor Koch has made the costly decision to proceed with the unlawful plan to install two larger-than-life statues of Catholic saints at the entrance to a public building in Quincy. This plan was conceived and implemented without public input and with total disregard for the concerns raised by constituents and local faith leaders. The statues send a message that the Quincy government favors one faith above all others. This flagrantly violates our state Constitution.”

“The city has abandoned its constitutional duty to remain neutral on matters of faith,” says Heather L. Weaver, senior counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The new public safety building will be home to many critical government services, but the moment they walk in the door, Quincy residents who do not share the city’s favored religious beliefs will get the message that they are not welcome.”

“Mayor Koch is abusing the power of his government office to impose religious beliefs on all Quincy residents,” says Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “The core principles of church-state separation and religious freedom promised in the Massachusetts Constitution require government buildings and other public spaces to be inclusive of people of all religions and none. By installing religious statues in front of the government building dedicated to public safety, Koch and the city are violating that promise and sending a message to all who rely on city police and fire services that one faith is favored over all others.”

And then, months later, that lawsuit succeeded. Justice of the Superior Court William F. Sullivan issued a preliminary injunction blocking the statues from going up. (It wasn’t his final decision, but it hit a giant pause button on what the city is doing.)

In his 26-page ruling, Sullivan wrote that the city has already spent “at least $761,378.75 in public funds for the creation of the statues” and more will still be needed for the installation.

The city had urged the judge to dismiss the case, arguing the plaintiffs had no right to sue just because they were “offended” by the statues and that they had no legal standing. But the judge rejected both of those arguments:

Defendants respond that Plaintiffs do not have standing under the declaratory judgment statute because they “are simply offended by the planned statues, and, unwilling to confine themselves to the ordinary means for airing ideological disagreements with the government—the political process—have sought to make a lawsuit of it”… The Court is not persuaded.

…

Given the prominence of the public safety building and the displays at issue, the intended multi-faceted use of the building and promotion of the public accessibility, and Massachusetts’ traditional recognition of broader constitutional protections under its constitution than federal courts interpreting the United States Constitution, there is no basis to conclude that Plaintiffs lack standing to assert their claims here.

…

In other words, [“proponents of abandoning offended observer standing” believe] greater harmony would exist if only minority sects would acquiesce to the majority position and accept subordinate status. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., this notion confuses the absence of tension with the presence of justice. Massachusetts law cannot countenance such a result.

…

In this Court’s view, giving a member of the public standing to challenge the overt presentation of Catholic symbols on the front of a public building does not amount to a “modified heckler’s veto.”

So the church/state side had legal standing. Great. But what about the merits of their argument? The judge agreed that these statues would be an endorsement of religion. In fact, he used both the Lemon Test (which the Supreme Court has killed off but which Massachusetts’ law has not) and the fictional “is it tradition?” question to explain why the statues failed every kind of religious neutrality test.

As to the Lemon Test, the judge agreed the allegations suggest “the decision to erect these particular statues was ‘motivated wholly by religious considerations’” and “cannot be separated from their religious symbolism.” Furthermore, “an objective observer would view these statues… as primarily endorsing Catholicism/Christianity and conveying a distinctly religious message.”

What about tradition? The judge said he didn’t care what the Founders might have thought about this. Even if Christianity was promoted by the government hundreds of years ago, it didn’t mean we needed to keep making the same mistakes:

… this Court does not base its understanding of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights solely on what its founders envisioned at the time they signed the document. To do so would perpetuate the petty bigotries of the past.

…

… To the extent that the forebearers at times have failed to uphold the ideals espoused in our state’s Constitution, it is not a basis for this Court, informed by two centuries of human experience, to shrink from its duty to ensure that promise of Article 3 is fulfilled.

Then, more to the point, the judge said the statues sent a message to the public that certain religious groups were looked down upon:

Victims and witnesses entering such a building often must overcome emotional and psychological hurdles, and intimidation to report crimes and seek police assistance. Central to their concerns is the question of whether the police will treat their claims with the gravity warranted and treat them equally as any other individual, regardless of religious beliefs. Viewed in this context, the Complaint raises plausible claims that the statues are not merely passive or benign but serve as part of a broader message as to who may be favored.

After considering all that, the judge said the Plaintiffs were “likely to succeed on the merits of their claim.” The statues were definitely promoting religion, allowing that to move forward would mean more taxpayer dollars being wasted on the project, and the mayor was full of shit:

The Court is not persuaded by the Mayor’s self-serving assertions, particularly in light of his curious actions of commissioning the statues without public knowledge. Regardless, the Mayor’s professed secular purpose offers nothing more than semantics. To the extent a statue of Saint Michael provides inspiration or conveys a message of truth, justice, or the triumph of good over evil, it does so in his context as a Biblical figure—namely, the archangel of God. It is impossible to strip the statue of its religious meaning to contrive a secular purpose. To be sure, the statute of Saint Florian, a historical person, is somewhat more nuanced. But given the manner in which the statue portrays Saint Florian (as larger than life and with allusion to his martyrdom) and its juxtaposition with the statue of Saint Michael, Plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of showing that the statues do not serve a predominantly secular purpose.

… The placement of two statues seemingly befitting a house of worship, on the exterior façade of the public safety building, overshadowing public access points, indicates the primary effect is likely to convey a religious message.

Ultimately, the judge said, he had to issue an injunction now because there were only two options: If the church/state side eventually won the lawsuit, this ruling would prevent the city from wasting more money on an illegal project. But if Quincy eventually won the lawsuit, they would merely be delayed in putting up the statues.

It was the right move and the judge has gave plenty of hints as to how he would eventually rule.

But the city appealed to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court before that decision could come down. And that court has now upheld the earlier injunction for many of the same reasons we heard earlier.

The SJC said the Plaintiffs have legal standing to bring this case, and the arguments are on their side, too:

In sum, the preliminary injunction record reflects that the statues are large and will stand alone, they are brand new rather than long standing, they are closely affiliated with a particular religion, and they thus may convey to observing members of the public implicit government support for that religion and, as a result, subordination of other religions. All of this supports the motion judge's conclusion that the plaintiffs have a likelihood of success on the merits.

…

… As the motion judge determined, the plaintiffs have demonstrated a reasonable likelihood that the city has violated important constitutional rights and has spent, and plans to continue to spend, taxpayer dollars in violation of those rights that will not be recoverable. Furthermore, as the motion judge determined and as the plaintiffs' declarations in the record supported, were the statues to be installed for the duration of this litigation, the plaintiffs and other members of the public would have to confront them regularly, experiencing feelings of subordination given their own religious beliefs or nonbeliefs.

The bottom line is that the statues are not going to go up despite the city’s demands—and the lawsuit to block them permanently will continue with all signs pointing to a permanent rejection of them.

“I’m thrilled with this ruling and I’m relieved that these statues will not be installed while we pursue our case against the city,” says Claire Fitzmaurice, a resident of Quincy and a plaintiff. “As a Unitarian Universalist, I cherish the principle of religious pluralism. I believe that Quincy should be a place where we welcome people from all faiths and backgrounds. To have these imposing religious statues looming over the entrance of the public safety building would fly in the face of that pluralistic ideal — especially as our city continues to grow more diverse. I look forward to our next day in court.”

It’s a huge win for religious freedom and a huge loss for Catholic supremacy. Because these statues were never harmless pieces of public art. They were Catholic monuments, secretly commissioned by a Catholic mayor, paid for with an obscene amount of public money, and designed to tower over residents entering a government building. The message was unmistakable: Catholicism enjoys a place of honor in Quincy, and everyone who isn’t Catholic is expected to be subordinate and keep quiet about it.

That message would be offensive outside any government office, but it’s especially disturbing at a public safety headquarters. A building devoted to protecting the public should never be branded with the religion of those in political power.

These statues deserve to remain in storage. Preventing them from going up isn’t anti-Catholic. It’s just a reminder that public spaces are for everyone.

There’s an irony in all this, too. A costly facility meant to improve public safety has become better known outside of Quincy for how it will exclude certain members of the community. But thanks to some brave Plaintiffs, excellent lawyers, and wise judges, city officials won’t get to promote their religion at taxpayers’ expense.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)