Subscribe now

The Congressional Freethought Caucus has added two more members: Rep. Val Hoyle (D-OR) and Gil Cisneros (D-CA).

Hoyle first entered Congress in 2023, but she’s been in politics for much longer. She served as commissioner of Oregon's Bureau of Labor and Industries in the four years prior to that. And from 2009 to 2017, she was in the State House, where she spent two of those years as Majority Leader. She is now a member of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure as well as the Committee on Natural Resources. She’s also part of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Congressional Equality Caucus.

She hasn’t always voted on the side of science, though; in 2023, she voted with Republicans to lift COVID vaccine mandates for health care workers, a move that put vulnerable people’s lives in jeopardy. She also initially voted for a racist immigration bill that the New Republic described as one that would allow “for the deportation and detention of any undocumented immigrant merely suspected of a nonviolent crime,” though she switched to a no vote for the final passage.

Cisneros is currently in his second (non-consecutive) term in Congress, and in between his terms, he served in the Department of Defense under the Biden administration. (Incredibly, this phase of his life began after winning the Mega Millions lottery in 2010.) He serves on the Armed Services and Small Business committees and is also a member of both the Congressional Progressive Caucus and Congressional Equality Caucus.

Like most of their colleagues in the CFC, neither Hoyle nor Cisneros is non-religious. The Pew Research Center, in their 2025 roundup, listed both as Catholic. Still, they support church/state separation and pledge to protect freedom of religion for everyone (including the non-religious).

The caucus now includes a record 35 members, all of whom are Democrats. As of this writing, the two have not made any public announcement about their CFC affiliation.

In case you need a refresher, the CFC was first announced in 2018 by Rep. Jared Huffman, currently the only openly Humanist member of Congress.

The 35 members now include:

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) (Co-cha)
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) (Co-chair)
Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI)
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA)
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN)
Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA)
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA)
Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL)
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.)
Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA)
Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA)
Rep. Julia Brownley (D-CA)
Rep. Kevin Mullin (D-CA)
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL)
Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX)
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA)
Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL)
Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT)
Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-TX)
Rep. Laura Friedman (D-CA)
Rep. Andrea Salinas (D-OR)
Rep. Emily Randall (D-WA)
Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ)
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY)
Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA)
Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL)
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR)
Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA)
Rep. Kelly Morrison (D-MN)
Rep. Sarah McBride (D-DE)
Rep. Ami Bera (D-CA)
Rep. Herb Conaway (D-NJ)
Rep. Val Hoyle (D-OR)
Rep. Gil Cisneros (D-CA)

(Eric Swalwell was a member of the CFC until his recent resignation.)

To be clear, this isn’t an “atheist club” for Congress, as some critics have suggested. This is just a group of lawmakers dedicated to promoting reason-based public policy, keeping church and state separate, opposing discrimination against non-religious people, and championing freedom of thought around the world. There’s really no reason anyone should be against this. That’s why there’s nothing hypocritical about the fact that nearly every member of the Caucus is religious.

The hope is that the membership continues growing—making the Caucus more influential—while the stigma of being an atheist (or even being associated with non-religiosity) decreases across the country. Those two things are more closely linked than we might imagine. Keep in mind that the Congressional Prayer Caucus, which typically promotes a version of conservative Christianity, is much larger and has members from both major parties. By that metric, the Freethought Caucus has a long way to go.

As I’ve said before, perhaps the most shocking thing about the Caucus is that, based on the relative lack of media interest, people don’t seem to care who the members are… which is to say, no one—not even in right-wing media—thinks it’s a big deal for sitting House members to align with a group defending atheists.

That also means none of these lawmakers believes the Caucus will be a concern for them during the second Trump administration. That may come as a shock to anyone who remembers a time when aligning (even remotely) with atheism was considered one of the biggest taboos in politics.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

Subscribe now

The former mayor of Spokane, Washington is suing her own city for $10 million because people had the audacity to criticize her for sharing a stage with a Christian Nationalist and a domestic terrorist (two different people, in this case).

It’s all part of a complaint that’s been dragging on for nearly three years.

Back in August of 2023, Christian Nationalist and COVID super-spreader Sean Feucht staged a worship event in Spokane, Washington that was attended by city council candidate Jessica Yaeger, failed candidate Natalie Poulson, and then-Mayor Nadine Woodward. All three women received prayers on stage from Feucht and former state lawmaker Matt Shea.

“We’ve got an enemy we need to fight. His name is Satan,” Shea proclaimed. “Father God, we pray a blessing over the leaders you have chosen for this time. … Give them courage, your courage, to stand on the foundation—the rock of Jesus Christ. Give them, right now Lord, unwavering ability to speak the truth into the darkness, and no matter what anybody says around them, they will glorify, honor, and praise you in every single thing they do.”

“I’ve had the privilege to pray over many mayors and many governors and even the president,” Feucht then declared. “But not every city in the world has a prophetic history like Spokane. … I pray God that you would give this mayor and her family and her team and the pastors in this region, God, that you give them revelatory wisdom and insight on how to steward what you want to do in this region.”

Right Wing Watch pointed out that Feucht and Shea have a working relationship. Earlier that year, Feucht accepted an award from Shea on behalf of his On Fire Ministries. This particular event was a reunion of sorts.

But since Shea’s name was invoked, it’s worth mentioning why he was no longer a politician.

In 2018, after nearly a decade in office, the Spokesman-Review published a four-page document in which Shea discussed the “Biblical Basis for War.” One section listed a penalty for men guilty of breaking “biblical law”: “If they do not yield — kill all males.”

Shea quickly insisted the line was being taken out of context. Somehow. Still, the document led to him losing his role as chair of the state’s Republican caucus. In 2019, he was exposed for being part of a chat room in which he and his buddies discussed violently attacking their political enemies. He was also found to be part of a group that planned and participated in acts of domestic terrorism. He also proposed the creation of a 51st state just for Christians. And he was fined nearly $4,700 for dumping oil at the State Capitol, effectively vandalizing historic masonry, because he didn’t like how The Satanic Temple was protesting outside. Oh, and he’s a fan of white nationalists.

Republicans pushed for Shea to resign, but he never did. Instead, in mid-2020, he simply chose not to run for re-election. Perhaps he saw the writing on the wall that he would’ve been voted out and decided to quit instead.

But by 2023, like clockwork, he was running a ministry and wrapping himself in even more Jesus so he could keep pretending he’s a martyr for the cause.

That’s the guy Mayor Woodward decided to cozy up to on stage. As if Feucht wasn’t bad enough.

Hours after the event, facing immediate criticism, Mayor Woodward claimed the event had been “politicized” in a statement that deflected from her own actions. (This portion of her statement was buried underneath a larger statement about wildfires.)

… I am deeply disturbed that Matt Shea chose to politicize a gathering of thousands of citizens who joined together yesterday to pray for fire victims and first responders. I attended the event with one purpose only and that was to join with fellow citizens to begin the healing process.

Shea didn’t politicize the event. The event, like everything Feucht did, was political. It was a celebration of Christian Nationalism, and the mayor was all too happy to join in. How could you possibly go to any event with either of those two guys, then act surprised when they both did they very things they’re famous for?

The Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party only ever has one item on the agenda.

A second statement came out hours later:

“I did not seek, nor do I accept any support from Matt Shea. I am opposed to his political views as they are a threat to our democracy, and I regret my public appearance with him. I was invited to share in prayer with several thousand citizens out of heartfelt concern for fire victims, first responders and our whole community. I was not aware that he would be at the event last night and it only became apparent as I was walking on stage that he would be leading the prayer. I should have made better efforts to learn who would be speaking at the event.

There will be plenty of time to discuss political positions during the rest of this campaign. Now, as our region is hurting and our focus is on friends, neighbors, loved ones and the response effort, is not the time. All day yesterday not one fire victim or first responder asked me about my political views. But they did ask us to pray for them.”

If she saw him on stage, why didn’t she have the courage to condemn him there? Why not just leave? How do you show up to an event hosted by Shea’s ministry and not realize he might be there? Why was she okay with Sean Feucht being there?!

Her statements never answered any of those obvious questions and they were just the culmination of a slew of idiotic decisions that any politician of a big city could have avoided with an ounce of common sense. Furthermore, for someone who insisted she was deeply concerned about wildfires, the last thing that would help the people in her community was a prayer rally. If she wanted to thank first responders, she could have visited a fire department. She chose not to.

It didn’t help that the one person who insisted Woodward knew exactly what she was doing was Matt Shea himself:

This is an annual event planned months ago to worship Jesus. https://letusworship.us It wasn’t for “fire victims.” She was invited and she accepted BEFORE the fires started on Friday. However, we of course wanted to pray last night for all those who have lost everything and be there for them and also pray for our leaders. Praying for leaders, especially during a crisis, isn’t political it is Biblical. She is the one that politicized what everyone knows was a worship event. We are praying for Nadine.

I don’t say this often, but the Christian terrorist was right.

Woodward was lying. Which became a problem for her since she was running for re-election.

Ben Stuckart, a former Spokane City Council President who lost the 2019 mayoral race against Woodward, rightly pounced on her flimsy excuse:

“It’s just so disgusting,” Stuckart said. “If a Christian white nationalist asks you to stand up on stage and be prayed for, you say … ‘No,’ and you leave the room the moment you figure out that person is there.”

“You don’t go to white Christian nationalist events, put on by Christian nationalists and not expect the Christian nationalists to be there,” he said.

Stuckart called on Woodward to resign, saying she had irreparably damaged her legitimacy and sent a dangerous message to vulnerable and marginalized residents.

Woodward’s main opponent in the mayoral race, Lisa Brown, didn’t call on her to resign, but shared in the condemnation, saying Woodward “should be disavowing Matt Shea, an anti-woman anti-LGBTQ extremist, associated w political violence.”

They had a point. If you don’t have the courage to denounce white Christian Nationalism and two of the harmful movement’s leading proponents, then you have no business running a big city. The best-case situation for Woodward was that she prioritized public prayer over the people praying alongside her, but even that decision would be utterly pointless during an emergency. A better leader would’ve left the God-talk to everyone else while she took action. Instead, Woodward chose to pray with people who have spent their careers physically hurting or threatening the people around them. That’s where Jesus led her.

It created a problem for the elected officials closest to her, because they sure as hell didn’t want to be associated with any of this. So that September, the City Council passed a resolution denouncing Woodward’s actions that “associated her with former Washington State Representative and alleged domestic terrorist, Matt Shea, and known anti-LGBTQ extremist Sean Feucht.” It was a 4-3 vote. (You can read the full resolution on page 429 here.)

When the mayoral election took place that November, Woodward lost to Lisa Brown 48% to 37% (with other candidates picking up the rest of the votes). Brown remains the mayor of Spokane to this day while Woodward has spent the past few years on a vengeance tour (when she’s not selling real estate).

What does that look like in practice? Well, in mid-2024, she filed a claim—a predecessor to a lawsuit—against the city over that resolution, insisting it was an illegal attack on her free speech and an attempt to interfere with the election she eventually lost. She demanded they (a.k.a. the taxpayers) hand over $1.4 million to make up for it.

“A four member majority of the Spokane City Council, in violation of the state and federal constitution, ‘condemned’ speech by Woodward which speech is protected by the state and federal constitutions. The City Council did so with the intent of interfering with the then-upcoming mayoral election and promoting the candidacy of Woodward’s opponent,” she wrote in the claim. “The council’s violations of speech and association rights and election interference.”

According to the document, Woodward is prepared to settle with the city for $1.4 million.

The city never responded to that claim. So now Woodward is trying to wring even more cash from Spokane. (Or, as her lawyer explained to me, “I reviewed her earlier effort, and I revised her claims to what they should be, with proper damages given the number and the nature of the violations.”)

To that end, they just filed an amended claim demanding $10 million from the city because those council members supposedly destroyed her reputation:

Woodward says the city and the council members violated her constitutional rights with that resolution that that the actions “irreparably damaged and continues to damage Woodward in her professional and personal reputation.”

The claim says the city’s action “resulted in harassment..by the media, estrangement from her social group, supporters and neighbors, and loss of business and professional opportunities.”

It never seems to have occurred to her that, maybe, no one wants to be her friend or colleague because she’s going to prayer rallies hosted by the worst people, and that’s not the fault of anyone who points it out and condemns her for it. Anyone who willingly attends a Sean Feucht event, and anyone who receives prayers from a domestic terrorist, is already setting themselves up for criticism. The resolution simply put a city stamp on what many people in the community were already saying.

(For what it’s worth, Sean Feucht filed a lawsuit against the city for the same basic reasons, and a judge dismissed the case in 2025, saying there was no legal merit to it. Because of course there isn’t.)

Woodward says in the claim that she wants the resolution to be declared unconstitutional and vacated. As if anyone would even remember it if she didn’t keep drawing attention to it herself.

In the claim, Woodward asserts that the city’s actions “imposed a scarlet letter on [her], which took over the election cycle.”

“The legislative action required [Woodward] to divert all available resources and time to defending and defusing character assassination.”

The claim says Woodward “continues to suffer ongoing injury, including vitriol, backlash and threats, all of which has caused [Woodward] fear of physical harm.”

If Woodward didn’t want to be associated with Christian extremists, all she had to do was denounce Christian extremism, and Sean Feucht, and Matt Shea, and everything they stand for, and admit she was completely delusional to think her prayers were going to make a damn bit of difference in response to wildfires. And she should have done it all in real time instead of issuing a half-hearted apology to some of that only after she got caught.

Demanding millions of dollars because she doesn’t know how the Streisand effect works—and keeping this story front and center instead of moving on after her election loss—is like blaming your camera for an ugly selfie. Your anger is aimed in the wrong direction.

Woodward says the resolution violated her free speech rights, but no one was ever stopping her from attending the rally or participating in it. She’s mad because people didn’t like what she was doing and called her out on it. She’s upset that there are consequences to her actions. The Constitution doesn’t owe her praise no matter what ridiculous things she does. She fucked around; now she’s finding out.

Her lawyer didn’t make things any better by trying to equate free speech with consequences for that speech:

Neither federal nor state constitutions allow the legislature to punish its mayor for showing up and listening to whatever political or religious views are being discussed in our community, whether the mayor agrees with those views or not. That is the mayor’s job," [Mary] Schultz told KREM 2. "Legislative bodies simply cannot legislate speech, and that is exactly what the City Council did."

Again, they didn’t “legislate speech.” They didn’t even punish her. More importantly, she didn’t merely show up and listen. That makes it sound like she was randomly inside the building when a prayer circle just arose out of nowhere. The truth is she actively participated in an event run by extremists. The council members said they didn’t stand by what their mayor did, and they wanted the city to know she wasn’t speaking on their behalf. They didn’t prevent her from doing anything. She just mad because it turns out the people of Spokane aren’t fond of religious extremism and don’t want leaders who are.

For now, while a draft lawsuit has been written up, it hasn’t been formally filed. And if she wants to avoid further embarrassment, she’d be wise to just let this thing die instead of drawing more attention to her poor decision-making.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

Subscribe now

The White House’s ridiculously named “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias” has just released its final report summarizing all the ways Christians are persecuted in America and how we can fix it.

It’s as absurd as you’d imagine.

A quick history here: Last year, Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing this group and the commission really only had one job: Putting out a report highlighting any “unlawful anti-Christian policies, practices, or conduct by an agency” and suggesting how to fix them.

The Task Force was filled with the brightest minds in the Administration. Which is to say they had one brain cell that was passed back and forth between each other.

Was it all symbolic? Perhaps. But it could be useful if experts on the subject were coming together to offer the administration a guide on how to overcome serious obstacles to religious liberty.

Unfortunately, this commission wasn’t filled with religious liberty experts. It was filled with right-wing Christian crusaders who treat religious neutrality as anti-Christian persecution. And who quote Pulp Fiction when they mean to quote the Bible.

You would think the people who make up the most popular religion in the country, and 87% of Congress, and 98% of elected Republicans are doing just fine. Complaining that Christians have it rough is like saying the problem with racism in America is that it really hurts white people. But as we’ve seen with the recent Supreme Court ruling eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, that’s very much what these people believe.

When the Task Force held its first meeting last April, it was obvious where this was going. Attendees included several notable right-wing Christians, including Pastor Paula White-Cain, homeschooling advocate Michael Farris, and the provost of Liberty University. You just knew they were going to compile a list of conservative Christian grievances—How dare anyone say “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”?—not an actual list of federal biases that exist against Christians, much less ways to fix anything, because no such thing exists.

Their preliminary report, issued last September, was nothing more than a collection of complaints from various Cabinet departments along with a preamble that laughably claimed there was “a consistent and systematic pattern of discrimination against Christians during the Biden Administration.”

But now their final report has been released. It’s 565 pages aimed at an audience of Christian extremists who have no idea how religious pluralism ought to work. It’s also full of lies and exaggerations about how Christians are supposedly persecuted in the country. (The substance of the report is under 200 pages.)

The executive summary sums up just how pointless this whole exercise was by repeating the lies underlying Christian Nationalism: “Our Nation’s origin and system of government bear the imprint of a Christian worldview and ethic, even as its laws protect religious pluralism.” Hilariously, they admit the Biden Administration “generally tolerated religious beliefs that were privately held” but insist that Christians got in trouble when they demanded the ability to “act in accordance with their faith.”

Well… yeah. If your religion tells you to do something discriminatory or ignore generally applicable rules (like vaccine mandates), and you work for the government, too damn bad.

But what examples do they actually give of this discrimination?

There are 14 “Key Findings” and each one is dumber than the last.

Key Finding 1: The Biden DOJ pursued aggressive prosecutions against non-violent, prolife, Christian demonstrators under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act but responded less aggressively to violent attacks against pregnancy resource centers.

They’re upset that the Department of Justice under Biden targeted Christian protesters who blocked access to abortion clinics. Not because they opposed abortion but because they blocked access to abortion clinics.

That’s not anti-Christian discrimination at all.

Key Finding 2: The Biden Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated, monitored, tracked, and scrutinized traditional Catholics who had engaged in no criminal misconduct.

I’ve written before about how this story is bullshit. Basically, an internal FBI memo pointed out that a guy they were looking at as a potential terror threat hung out at a church that described itself as Catholic but wasn’t formally affiliated with the Catholic Church. He also appeared to be recruiting members for a possible attack. When a couple of FBI analysts wrote up their report on this guy, they noted the link between his extremism and his faith, though they pointed out this guy was on their radar before he ever joined that church.

Those analysts later found that there were other men on the FBI’s radar that had similar extremist ideologies and belonged to a similar church. So they noted there might be a link there worth investigating. But higher-ups in the FBI rescinded that report saying it “failed to adhere to FBI standards” because of a number of other errors in it and that the agency did not conduct investigations “based on religious affiliation.” (It should be noted that the draft report was never even made public, but it was leaked to a right-wing outlet before it could even be scrutinized.)

That’s not anti-Christian bias. 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!) Yet the DoJ cited it as an example of the Biden administration targeting people of faith while leaving out the details that would have justified those actions.

Key Finding 3: The Biden Internal Revenue Service (IRS) investigated churches because of what their pastors preached and Christian organizations because they applied biblical teachings to daily life.

This never happened. By this point, it’s well-documented how right-wing pastors constantly violate the Johnson Amendment—by promoting political candidates from the pulpit—but face no consequences because of it. There’s no evidence of the IRS targeting churches because of what pastors preach. (Notice also that they say “investigated” and not “punished.” There’s nothing wrong with looking into potential violations of the law.)

And the word-salad description of how Christian groups were targeted “because they applied biblical teachings to daily life” is nonsense. The report says the IRS denied a non-profit tax exemption to one (just one) political group that justified its planned campaign interventions by invoking biblical language. Even if you believe that’s the wrong decision—it’s not—it’s literally one example. Not evidence of an anti-Christian trend.

Key Finding 4: The Biden Department of Education (ED) focused its enforcement actions against Christian universities, levying enormous fines that dwarfed the penalties for Larry Nassar’s and Jerry Sandusky’s sexual assaults.

Neither penalty was an example of “anti-Christian bias.”

In 2023, Biden’s DoE levied a $37.7 million fine against Grand Canyon University because there was ample evidence that the school lowballed its tuition fees to reel students in… before hitting them with larger fees once they were already taking classes (and it was therefore harder to leave).

The government laid out, with plenty of detail, how the school lied about tuition on its website, its enrollment agreement, the “Net Price Calculator” that students could use online to figure out how much they would owe, and other marketing materials. This wasn’t, in other words, some accident on one page of GCU’s website; it was clearly a purposeful move to attract students before gouging them later.

But the Trump administration rescinded that penalty because it doesn’t give a shit about students who were defrauded by the school.

What about Liberty University? They were fined $14 million for violating the Clery Act, meaning the school created a culture where students were afraid to report sexual violence and didn’t do nearly enough to let students know about threats on campus. A consultant who spoke to the Washington Post said it was “the single most blistering Clery report I have ever read. Ever.” (For the sake of comparison, the largest-ever Clery fine issued before that was $4.5 million to Michigan State for failing to address Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse.)

Punishing schools for not taking sexual assault seriously and for jacking up tuition costs after students have enrolled was never ideological. Biden wasn’t weaponizing the government to go after Christian schools. His administration did the kind of oversight it’s required to do of any school that receives taxpayer money—and both Liberty and GCU benefit from government-funded student loans.

In other words, the Biden administration didn’t target Christian schools. They went after schools that were screwing over their own students, and two of those schools happened to be Christian.

Key Finding 5: The Biden Health and Human Services (HHS) and DOJ scaled back ongoing enforcement efforts to vindicate conscience rights, withdrawing a notice of violation against the University of Vermont Medical Center after it coerced a Christian nurse into participating in an abortion despite her religious objections.

In this case, in 2017, the University of Vermont Medical Center began offering elective abortions but said staff members who objected didn’t have to participate. They just needed to let the school know if they objected to “medically necessary” abortions, elective abortions, or all abortions. But if the school couldn’t arrange for someone else to take your place, then the expectation was that you would help out to make sure patients were taken care of. A Catholic nurse was later put in a situation where she had to help out with an abortion procedure against her objections.

The Biden Administration later helped the school develop a policy that protected patients and allowed staffers to refrain from those procedures. That’s good, right? Not to the Task Force, which said the Biden people weren’t as deferential to religious staffers as they could have been because they “resolved active enforcement matters through administrative means, if possible, rather than litigation.” Right… because not everything has to go through the courts. Sometimes, you can just take care of things yourself. That’s not anti-Christian bias.

Other items on the list of Key Findings point to policy positions taken by the Biden Administration that basically boil down to laws that conservatives don’t like. If taxpayer dollars went to foster care agencies, for example, Biden’s people wanted to make sure potential parents weren’t making life worse for LGBTQ children. But the Task Force calls this anti-Christian.

There’s also this:

Key Finding 10: The Biden Administration sidelined Christians in favor of their preferred constituencies.

They seriously cite the example of Biden issuing a proclamation in 2024 celebrating the Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31, just as he did in 2021 and 2022 and 2023, saying that trans people were “part of the fabric of our Nation” and that we need to “work toward eliminating violence and discrimination based on gender identity.”

In 2024, however, March 31 coincidentally overlapped with Easter. So conservatives pretended that the Transgender Day of Visibility proclamation was anti-Christian… as if Biden picked the date as a middle finger to his own religion.

Key Finding 13: Biden agencies’ religious accommodation process often functionally penalized Christians who sought to exercise their religious rights.

This one claims the Biden Administration targeted Christians who were just practicing their faith… when the reality is that, when COVID vaccines were finally available, the government wanted federal employees to get vaccinated and they didn’t offer blanket exceptions for Christians who believed anti-vax conspiracy theories. Which was the right move because vaccines work and not getting vaccinated puts everyone in harm’s way.

You get the idea.

Some of the biggest examples of “anti-Christian bias” in this report aren’t systemic attacks on religion at all, but just examples of Christians behaving badly and getting punished for it. Apparently, Christians should be allowed to get away with anything they want under the Trump Administration.

The report concludes:

The Task Force found that, in its zealous pursuit of its preferred policies and constituents, the Biden Administration engaged in anti-Christian bias, seeking to limit Christians’ ability to act in concert with their sincerely held beliefs in their homes, in the workplace, and in the public square. At times, it went still further, leading Christians to reportedly choose between their beliefs and compliance with federal law. And, most troublingly, the Biden Administration is alleged to have prosecuted and jailed peaceful Christian pro-life demonstrators, terminated or harassed Christian workers who did not comply with the vaccine mandates, targeted Christian organizations with IRS inquiries, and subjected Christian schools to excessive fines. Taken together, the findings presented by the Task Force raise serious concerns about whether certain Biden-era policies and practices were administered in a manner consistent with the Constitution and applicable federal law. These concerns implicate core American commitments—religious liberty, equal treatment, and the rule of law—that protect all Americans of faith and conscience.

It’s all bullshit. This entire idiotic charade just shows how the Biden Administration wasn’t waging war on Christianity at all, but rather treating Christians the same way they did everyone else and not allowing claims of “But Mah Religion” to override health and safety and generally applicable laws.

Unfortunately, we now live under a regime full of powerful conservative Christians who want to weaponize victimhood to shield themselves from accountability.

To call any of this persecution is an insult to the very concept of oppression.

This report is not evidence of discrimination; it is evidence of entitlement. These Republicans don’t give a damn about freedom of religion. All they want is freedom from consequence. They want right-wing Christians to be allowed to operate above the law, unchallenged and unaccountable.

To state the obvious, ”anti-Christian bias” shouldn’t be ignored. Neither should bias against any other group. If it happens in a government agency, it should be punished. The problem here is the underlying theory that Christians suffer more discrimination than other religious groups.

If these are the best examples of anti-Christian discrimination they have, they’ve got nothing. They’re just proving what many of us have been arguing for years: Cries of anti-Christian persecution in America are not about protecting faith, but about protecting power.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State called out the uselessness of this report:

“The Executive Summary alone confirms what we have been saying all along: The administration’s claims that it has uncovered extensive evidence of anti-Christian bias within the federal government are unfounded. Instead, the report just repeats the misleading examples the Trump administration has been using since Day 1. The task force is doing exactly what we expected: imposing its narrow view of Christianity on the country and attacking freedom and equality, especially for women and LGBTQ+ Americans.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation said this was a “political document masquerading as a civil rights analysis.”

“The bogus findings of the ‘Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias’ were always a foregone conclusion,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor, “since the purpose of the task force was to presume and look for bias against only one class, conservative Christians, and seek to expand protections only for them.”

The Interfaith Alliance’s Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush said the Trump Administration ought to look in a mirror:

“Trump’s radical DOJ’s new report is abominably hypocritical. To find anti-Christian bias, the Trump administration should look in the mirror at its own targeting of Christian communities and leaders who dare to oppose its extreme agenda. From attacking Pope Leo to Bishop Budde to so many others, this president has repeatedly threatened and clashed with many of the most prominent Christian denominations in our country.

…

Given President Trump’s own very public disrespect for Easter – and shocking portrayal of himself as a Christ-like figure in social media posts – the idea that his administration is somehow prioritizing the traditions and values of the Christian faith is absurd. Reports and stunts like this are meant to distract from the admin’s persecution of millions of Americans – including the many Black Christians across the South whose civil rights and political freedoms are directly targeted by yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling.

They make solid points. If you want real examples of Christians getting harassed for their beliefs, you won’t find them in this report. In January, just after Trump was inaugurated, a religious leader politely asked Trump to follow Jesus and have mercy on the marginalized. Republicans responded to Bishop Mariann Budde by saying she should be “added to the deportation list” (she was born in New Jersey), implied that she was an idiot, and insisted that she was bad at her job.

More recently, Trump has threatened to deport millions of Christian immigrants.

Those are far more direct examples of anti-Christian bias than anything you’ll find in this report. If you want to protect Christianity, you’d be better off ridding the administration of all the people who make Christianity look bad… which is damn near everyone.

And if you think the Trump Administration is interested in leveling the playing field for Christians, you’ve been lied to. They want to make sure “I’m Christian” is always an acceptable excuse for certain people to get away with anything they want, whether it’s ignoring civil rights laws, putting patients in danger, or promoting bigotry with taxpayer dollars. That’s the only kind of Christianity they care about.

It’s not like they have examples of Christians wanting to help the poor only to be stymied by Democrats.

This Task Force was always a sham and this report proves it.

For what it’s worth, the Task Force says one more report will be published next year outlining policy recommendations for the future.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

Subscribe now

There’s Christian hypocrisy. And then there’s writing a book about the importance of biblical marriage only to get arrested because you’re secretly married to multiple people.

In 2017, Leslie Williams self-published a book called Love Her Like This: Loving Her Has Never Been Deeper (affiliate link) all about the “type of love a man should have for his wife.” It was also an advice book that dealt with common issues that come up in marriage, the sort that “have the potential to destroy the sacred relationship between a husband and wife.”

All of that was an extension of his work at the Leslie Williams Ministries, a group whose goal was to empower people “to strengthen their relationship with God, each other and with new disciple recruits.”

Last week, however, the 62-year-old Florida man was arrested after an officer found that he was wanted in Georgia for alleged bigamy.

Authorities transported Williams to the Sumter County Detention Center, where he remains held pending extradition to Georgia authorities to face prosecution on the bigamy charge…

The Florida document does not include details about the underlying allegations in Georgia beyond the bigamy charge…

It’s not clear how people realized he actually had more than one wife, but it probably didn’t help that he recently posted about getting married on Facebook, only to have someone chime in with “Wow I thought you were already married. Congratulations!!”

That same week, he changed his Facebook cover photo to one of his new (latest?) wife… but it was taken down just weeks later and replace with an image of his dog, then his car, then his dog and car together. His page now says he’s “single.”

If you go back in time, there’s even more. In May of 2024, Williams posted about his “ex wife,” saying she had accused him of “domestic violence 4 different times.” He denied everything. Was she actually his ex-wife, though? Did the paperwork not go through or something? Did they just walk away without telling the courts? Who knows.

The reporting on all this doesn’t actually get into the details of Williams’ personal life, only the salacious charge against him. Fox News Digital noted that he lives in The Villages in Florida, a famously conservative retirement community, calling it a place for “swingers” and “unusually high rates of sexually transmitted diseases.” But there’s nothing to back up those claims much less any evidence that’s what he was doing.

Whatever the case, in Georgia, a bigamy conviction could lead to between one and ten years in prison.

Until that time, it’s possible his book will get a publicity boost given that he appears to be an expert in marriage given all this practice. One recent reviewer even alluded to that on his book’s Amazon page:

I was skeptical at first but, after finding out you had multiple wives, you must know what you’re talking about sir. You just got yourself another customer.

Brilliant trolling.

It’s very easy to crack jokes about this whole situation, but there is something serious at the heart of it. Because Williams didn’t just quietly fail at living up to his own ideals; he built a platform around those ideals. In that way, he’s not that different from young white evangelical women who pretend to be experts on intimacy despite having relatively no experience in the bedroom.

Plenty of people have marital problems. That’s not unusual. But when you write a book about how to be a great partner, when it’s not something you’re putting into practice, you’re setting yourself up for mockery. So much for Christian values.

Even if this is a extreme situation, it’s also not that weird. We’re so used to seeing Christians who obsess over other people’s marriages—by policing same-sex couples, calling for the end of no-fault divorces, etc.—who have little to say when their own leaders break those rules.

It’s not that Williams is uniquely corrupt. It’s that he’s part of a culture where hypocrisy is expected and the only question is what kind.

Subscribe now

The Kansas Republican Party is accusing a Christian pastor of unfairly using his megachurch platform to promote a political candidate.

That sound you hear is your irony meter breaking. But their justification is worth exploring, and so is the way this pastor’s church is handling a delicate situation.

Two months ago, Adam Hamilton announced that he was thinking about running for the U.S. Senate from Kansas. He needed time to go around the state, talk to voters and potential donors, and figure out if he would be a viable candidate before making it official.

The reason he thought he might even have a shot here is because he’s already a leader of sorts, having founded the United Methodist-affiliated Church of the Resurrection over three decades ago. It’s now the largest UMC congregation in the country and one of the largest in the world, with over 24,000 active members spread out over nine locations.

What makes Hamilton unique is that he’s hardly a fundamentalist preacher. He has admitted there are “hundreds” of mistakes in the Bible (though he believes in the overall arc of the story). He has said it’s wrong for churches to prohibit women from being ordained as preachers. He supports social justice. And he’s been a supporter of the United Methodist Church’s inclusive position on openly gay clergy members and its decision to allow clergy members to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies.

In short, his whole thing is trying to bring people together in a divided world and he believes that might be a winning formula for a Senate race. Maybe he’s right. Even if he’s not a progressive firebrand, he would undoubtedly be better than a typical Republican.

It helps to understand the current political landscape in the state. The seat we’re talking about is currently held by Republican Roger Marshall, a conspiracy theorist and MAGA cultist who’s running for a second term. It’s considered by the Cook Political Report to be a “solid” GOP seat, meaning there’s virtually no chance a Republican will lose… at least under current circumstances. Democrats will have a candidate, but given that a Republican won the other Senate seat in 2022 by over a 20-point margin, and Marshall won his 2020 race by 11 points (in a year when the anti-Trump voters were out in full force), you have to assume any opponent with a D next to their name will be an afterthought.

One strategy to counter that, however, is to imitate what’s happening in neighboring (and deeply red) Nebraska. The Democrats there have already announced they won’t even put up an official candidate but instead support the independent Dan Osborn, who came very close to winning a Senate seat two years ago.

So if Hamilton wants to get elected in Kansas, his best chance may be running as an independent, not as a Democrat. (That’s assuming Democrats won’t put up a fight if he decides to run.)

Here’s where things get messy.

Hamilton announced his thinking—that he was exploring the possibility of a run—via a video posted on his church’s website and released on the church’s YouTube channel:

He said in that video that he wanted to personally tell his congregation where his mind was at so they didn’t hear about it in newspapers. He also told them, “I'm not asking you to vote for me. I'm not asking you to support me. I'm just asking, would you please pray for me for God's wisdom?” More than anything, he wanted to give them a heads up that, if he ran, he would probably stop preaching in the immediate future so he could concentrate on the race, and if he won, church leaders could begin the process for finding his replacement, something they already had on their radar since Hamilton was planning to retire in a couple of years.

… If I lose, I’ve already got a sermon series planned. It’s called “The thrill of victor and the agony of defeat.”

But what if I win? Well, if I win, starting in January of 2027, would I remain your senior pastor?… If the staff parish committee would have me, the answer is yes. I would continue to be your senior pastor, but I would be scaling back the time that I would be able to commit to the church to about one quarter time, and I would be preaching 12 to 18 times a year.

(It’s not unusual for pastors in elected office to preach when their schedules allow. Sen. Raphael Warnock does it regularly.)

Hamilton said he would make his decision after Easter, but as of this writing, he hasn’t made anything official.

In the meantime, though, the church has put up a page on its website dedicated to his decision. They make clear that the church would not endorse him if he ran because the church “does not endorse political candidates or parties.” (They have a policy to that effect.)

Congregants and staff members are encouraged to vote according to their own convictions. To maintain clear distinctions between church life and any political activity, the church will not engage in political activities this year. For instance, we will not host onsite voter registration, distribute voter guides, or hold candidate forums during this election cycle. The church’s focus remains on our shared faith and mission.

They also say no church resources would be used for the campaign. Staffers wouldn’t work on the campaign “during work hours,” the church’s database would not be shared with the campaign, etc.

To state the obvious, this is a hell of a lot of commentary from the church to describe a pastor who’s not going to run for Senate. But they’re also trying to give their massive congregation details about what could be a major internal shakeup. Pastors like Hamilton, who have been around for decades, don’t usually leave suddenly for reasons other than a major scandal. This isn’t anything like that.

Whatever the case, it sure looks like the Kansas Republican Party assumes he’s going to run, because they recently filed an ethics complaint with the Federal Election Commission, which enforces federal campaign finance laws. They’re basically trying to hamper his potential campaign before it ever gets off the ground.

In their announcement, the Party said Hamilton and his church were already violating the law by using church resources to promote his exploratory committee.

Those actions, the complaint argues, constitute prohibited in-kind corporate contributions to a federal candidate.

“The Kansas Republican Party believes strongly in the rule of law. This complaint raises serious questions about the separation between the Church of the Resurrection’s religious mission and partisan political activity,” Rob Fillion, Executive Director of the Kansas Republican Party, said. “This is a clear and blatant violation of federal law. For more than a century, corporations, including nonprofit corporations like churches, have been strictly prohibited from making political contributions to federal candidates. Adam Hamilton and the Church of the Resurrection used church staff time, facilities, databases, and communication platforms to launch his political campaign while claiming ‘firewalls’ that were immediately ignored. No one is above the law, and the FEC must investigate and enforce the rules that protect the integrity of our elections.”

I know, I know, it’s pretty damn hilarious to see Republicans insisting they believe “strongly in the rule of law” while their Party’s leader seems to rack up new crimes by the day—while actively suppressing evidence of his potential past crimes—all while other Republicans stand back and allow him to do whatever the hell he wants. Republicans have no right pretending to care about the law.

But beyond that, do they have a point? Is the church breaking any rules by talking about Hamilton’s potential candidacy?

This is where it gets tricky. For example, as I mentioned, the church has an FAQ page to answer questions about Hamilton’s potential run for office… but the complaint says that itself is a problem (emphasis theirs):

On February 27, 2026, the Church added a page to its website headlined “Pastor Adam Hamilton Explores a Possible Run for the U.S. Senate.”4 This page includes a list of questions and answers concerning Hamilton’s potential candidacy, including “[w]ould church resources be used for the campaign?” The Church proceeded to answer the question concerning the use of church resources by using church resources to answer as follows…

The Church webpage also embeds Hamilton’s eleven-minute-and-thirty-five-second exploratory committee announcement video… which was first posted on the official YouTube channel for “Church of the Resurrection.”

They go on to say Resurrection must have “utilized an internal Church mailing list to email Hamilton’s statement to the Church’s members.”

Are these in-kind contributions to his campaign? If church staffers publish an FAQ on the church’s website, aren’t they, in a way, working on his campaign during work hours? And if you say you never use church resources to promote candidates… while using church resources to talk about a potential candidate… is that hypocritical?

That’s what the Kansas Republican Party is claiming. They’re asking the FEC to “move expeditiously to compel Respondents to comply with the law” if the law has been broken, and they want the FEC to impose any “appropriate sanctions” if necessary.

The complaint points to FEC fines that have been issued in other cases, but all of them involved cash donations made to actual candidates, situations that don’t apply here. It also says the church made “its corporate resources available to Adam Hamilton so that he could announce his exploratory campaign for U.S. Senate,” though one could argue he didn’t formally announce his campaign at all but rather explained to the church why he may be leaving.

I will say that I believe there’s a good-faith argument for Hamilton’s side here.

He’s the founder and face of this megachurch, and his sudden departure would be a huge deal. The best way to handle it is by being as transparent as possible about why he might leave, answering obvious questions in advance, and giving church leaders ample time to plan a future without him at the helm. It’s not like his consideration of a Senate run is a secret, nor does he want it to be.

If he was asking for campaign donations, or telling people to vote for him, or launching his campaign during a service, those would be pretty serious violations of the Johnson Amendment. He’s not doing any of that.

But maybe it’s easy to say that when right-wing pastors have gone so much further to actively promote Republicans from the pulpit. Their numerous violations of the Johnson Amendment—and their complete lack of consequences—have been well-documented at this point. So perhaps I’m judging Hamilton on a curve. I just don’t know if there’s a better way for him to explain to the congregation what he’s doing without going this far. He and his church seem to know there’s a line that must not be crossed, and what we’re seeing is his team getting as close as they can to that line without going over it.

(It would be ironic, too, if none of this mattered because Republicans have decided the Johnson Amendment can’t be enforced while they’re in power.)

The Republicans’ case would be a lot stronger if Hamilton had already jumped into the race. But he hasn’t. Telling people he’s seriously thinking about it just isn’t the same thing. And there’s a separate page for his exploratory committee that has no direct connection to the church at all. That page has a different, more political, video message:

I doubt the FEC will do anything. (As of now, it doesn’t even have the numbers to conduct serious investigations.) But the purpose of calling this out may simply be to connect “Adam Hamilton” with “ethics complaint” in the minds of voters. Anything to make sure Roger Marshall has an easier path to reelection.

For what it’s worth, Hamilton didn’t respond to my request for comment, but his spokesperson told a local news reporter that this complaint wouldn’t get anywhere and blamed it on Marshall himself:

“Roger Marshall would rather launch false attacks on people of faith - and the largest church in Kansas - than defend his record as a failed politician, because he knows Kansans are tired of politicians like him who aren’t listening and keep making things worse in Washington. Roger Marshall knows that if Adam Hamilton runs against him, Adam will win.”

Sounds like a statement from a candidate who has already made up his mind about running.

And that last line isn’t just bluster. A recent poll showed that Hamilton had very little name recognition among voters, but in a hypothetical matchup between Hamilton (as an Independent) and Marshall, Hamilton would come out on top. (The poll also showed Hamilton would lose if he ran as a Democrat.)

The church itself offered a more neutral explanation of its actions:

The communications cited in the GOP’s complaint are examples of how the church regularly communicates significant updates to congregants, Resurrection Church spokeswoman Cathy Bein told WORLD Tuesday in a statement. The church’s founding senior pastor is considering a possible career change after 35 years in ministry, which would have a major impact on the church, so congregants were informed, she added.

If Hamilton does indeed run, and if Democrats decide to back him instead of one of their own candidates, it could be one of the more interesting campaigns nationwide.

At a time when James Talarico is redefining what it means to be a Christian in Texas, and independent candidates in Nebraska and Maine are running effective campaigns, and when Kansas has seen a Democrat win a statewide gubernatorial race twice in a row now while rejecting a constitutional amendment banning abortion, the state is ripe for a major change. Especially if the Senate election is a referendum on Trump.

Subscribe now

Christian Nationalist Pastor Joel Webbon insists “America does not have a racist problem” and that, “if anything, we could probably use a little bit more racism in America.” If that strikes you as a wildly ignorant rant from someone who slept through every single grade school history class, you’d be absolutely right.

But he’s not alone in saying things like this. Conservatives like him are whitewashing history even more than usual on the back of an indictment against a group that’s been fighting hate groups for decades now.

For the past week, conservatives have been downright giddy over the Trump-controlled Justice Department indicting the Southern Poverty Law Center. After years of watching many of their organizations accurately labeled “hate groups” by the SPLC—not because they’re merely anti-LGBTQ but because they spread untrue and harmful lies about the groups they rail against—they’re eager to see the SPLC destroyed by the Trump administration.

The problem is that the indictment means very little and the actual case against the group is extremely thin.

The entire case against the SPLC, according to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, revolves around a couple of major allegations: that the SPLC was financially propping up the very groups they claimed to fight against, and that it lied to banks about who they were in order to make those payments. That’s why the 11-count indictment includes charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The more nuanced understanding is that the SPLC knew that they could learn more about a variety of hate groups if they had someone on the inside who could feed them information about upcoming plans or attacks. They paid several of those informants to give them this information, which was also shared with the FBI. And to protect everyone’s cover, and to make sure the money wasn’t traced back to the SPLC, they created fake companies to make the payments. (It’s unclear if the FBI was aware of this.)

The government argues that this method deceived the banking system as well as donors. They need to fight the SPLC on behalf of liberals who love them!

At a press conference earlier this week, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche focused largely on the wire fraud charges, saying that between 2014 through 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center paid at least $3 million to eight different informants who were affiliated with groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the National Socialist Movement and the Aryan Nation.

To prove wire fraud, the government must show at trial that the Southern Poverty Law Center intentionally tried to fleece its donors and that those misstatements or omissions of facts were material.

If the SPLC told donors it wanted to “dismantle white supremacy,” but paid hate group insiders to help take them down, is that deception? Not if I’m a donor. Seems like a perfectly smart way to do that kind of work. That’s why experts say this case isn’t strong and may even be dismissed before any kind of trial.

But conservatives have spent the past week arguing that the indictments prove the SPLC was fueling hate, not stopping it. Blanche said the SPLC was “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” Others are going even further, arguing that these supposed hate groups never existed at all. Some conspiracy theorists claimed the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville was a false flag:

Those attempts to pretend violent hate groups never existed aren’t getting very far, though, in part because there’s video proof of the violence and some of the people involved are openly confessing to what they did. Even white nationalist Jared Taylor said the indictment “seems hokeyed up to me.”

Joel Webbon doesn’t care about any of those pesky details. Webbon, pastor of Covenant Bible Church in Georgetown, Texas (not far from Austin), is the sort of guy who believes false rape allegations would end if we just “publicly execute a few women,” that white parents should teach their children to avoid Black people, and that in his ideal world Jewish people wouldn’t “be able to serve in public office.”

In response to the SPLC indictment, Webbon says it’s proof that racism simply doesn’t exist. As if the organization made it up from scratch in the 1970s.

Right Wing Watch has the clip and transcript:

"It's so clear that America does not have a racist problem, at least in terms of like pure, baseless, mindless hatred towards minority people," Webbon said on his program last Friday.

…

"There's a lot of money to be made in slaying dragons or pretending to slay dragons that have already been slain," he continued. "Either the dragon doesn't exist at all, and that's why it's lucrative, or—I'm just going to throw this out there—the dragon's actually good and it's actually the king who's commissioned the knights and they're actually the bad guys. This whole witch hunt for white supremacists who hate brown people simply because they're brown, the reason why that's so lucrative and there are NGOs with millions and millions of dollars for that is because the white people in America are predominantly, on the whole, not racist. White people in America are, if anything, I think, too trusting, too gullible, toxic empathy. White people in America are like, 'You know what? I know that this will kill my grandchildren, but can we just import half of the country of Haiti, just to be nice?' So not only is racism non-existent, if anything, we could probably use a little bit more racism in America."

As Right Wing Watch points out, Webbon himself is living proof that racism is alive and well, especially in conservative Christianity.

He’s said he doesn’t trust Black doctors, that it’s Black people’s “fault” they’ve ever been oppressed, that he would tell his daughter not to marry anyone who’s Black, and it’s fair to generalize that all Black people are lazy.

In response to RWW’s clip, Webbon issued one correction: Racism was indeed real, he said. But white people were the victims of it:

There’s a reason he and his Christian allies are making these kinds of comments. If they can convince conservatives that racism is somehow over (if it ever existed at all), then any policies that harm marginalized groups can be reframed as neutral or justified. When Webbon says “a little bit more racism” would be beneficial, he’s trying to normalize his own bigotry.

If this were one fringe guy with no audience, maybe it would be forgettable, but he’s not. He’s part of a white conservative Christian movement that has spent years minimizing systemic racism, rewriting American history, and reframing civil rights advocacy as the real threat. They’ve already been successful getting their bigotry enacted in red states and it’s widespread in pockets of social media. That’s why it must be countered at every turn.

Subscribe now

In dozens of countries worldwide, more people are ditching Catholicism than entering into it, including countries where Catholicism is the default religion for many citizens. It suggests a perilous future for the Church if it can’t find new ways to bring people into the fold.

There’s a phrase for this: Religious switching. It’s when you were raised in one religious tradition but have since gone on to a different one. It’s been happening a lot in recent years and it threatens to upend one of the most basic beliefs about belief: That if you raise your children in your faith, it’ll stay with them in the future.

Think about that for a moment. One of the reasons religion has historically had so much power is because parents could safely assume that if they indoctrinated their kids from a young age, those beliefs and traditions will live on indefinitely. It’s the very idea at the core of the Quiverfull movement, famously exemplified by the Duggars: If you have lots of children, the religion will eventually spread to their own families, and within a few generations, your religion will mathematically outgrow all the other ones.

But the vertical continuation of religion isn’t a safe assumption.

People make friends outside their religious bubble when they go to school. They date and marry people who don’t share their faith (though their values likely overlap). They live in diverse communities where there’s no “default” faith, making the spread of different ideas a little easier. There’s also less stigma today in saying you’re not religious (or not Christian). That means the pressure to remain in the fold has largely evaporated. And, of course, there’s the internet, which allows people to see what life is like outside their particular bubbles.

When it comes to religion in general, the switching is intense. It’s especially bad news for the Catholic Church because far more people are leaving than entering.

Just take in this incredible chart from the Pew Research Center showing the percentages of people who have “switched” into or out of Catholicism in various countries. The blue bars represent people who left Catholicism despite being raised in the faith. The yellow bars show people who decided to convert to Catholicism.

In nearly every case, the blue bars dwarf the yellow ones. And in the few cases where Catholic converts outnumber those who’ve escaped, it’s only by a small amount.

Overall, more people left Catholicism than joined it in 21 of the 24 countries we analyzed. Hungary is the only country surveyed where more people joined (5%) than left the church (2%). In the remaining two countries – Kenya and South Korea – similar shares entered and exited Catholicism through switching.

It also helps to know how Catholic these nations were to begin with to better understand how porous they now are. Poland, for example, is almost entirely Catholic with a low leak rate. But Italy, which is also heavily Catholic, is on track to lose quite a few believers over the next few generations. (And who knows what might happen to religion in Hungary now that the autocrat Viktor Orbán has been ousted.)

The big question is: Why is this happening? The analysis doesn’t go into all that, but I would argue a lot of this is simply the Catholic Church shooting itself in the foot. Blame the sex scandals, the blatant hypocrisy, the desperate attempts by some conservative Catholics to worship Donald Trump while abandoning Jesus, the easy access to material for people questioning their faith, etc. Or maybe JD Vance’s relatively recent conversion scared them away.

It’s tempting to say these trends may reverse with Pope Leo at the helm, but so far, he’s really no different from his predecessor in terms of his PR savvy and positions on issues. And while some American dioceses are celebrating a rise in new converts—and receiving fawning media coverage for their self-reported numbers—the overall trend is still not good news for them.

Before you celebrate the global demise of religion, though, it’s important to recognize these trends aren’t the same for Protestantism. If you do the same kind of analysis in the same countries, you find that the shifts aren’t quite as drastic. In fact, Pew says, “Protestantism has seen a net gain from switching in nearly as many places as it has seen a net loss.” Those gains are especially noticeable in Latin America:

The question in places like Brazil and Ghana is whether those gains will remain in place in years to come. Or will people who switch to Protestantism eventually leave that religion for the same reason so many people are leaving Catholicism? It’s too early to tell.

If there’s a broader takeaway here, it’s that religious institutions no longer get to assume permanence. People around the world are willing to reconsider their religious upbringing and that sort of thinking is contagious. When you realize you don’t have to be trapped in a faith you no longer believe in and whose beliefs in certain areas are indefensible, it’s much easier to walk away when you see others doing it. Right now, the Catholic Church is hemorrhaging credibility faster than it can replace it.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

Subscribe now

Christian Nationalist Micah Beckwith, the lieutenant governor of Indiana, is now picking a fight with a public high school band, calling their show “demonic,” claiming their school is giving the middle finger to conservative Christians, and urging families to ditch public schools entirely.

Because there’s nothing Beckwith loves more than trashing his own state and the people in it if they don’t align with his right-wing conspiracy theories.

Here’s the situation: Westfield High School, just north of Indianapolis, has a very strong competitive marching band and a relatively new Indoor Percussion team. Last month, that percussion team wrapped up their season with a few big competitions performing a program called “The Red Line,” which included music from the opera “Carmen” and Ravel's “Boléro.”

The band explained the theme in a February post on social media:

The Red Line follows a journey of knowing where boundaries exist, yet feeling an urge to cross them. From the restraint of Bolero to the fire of Carmen Fantasy and Capriccio Espagnol, restraint gives way to passion as precision collides with obsession, leaving us changed forever.

That’s a very elaborate description of where the music came from, but remember: We’re talking about percussion players. They weren’t acting out these scenes even if their amazing costumes fit the theme. They were simply interpreting the music. Hell, you can see their show right here: It’s fascinating!

The bottom line is they worked hard, performed at a high level, and the school community rallied behind those students, which is exactly what you hope to see from a high school activity.

Leave it to Micah Beckwith to ruin things for everyone. He saw public school students excited and enthusiastic and he immediately decided he would make their lives worse, as is the Republican way.

Sharing the reel seen above, with performers clad in red and black costumes, Beckwith chimed in to say that “schools like Westfield LOVE giving the [middle finger emoji] to Christian Conservative families of our community.” He then urged parents to use taxpayer-funded vouchers to get their kids out of public high schools.

It’s beyond appalling to see a high-ranking public official trash his own constituents for the crime of having fun while showing off their musical talent... for no reason whatsoever. Beckwith didn’t even elaborate in that post. The assumption is that something about this performance was anti-Christian, but he didn’t bother offering any evidence of that. So we’re all left to believe it’s the costumes and eye makeup.

A responsible, sane politician would congratulate the students for their hard work and the staff for their time and commitment. But Beckwith is a conservative Christian whose religion teaches him to be an asshole at every turn.

This is, after all, the guy who said the LGBTQ movement is operating out of a “demonic playbook,” that the infamous three-fifths compromise was “a good thing,” that his own election was a choice between “godly boldness” and “the Jezebel spirit,” that people who advocate for church/state separation are “the LGBTQ community trying to support Hamas,” that he would only allow exceptions to his state’s anti-abortion laws in the case of child rape victims as long as the rapist was murdered, and that Zohran Mamdani was wrongly trying to “force his values onto New York” by daring to be Muslim in a country that Beckwith falsely claims is founded on Christianity.

And now he’s making up ambiguous reasons to be mad about marching band costumes. As if the school is somehow promoting Satanism when what they’re actually doing is exposing students to classical music. (Some commenters online were quick to point out that their own children, or children they know, were part of that percussion program, and there was nothing anti-Christian about any of it.)

This is all happening, by the way, while Beckwith’s own church is mired in a child sex scandal. But sure. Get mad about red costumes.

On Friday, Beckwith appeared on a conservative talk radio show to talk about his post. As you would predict, he chose to double down on his stupidity instead of apologizing to the children, calling the show “demonic” when it’s clear he never saw the actual performance.

"I was made aware of this from Christian students who attend Westfield, and they said they felt uncomfortable but didn't want to speak out because they were afraid to speak out. They were not being seen, they were not being heard, so I didn't go looking for this — it was brought to my attention," Beckwith told Blakeslee.

"When I looked at it, I said, 'Yeah, this is demonic,' and then, we looked into it even more, and their theme for the drum line — let me explain this — it's the red line, and the red line follows the journey of knowing where boundaries exist, yet feeling an urge to cross them from the restraint of the fires of Carmen, the Carmen fantasy. Now if you don't know who Carmen is, it's a fantasy novel, it's a character, and this is a woman, she's a seductive witch, this is what self-identified. Her job in this opera that they are actually playing music from is to seduce a husband and a father out of his marriage into an affair, so the music they're playing is from that opera, a seductive witch, her whole goal is to try to get a man to cheat on his wife to destroy their family, and Westfield tax dollars are promoting this, and we pay a lot of freaking money in property taxes in Westfield."

It’s hard to believe Christian students complained about this when (1) Beckwith has a history of lying and (2) there’s nothing to complain about. But does anyone seriously believe that there are no Christians in that drumline? In Indiana? And if there were concerns about the show, then students should have gone to the administration about it, not complain to the lieutenant governor. There’s no indication they did that.

Also, he has no clue what the opera is about. Beckwith says Carmen’s “whole goal is to try to get a man to cheat on his wife to destroy their family.” That’s… not even close to true. The man in question, Don José, isn’t married and has no children. So there’s no “affair.” Beckwith couldn’t even bother himself to read the Wikipedia synopsis of the plot.

And what did Beckwith look at? A couple of pictures of the band? Or the actual performance? Because the performance has nothing in it that’s controversial. Saying that music from an opera shouldn’t be used because the full show (which they aren’t performing) has some adult themes in it would also mean you can’t read excerpts from damn near any classical novel. Or the Bible, which is full of rape and genocide and slavery.

To pretend that this percussion performance was advocating for family destruction by way of seduction is such a wild distortion that even Christian pseudo-historian David Barton would say, “I think you’re taking this a bit too far…”

And we know Beckwith doesn’t actually give a shit about people having affairs given that he fully supports thrice-married, affair-having, Epstein-loving Donald Trump.

Elsewhere in that interview, Beckwith insisted the kids who saw his comments as trashing them personally were too stupid to understand what’s going on:

… [T]hey don't know what they're doing, and that's what the demonic always does. They have no idea… They don't know what they're giving themselves over to.

Teenagers are much smarter than Republicans will ever give them credit for.

Beckwith also said he knew what he was talking about because “I was a band teacher for 15 years.” (No he wasn’t. Unless we’re talking about some kind of worship ministry, which isn’t at all comparable to what these students are doing.)

Maybe he’s just mad because the school allegedly “DISINVITED” him from meeting with agriculture students in 2024, a move that prompted Beckwith to threaten to defund the school. Or because, a month later, people protested his appearance there because they knew he was a Christian bigot about to enter public office.

Here’s the good news: It looks like everyone in the community is pushing back against this. They’re genuinely pissed off that Beckwith is targeting a source of local pride.

Westfield Mayor Scott Willis put out a statement celebrating the team’s achievements without directly addressing anything Beckwith said:

… Our students continue to represent Westfield at a high level, both on and off the field. The achievements highlighted by the district reflect not just talent, but a strong commitment to discipline, teamwork, and doing things the right way.

When you hear ‘from Westfield, Indiana’ announced on a national stage, it’s a point of pride for our entire community. These students have put in the work, and it shows. It’s a great example of what can happen when students are supported by their schools, their families, and their community.

The Indiana Percussion Association, which oversees some of these competitions, expressed its support for the band (without directly mentioning Beckwith either):

The Indiana Percussion Association stands in full support of the Westfield Indoor Percussion program, all performing arts in Westfield Washington Schools and the students, staff, and families who make it such a meaningful part of our community.

These performers dedicate countless hours to developing discipline, teamwork, creativity and resilience - qualities that extend far beyond the floor and into their everyday lives. Programs like this don’t just build musicians; they build confident, hardworking young people who represent our communities with pride.

Public criticism, especially when it targets students and their efforts, undermines the positive impact that arts education has on growth, expression, and belonging.

We encourage our community to continue uplifting and supporting these students. Their commitment, passion, and courage to perform deserve recognition, not ridicule. Westfield Indoor Percussion is something to be proud of, and we stand behind them.

There was also a personal reflection from Westfield’s Director of Bands Andrew Muth that’s well worth reading. He spends the bulk of it praising the students for being resilient even as their own lieutenant governor is publicly trashing the program they love:

I’ve learned that kids are incredibly brave. When things weren’t easy, our students chose courage. They carried themselves with grace and class, even as their images and performances were shared thousands of times online. They did it for one simple reason—they love band, and they believe in what they are a part of.

He also noted that he grew up as a Christian—but not the Beckwith kind that pretends hate is a virtue.

I grew up in a Christian household where I was taught a simple but powerful idea from Ezekiel 22:30—to “stand in the gap.”

To me, that means showing up for others when it matters most. It means doing what is right, even when it’s difficult. It means choosing to care, to lead with integrity, and to protect the people around you.

We all have moments where we are called to step forward—to support someone, to speak up, or to be the steady presence others need.

That was this moment.

I am proud to lead this program. I am proud of our kids. I am forever proud to be a rock. Stand in the gap when it matters even in the face of unimaginable adversity.

It’s truly incredible how easy it would have been for Beckwith to say absolutely nothing. Instead, he went out of his way to pick a fight with band kids. You never pick a fight with band kids. Everyone knows a band kid.

But weaponizing his own ignorance is Beckwith’s specialty. It’s all he has in his arsenal because he can’t point to any policies that actually help the people in his state. As the Trump administration teaches us, when you can’t govern effectively, you might as well manufacture outrage. When you can’t inspire people, you might as well scare them. Beckwith is using a talented group of students to launch a broader attack against public schools because he knows well-educated students and communities that rally against bullies aren’t good for his party’s long-term future.

Indiana residents should be furious that a guy like Beckwith is embarrassing their state when they have all these talented students and teachers who deserve far more attention. Their own state leaders are willing to sacrifice their kids’ achievements, their schools’ reputations, and their community’s pride to score cheap political points.

If everyone pushes back, though—without apology and by calling out Beckwith and his party directly—they can make it clear that kids shouldn’t be political props for desperate, talentless conservatives.

If you’d like to support Westfield’s music program, you can do so here.

Subscribe now

On Wednesday, Navy Secretary John Phelan was booted from his job, presumably after clashes with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. It was a shocking dismissal given that the country is currently mired in a Trump-fueled battle centered around the Strait of Hormuz. But while Phelan didn’t come into the job with any relevant experience—he was a Trump donor who founded an investment firm—his replacement may be even worse.

The new Acting Navy Secretary is Hung Cao, an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist best known for his failed attempt to unseat Senator Tim Kaine in Virginia’s 2024 Senate race. Which came after a failed attempt to unseat a Democratic congresswoman in 2022, a campaign in which he compared abortion to the Nazi regime, saying “The Nazis did this. They’ll take Jewish babies and just take the legs and just smash the babies and kill them. You think that can’t happen in this country?”

Or perhaps he’ll now be best known as the guy who insisted in 2023 that witches had taken over Monterey, California. He made the comments in an interview with fellow anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Sean Feucht.

… We can’t let it turn like this. There’s a place in Monterey, California called “Lovers Point.” The original name was “Lovers of Christ Point,” but now it’s become–they took out the Christ—it’s “Lovers Point.” And it’s really—Monterey is a very dark place now. A lot of witchcraft and the Wiccan community has really taken over there. We can’t let that happen to Virginia.

For what it’s worth, the Monterey County Historical Society says “Lovers of Jesus Point” (not “Christ”) was named that way in the 1870s by a man who wanted to create a “Christian Seaside Resort” in Pacific Grove (not Monterey). It was secularized much later.

But Wiccans have not “taken over” Monterey. (One local media outlet quoted a resident who said, “There used to be a witches Meetup group but they haven’t met in a couple of years.”)

Also, changing the name of an area of land to something secular doesn’t mean the world is ending.

And Lovers Point looks pretty damn amazing today.

While Cao has some military experience, unlike his predecessor, there’s no reason to think he won’t use his platform to spread even more lies, much like everyone else in this administration. As a public figure, he’s never chosen the side of honesty and responsibility, so there’s no reason to think he’ll suddenly do that now.

It’s truly incredible that there are people in this administration who have claimed to teleport to a Waffle House, cut off the penis of a dead raccoon, and accidentally quoted Pulp Fiction during a work-time sermon, which means Cao’s claim of a witch takeover makes him one of the more sane members of this administration.

Hell, perhaps the Navy is the perfect place for him since he’s a fan of “crone warfare.”

But in case you think Cao is relatively harmless, keep in mind that his wife April Lakata Cao is an all-out racist, based on things she wrote on her “The Conservative Parent” blog:

… she once told former President Barack Obama to “stay in Africa.”

…

… Cao intimated Muslims should be killed (“peace those Muslims,” she wrote), dipped her toes in the discussion around Obama’s nationality and race, said Black Obama administration officials were racist, and shared conspiratorial InfoWars posts about the Department of Homeland Security arming itself against citizens.

Is there anyone in the upper tiers of this administration who isn’t a nutjob or surrounded by people who are arguably worse? Good luck finding them. The only qualifications you seem to need are a commitment to Jesus, a refusal to put ethics over loyalty, and a non-stop history of batshit crazy comments that live online.

Side note: This is somehow not the only time allegations of witchcraft have affected Republicans. In 2010, Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell released an ad insisting she wasn’t a witch after clips circulated in which she claimed she dabbled in witchcraft years earlier.

Subscribe now

A high school student in Colorado just obtained a religious accommodation to get around what she claims are her district’s restrictive bathroom access rules. But we’re not talking about a Christian student complaining about transgender students using the facilities or anything like that.

She’s a Satanist.

The issue dates back to February when the Elizabeth School District introduced a system called Minga that essentially offers digital hall passes. It tracks students who leave their classes to go off-campus or go to the bathroom. Students sign out on their own and the system logs where they’re going and how long they’re gone.

As just about any teacher can tell you, there are always students who insist they need to go to the bathroom during your time together, who leave class much longer than they should be gone, who might lie about where they’re going or what they’re doing, etc. Trying to manage all that while still respecting students’ rights is always a predicament—especially when there’s no paper trail—and every school has different ways of dealing with students who abuse the privilege.

The Minga system is meant to take that pressure off teachers while still offering accountability. It also allows schools to know where students might be in case of emergencies.

In February, Michelle Thompson, a mother of an Elizabeth High School student, told the school board she was concerned about how Minga would impact kids’ “physical health, overall well-being, and dignity” because it was already denying students—including her daughter—the ability to go to the bathroom when needed: “Our child's ability to independently meet a basic biological need has effectively been restricted.”

She added that, even though she was assured parents would have the right to opt their kids out of the Minga system, the district’s administration was denying her that option.

The district didn’t budge, so in March, Matt Kezhaya, a lawyer for The Satanic Temple, sent a letter to the district demanding Thompson’s daughter (“ST”) be allowed to opt out of the system. They specifically said she was denied the ability to leave class even though she was on her period:

By its very nature, the [Minga] system requires ST to subordinate her bodily needs to institutional permission and surveillance. On Mondays, all requests to use the bathroom are denied. The bathroom is available to only three children at a time, and then only for up to five minutes under threat of forcible removal by a security guard.

On February 2, 2026, these restrictions caused ST to have a bleed-through accident because she was unable to tend to her menses. This caused such shame and embarrassment that she now refuses to use the restrooms while at the school.

(One reason bathroom requests might be denied on Mondays is because there’s a shortened class schedule that day.)

The Satanic Temple pointed out that Thompson had repeatedly asked the district for a religious accommodation but was denied—something administrators can only do if they have a legally compelling reason to do so. The lawyer demanded to know those reasons:

As you hold the burden of justifying the refusal of a religious accommodation, please respond with a statement of all compelling interests requiring the District to refuse Ms. Thompson’s demanded religious accommodation, as well as statement of those facts that support why the refusal is narrowly tailored to achieve those interests.

The lawyer also referenced the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, a case that gave religious parents the ability to remove their kids from class if the instruction conflicted with their faith.

At the heart of the argument was the claim that Thompson and her child were Satanists, so this wasn’t some made-up excuse. They even had a faith-based rule that allowed them to get around the Minga system—the same rule Satanists have tried to use to get around abortion restrictions.

Ms. Thompson is raising [her child] in the beliefs and practices of TST. As part of this religious upbringing, Thompson and ST both adhere to TST’s Seven Fundamental Tenets.

The Third Tenet provides:

One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.

Pursuant to the Third Tenet, TST’s adherents believe that natural bodily functions are sacred, and any institutional efforts to control those sacred functions should be resisted. See also TST’s Second Tenet (“The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.”)

The bathroom monitoring system interferes with ST’s adherence to the Third Tenet and requires accommodation…

Beyond those statements, the letter read exactly like something you’d see from a conservative Christian legal group, saying that the family’s religious views gave them a special right to get around a general rule. The letter even noted that the district offered exceptions for people with medical or disability-related reasons, therefore it was illegal to deny those same exceptions to anyone who had a religious justification for opting out of the Minga system.

That argument worked.

On March 19, the district told Kezhaya that Thompson’s daughter would be granted a religious accommodation.

… the District will exempt ST from the Minga system for purposes of restroom access, allowing her to leave the classroom for the restroom at any time and for any duration without logging her departure in the system. In place of a digital hall pass, ST will be provided a laminated physical pass for her exclusive use, which she will present to her teacher upon leaving and return upon coming back to class. ST will remain subject to the Minga system for all other out-of-classroom purposes, including visits to the counselor, library, and main office as implemented at Elizabeth High School.

(As part of the agreement, ST’s parents have to sign a waiver saying the district will not be held accountable “for any consequences that may flow from ST’s unmonitored movement through the building.”)

The bottom line here? Satanists secured a religious accommodation to a public school district policy by pointing to one of their Seven Fundamental Tenets. If Christians can get away with the religious accommodation excuse when it comes to reading challenging books or learning about sexuality in a health class, there’s no reason Satanists can’t apply the same logic when it comes to something sensible.

The same legal playbook that’s been used to privilege Christianity is now being used to protect a Satanist’s right to control her own body in a public school.

Eliphaz Costus, the Campaign Director for The Satanic Temple’s “Protect Children Project,” told me in a statement that the district was right to accommodate their client:

This was a cut and dry case of our religious right to bodily autonomy being violated by an invasive digital system. I’m thrilled we could successfully advocate on this family's behalf and I hope this will establish a precedent for other TST student members to be exempted from Minga bathroom controls.

It’s sad that the easiest way to secure dignity in a public institution is to claim it’s a religious mandate, but if those are the rules, then they need to apply to everyone across the board. The district hasn’t said anything about why it denied ST’s reasonable request before her family brought up their faith, but now that they have, it’s virtually impossible to reject if the district wants to avoid a lawsuit.

The Christian Right helped build this world. Will any of them complain now that Satanists are using the rulebook those Christian wrote to their own benefit?

Subscribe now

A quick personal note: This Saturday at 4:00p, I’ll be speaking in Denver, Colorado at the Secular Hub. The event is sponsored by the FFRF Metro Denver Chapter. All the details are here—the talk is free but space is limited, so please RSVP! Hope to see you there!

The founder of a prominent podcast critical of the Mormon Church is now being sued by the Church for trademark and copyright infringement… as if there’s any way listeners might be confused between the podcast and the subject of it.

John Dehlin began the Mormon Stories Podcast in 2005 when he was questioning whether or not to leave the LDS Church. It soon became a haven for other critics and former Mormons—and a landing space for listeners who harbored the same doubts but knew the Mormon Church wasn’t a safe place to get their questions answered in a meaningful way. (True story: I’ve met a lot of ex-Mormons over the years, and my first question to them is inevitably whether they’ve heard of Dehlin and his podcast. The answer is, almost without exception, yes. It’s the podcast you listen to when you’re walking away from the religion.)

In 2015, Dehlin was officially kicked out of the Church for the “crime” of apostasy—he was accused of leading people away from the Church—though Dehlin argued the real reason was because he openly and proudly supported same-sex marriage and the ordination of female priests. I also interviewed him around that time.

The podcast has become popular enough that it spurred the creation of a non-profit group—the Open Stories Foundation—in 2010 to oversee the show and go beyond it. In 2024, the group generated over $1.12 million in revenue.

That’s nothing, of course, compared to the tens of billions of dollars hoarded by the LDS Church. You would think, given all the very legitimate criticism of Mormons from all over the place, the smart move would be to simply ignore what one podcaster is doing, even if he’s popular, in order to avoid the Streisand effect.

But the Mormon Church is taking the opposite approach. Last week, after months of conversations between the two sides, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints sued Dehlin for trademark and copyright infringement. They’re arguing he has no right to use the word “Mormon” or any of their materials.

As Defendants are well aware, the public associates the term MORMON with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has used the mark MORMON and other names and marks incorporating the term MORMON since its founding nearly 200 years ago. Defendants’ use of Church trademarks and copyrighted materials has caused and will continue to cause individuals to be confused and access Defendants’ content mistakenly believing it comes from or is affiliated with or endorsed by the Church. This is not by accident. Defendants adopted a blue MORMON STORIES logo with a light-rays design prominently used by the Church, showing Defendants’ intent to capitalize on and increase confusion. Defendants’ logo was calculated to imitate the Church’s logos by using confusingly similar color, font, and other design elements, as shown below.

In absolutely no sane world is anyone listening to Dehlin’s podcast and confusing it with Official Church Propaganda. The closest you would ever get is someone searching for information about Mormonism, stumbling across the podcast, and quickly realizing it’s not advertising for the LDS Church. After all, why would the banner for the show include Dehlin’s picture—an apostate!—instead of Mormon leaders?

But the Mormon Church insists there’s confusion. To make that argument, the lawsuit includes examples, cherry-picked from the podcast’s social media pages, of people who came across it because they believed it was pro-Mormon… only to realize that wasn’t the case. Here’s just a sampling:

There are more comments where those came from, but they all seem to prove the opposite point. People found Mormon Stories because they had questions about Mormonism… and then realized it wasn’t promoting the LDS Church. At no point in any of the comments included in the lawsuit do people say they genuinely confused Dehlin’s words (or his guest’s words) for Church policy. The fact that some of those commenters say they stopped listening immediately after their realization are points in Dehlin’s favor!

(Also, for a podcast this popular, it’s deeply unfair for the Church to go searching for comments suggesting confusion is afoot because you’re bound to find anything you want. That’s the nature of popular comment threads. It’s also likely people in those threads said slurs or made ad hominem attacks against Mormon leaders. Whatever the case, it’s absurd to blame the podcast host for that when he’s not baiting any of that.)

To avoid confusion, the LDS Church demanded that Dehlin include a disclaimer everywhere saying that his podcast for ex-Mormons and believers who are being persecuted for questioning LDS Church policies isn’t an official product of the religious sect. But that, too, is beyond parody. No one should have to open their show by explaining which groups they’re not affiliated with.

Keep in mind that there are pro-Mormon podcasts that use the word in their titles, too, but there’s no indication the LDS Church has ever gone after any of them for trademark violations even though those podcasts are not official products of the Church either.

Whatever the case, the two sides began to discuss their positions beginning in February.

Dehlin agreed to remove any copyrighted images from his website and social media pages. (The LDS Church says he broke that agreement by later using an image of a temple to advertise an episode.) He changed the logo’s color from Mormon blue to non-Mormon orange. He even added the disclaimer to podcast descriptions on every platform.

What Dehlin refused to do was issue a disclaimer at the beginning of every show “acknowledging that Mormon Stories is not affiliated with the Church.”

That’s why the Church is now going after him. And their case is weak.

Just consider the copyright issues. The lawsuit includes examples of official photos released by the Church that were later used in the thumbnails for Dehlin’s podcast videos:

That seems like a perfectly normal case of “fair use.”

The Church is also mad that Dehlin uses the word “Mormon” at all... which is wildly ironic given that the LDS Church itself has urged people to stop using the word because they don’t want to be known that way. (Case in point: The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is now officially called the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square.) And yet here they are telling the court that it’s their word and not anyone else’s… and they have the paperwork from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to back it up.

This is all, they say, deeply damaging to the billion-dollar religious organization:

Unless these acts of Mormon Stories are restrained by this Court, they will continue, and they will continue to cause irreparable injury to Plaintiffs and to the public, for which there is no adequate remedy at law.

May we all strive to have this kind of influence. The Mormon Church is seriously arguing that Dehlin’s perfectly defensible use of their language and imagery might topple the entire damn religion. As if one man could destroy all of Salt Lake City through the power of… a podcast.

The lawsuit asks the court to stop Dehlin from using any logos or imagery that is “confusingly similar” to the LDS Church’s, and they want a jury trial.

Dehlin issued some informal responses to all this already, saying that he’s “been using the Mormon Stories name for my podcast for more than 20 years without any objection from the Church” and that he made plenty of changes at the request of LDS Church lawyers. But he adds that it’s “unreasonable” to demand anything beyond that:

… We didn’t feel any disclaimer was required, but in the spirit of cooperation we adopted one in our podcast description. The Church wanted us to make the disclaimer more prominent so it was essentially the primary thing anyone sees in our branding which we believe is unreasonable. We don’t want our primary message to be about what we are NOT. We have operated for a long time promoting who and what we are…

He says he was surprised by the lawsuit “given how cooperative we have been.” (There is a fund for supporters who want to contribute to the podcast’s legal defense.)

The LDS Church insists it’s not going after Dehlin for what he says, only for the way he’s marketing his show, but there’s just no jury on Earth who would buy that excuse:

People are free to express support for or criticism of the Church and its teachings. This case does not concern the content of the podcast.

There’s a far stronger case that the Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon” might confuse outsiders who don’t know any better, but the Church famously didn’t fight that battle in court. If anything, they used it to their advantage. Did the Church sue Hulu over “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives”? Not a chance. Even though that suggests a window into, well, the secret lives of Mormon wives.

I guess that strategy of not picking fights with people who aren’t promoting the Church is out the window now, given that they’re going after one of their most prominent critics.

On Monday, Dehlin released a video summarizing and responding to the lawsuit:

It’s truly amazing this is how the LDS Church is wasting its time and money. Pope Leo is fighting fascism while the Mormon Church is fighting a podcaster.

This lawsuit also tells you everything you need to know about the modern LDS Church. They’re not really trying to protect their “brand” at all. They’re just trying to put obstacles in the path of someone who has helped countless people leave the Church. Rather than addressing the criticisms people on Dehlin’s show make, they’d rather turn off the microphone by forcing Dehlin to fight an expensive legal battle.

This is how you know the show makes a positive difference in people’s lives. It shows them their lives can be fulfilling and wonderful and guilt-free outside the bubble of Mormonism.

If this is how the LDS Church treats a former insider who asks questions and builds community, imagine what it signals to current members who are quietly doubting. If you become too effective at articulating those doubts, the institution won’t just argue with you; it’ll try to silence you.

By picking this fight, the Mormon Church is only confirming the criticisms they’re so desperate to suppress.

Subscribe now

In a predictable but utterly awful ruling, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has just ruled that Texas can force public schools to put up posters of the Ten Commandments, giving Christian Nationalists a new way to impose their religious beliefs onto children.

This will undoubtedly be appealed to the Supreme Court, but that risks exposing the rest of the country to Christian indoctrination in schools.

First, let’s remember how we got here.

Last year, Texas lawmakers passed a bill, appropriately titled SB 10, to shove the Commandments into schools despite widespread opposition. (Democrat James Talarico, now a U.S. Senate candidate, did his best to highlight the hypocrisy of the people voting for the bill as well as the possible backlash it might receive.)

Like so many other iterations of these bills, this one said every classroom would have to display a durable or framed 16” x 20” poster of the Ten Commandments—King James’ Version only. They could be privately donated or bought “using district funds.” All of the posters would have to read as follows:

The Ten Commandments

I AM the LORD thy God.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images.

Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain.

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Thou shalt not steal.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his cattle, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.

The law also included a provision requiring the attorney general of the state to defend districts that got sued over this. If they were to lose the case, the state would then be “liable for the expenses, costs, judgments, or settlements of the claims arising out of the representation.” Which is to say if this ended up backfiring on Christian Nationalists, don’t worry, because taxpayers would foot the bill for their ignorance.

The Republicans (and a handful of Democrats) ignored all the opposition to this bill, including a letter signed by over 150 Christian and Jewish leaders who said it “undermines the faith and freedom we cherish.”

You can read more details about the lawsuit and the Plaintiffs here.

In short, though, the lawsuit noted that a SCOTUS decision from a case nearly five decades ago, Stone v. Graham, declared a virtually identical law in Kentucky unconstitutional. The lawsuit also said that in the Stone case, and more recently in Louisiana, the Ten Commandments were required to have a “context statement”—a disclaimer of sorts—alongside the posters, explaining the supposed historical relevance of the Decalogue. They didn’t even bother with that in Texas. So if those previous laws were declared illegal, this one was even more egregious.

In August, a federal judge sided with the church/state separation crowd, putting a temporary hold on the ridiculous law… but only in a handful of districts. An amended lawsuit was successful in preventing the law from going into effect in other districts too. It became a huge game of Whac-A-Mole where schools districts had to decide whether to put up posters they knew were illegal and risk getting sued by church/state separation groups… or risk getting sued by a scandal-plagued and highly litigious Republican attorney general (Ken Paxton) breathing down their necks.

Before long, Paxton just asked the full Fifth Circuit to decide the issue in both Texas and Louisiana:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked the 5th Circuit Court to overturn Biery’s ruling and allow all 17 active judges on the court to hear both the Texas and Louisiana cases together.

A federal judge blocked Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law from taking effect in 2024, a decision unanimously upheld last year by a panel of three judges on the 5th Circuit Court. With all active judges on the court now hearing the cases, Texas and Louisiana officials hope for a more favorable ruling.

Twelve of the appeals court’s 17 active judges were appointed by Republican presidents. The court is considered one of the most conservative in the nation.

And now his demand has been rewarded.

Today, a majority of the Fifth Circuit judges said the Texas law could be implemented as written. It was a 9-8 decision.

The families who sued said the imposition of the Commandments violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and coerced their children into accepting the Christian faith. The judges rejected both arguments.

They said the Stone precedent was no longer in effect because the justification for that decision—the “Lemon test,” which offered a method to determine if a law violated church/state separation—had been killed off by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“With Lemon extracted,” they wrote, “there is nothing left of Stone.”

What about the Establishment Clause claim? Didn’t the posters suggest government promotion of Christianity?

The judges said no because no one was forcing Christian views on anyone:

S.B. 10 looks nothing like a historical religious establishment. It does not tell churches or synagogues or mosques what to believe or how to worship or whom to employ as priests, rabbis, or imams. It punishes no one who rejects the Ten Commandments, no matter the reason. It levies no taxes to support any clergy. It does not co-opt churches to perform civic functions. These are the kinds of things “establishments of religion” did at the founding. S.B. 10 does none of them.

Plaintiffs counter that, like historical establishments, S.B. 10 is “coercive” because it pressures children to honor the Ten Commandments. Not so. S.B. 10 requires no religious exercise or observance. Students are neither catechized on the Commandments nor taught to adopt them. Nor are teachers commanded to proselytize students who ask about the displays or contradict students who disagree with them.

They’re essentially saying there’s nothing Christian about the Christian commandments. It’s just a list devoid of any context. By the same logic, Texas could pass a law to put up The Satanic Temple’s Seven Fundamental Tenets and that would be fine, but they happened to choose this list, so what’s the big deal?

Similarly, they said that because kids don’t have to do anything in response to the posters, it’s not really coercive either.

To Plaintiffs, merely exposing children to religious language is enough to make the displays engines of coercive indoctrination. We disagree.

Another argument the Plaintiffs made was that there was “no longstanding tradition” of displaying the Ten Commandments in public spaces and no legal precedent to back up that notion. That mattered because, with the Lemon Test gone, the Supreme Court has relied on the fickle idea of tradition. If a Christian cross, for example, has been up on city property for decades and decades without complaint, then that’s justification enough for it to be allowed to remain there. This lawsuit, however, said that argument couldn’t work here because a tradition of putting Ten Commandments posters up in schools didn’t exist.

The judges just dismissed that whole argument. They said that tradition might be fine to invoke when it comes to invocation prayers at governments meetings, but the “opposite” logic—that a lack of pushing the Ten Commandments in schools means we shouldn’t do it now—is a “bizarre view” that can’t be justified. Apparently, the only way the tradition argument can be used is to allow something that used to happen, not prohibit something that never happened.

By saying that, they also dismissed all the expert testimony that said this practice of shoving Christianity in the classroom was a modern creation—a very simple way to ignore the facts.

The idea that the posters would pressure kids into accepting Christianity was also rejected by these judges. They compared it to the Pledge of Allegiance—which is also religious, with its “one Nation, under God” line—to argue that students aren’t forced to say it. Therefore, they conclude, the Commandments don’t burden anyone’s religious exercise.

The dissenting judges in this case were apoplectic about what their colleagues just did. Writing for the group, Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez wrote:

Because legislation requiring the permanent fixture of religious rules in public-school classrooms, with no “educational function,” violates these most basic First Amendment principles, I respectfully dissent.

The dissenters wrote that the Stone precedent is very much still in effect even if the Lemon test is no longer being used. They even cited the Kennedy case—the one about the showboating football coach who demanded the right to perform his prayers at midfield after games—to say that the Supreme Court still prohibits religious coercion. Kennedy was allowed to continue his prayers because students weren’t theoretically involved; the Ten Commandments law, however, directly impacts kids.

To argue otherwise ignores the unique context of placing religious scripture in public-school classrooms where, “given the impressionability of the young, government must exercise particular care in separating church and state”… It also ignores the self-evident nature of the Ten Commandments: they “command” the reader to follow certain directives. Those directives are largely religious in nature.

As one dissenting judge pointed out, there’s no way to interpret these Commandments other than as a call to adopt a specific version of Christianity:

Texas children will naturally examine these posters and be left to reflect on the fact that one religion—different from the one they observe in their home, their synagogue, their mosque, or other place of worship—was selected to be in their school as a representation of what? An expectation of a model student? A good citizen? A properly devout person? The majority insists that students will not be “catechized,” but forgets their curiosity. Surrounded by the Ten Commandments displays, students will wonder about “the LORD”; they will wonder about “other gods”; they will wonder about “graven images”; they will wonder about “kill[ing]”; they will wonder about “adultery”; they will wonder about “covet[ing]” a neighbor’s wife... Teachers inevitably will be asked to answer these questions, but Texas parents did not entrust public-school teachers with the spiritual education of their children. It is a parent’s right to have these conversations—not inside the classroom, absent their input, but with their children, present at home.

They also pointed out that there’s no way to opt out of this situation. Students may not have to say the Pledge, but they can’t escape looking at these posters.

Stated simply, “the right of parents ‘to direct the religious upbringing of their’ children would be an empty promise if it did not follow those children into the public school classroom”… If schools across Texas must display this scripture, then today our court ordains that empty promise.

The church/state separation groups that filed this lawsuit expressed their disappointment in the decision and announced that they have every intention of fighting this even more:

"We are extremely disappointed in today’s decision. The Court’s ruling goes against fundamental First Amendment principles and binding U.S. Supreme Court authority. The First Amendment safeguards the separation of church and state, and the freedom of families to choose how, when and if to provide their children with religious instruction. This decision tramples those rights. We anticipate asking the Supreme Court to reverse this decision and uphold the religious-freedom rights of children and parents.”

So what happens now, other than the possible appeal?

It’s not clear. The Texas law is back in effect, and districts that receive donations of the posters will be required to put them up. But there’s nothing preventing malicious compliance or other posters (with better moral teachings) from going up alongside them.

Hell, a couple of months ago, a website went up offering well-designed Ten Commandments posters that meet all the requirements of the Texas bill (and ones in other states) that might make Republicans rethink their own law.

But the bottom line is that Texas conservatives have used the courts to tell kids which religion counts—and which ones don’t. They’re sending a message that kids from non-Christian families (or the “wrong” kind of Christian ones) are second-class citizens.

Texas passed an illegal law, made up details about American history to defend their position, practically bragged about their true intentions along the way, and the Fifth Circuit gave them the victory they wanted anyway. It’s a disaster for anyone who believes in church/state separation and a classroom free of religious coercion.

The Christians who are celebrating today’s ruling would be furious if schools put up lists of Islamic or humanistic moral lessons, even though that would be legal using the same logic that the Fifth Circuit is using today, but because they believe their religion is superior to all others, they’re not going to complain at all.

(This is a breaking story and may change as new information comes in. Portions of this article were published earlier)

Subscribe now

A quick personal note: This Saturday at 4:00p, I’ll be speaking in Denver, Colorado at the Secular Hub. The event is sponsored by the FFRF Metro Denver Chapter. All the details are here—the talk is free but space is limited, so please RSVP! Hope to see you there!

Yesterday, the Supreme Court announced it would take up a case involving anti-LGBTQ Catholic schools in Colorado. The schools, which refuse to enroll anyone with openly gay or transgender parents, were banned from participating in a taxpayer-funded universal pre-K program. They want access to that money despite their bigotry, and the Supreme Court’s conservative super-majority could bail them out after a series of losses in lower courts.

Here’s how we got to this point:

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 said it would save families an average of $4,300 a year and give kids a head start in their education. It was just an incredible opportunity for families that 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, 40 of which are religious.)

In order to receive funding, schools had to follow some basic rules. For example, they couldn’t discriminate against students. They had to accept kids regardless of their (or their family’s) race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc.

That restriction led the Denver Catholic Archdiocese and two of its parishes to sue state officials. 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.

But it didn’t take a genius to understand the real goal here: This was always about Catholics’ 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 want to send their kids to Bigot Factories, they have every right to do so, and no one is 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?!

That was seriously what they wrote in the 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 illegal. Therefore, the rules needed to change. Not their beliefs. (Never their beliefs.)

This was the epitome of broken brain religion for you: A program that would lift up families that couldn’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 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’s telling 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 June of 2024, U.S. District Court of Colorado Judge John Kane ruled mostly in favor of the state. They weren’t discriminating against religious schools by saying all participants had to abide by the non-discrimination rules, he wrote. But it wasn’t a total win. By allowing Catholic schools to prioritize children in Catholic families over, say, Jewish families, the state had allowed a faith-based exemption to the law. So were faith-based exemptions allowed or not? The state “cannot have it both ways,” he wrote.

The Catholic schools called it a victory... but it wasn’t the complete victory they wanted. They had hoped the judge would declare the non-discrimination rules illegal. He didn’t. So they kept fighting and appealed the decision. But last October, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the earlier ruling:

The Department did not exclude faith-based preschools from participating in UPK. Indeed, they welcomed and actively solicited their participation. The only relevant limitation on any preschool’s participation is the nondiscrimination requirement, which applies to all preschools regardless of whether they are religious or secular. Thus, the inclusion of religious schools as welcome participants in Colorado’s UPK program distinguishes this case from Supreme Court decisions where the plaintiffs were excluded from participation based upon their religious exercise and status.

…

… we can find no reason to rule that the Department has violated the Parish Preschools’ free exercise rights. This ruling does not mean that we shirk our constitutional duty to protect the Parish Preschools’ freedom of worship. It simply means that when a school takes money from the state that is meant to ensure universal education, then its doors must be open to all.

That’s apparently a concept the Catholic Church doesn’t understand.

The Catholic Church’s lawyers also argued that Colorado allowed schools to “discriminate” on the basis of income (Head Start) and disability (through Individualized Education Programs or IEPs). So didn’t allowing some preschools to prioritize students in those situations mean Catholics could prioritize students whose families fit their rigid preferences? The Tenth Circuit didn’t see those as the same things. The former situations were meant to keep the program inclusive while the latter was about exclusivity.

… we are not persuaded that the IEP and Head Start preferences amount to a violation of the nondiscrimination requirement. The Department interprets the nondiscrimination requirement to prevent preschools from denying admissions to children because they are disabled or from a low-income family. It does not, however, protect children without disabilities or children from high-income families. Disability and income level are treated differently from other protected classes in light of the Colorado General Assembly’s substantive goals in implementing UPK. The General Assembly specifically declared its intention to try and expand the number of disabled and low-income students attending preschool.

…

These provisions do not speak in general terms about ignoring disability status or income level. They specifically concern children who have a disability or are low-income. And the IEP and Head Start preferences were developed to help preschools comply with federal laws that specifically protect disabled and low-income children.

In short, there was no reason to think there was any “religious hostility” involved when the state was formulating its rules.

And to the Catholics’ argument that forcing same-sex couples or families with transgender kids to enroll in their pre-schools would violate their religious freedom, the Court rejected it entirely. After all, we’re only talking about kids, not people on the payroll.

This is a case about preschoolers. No one would reasonably mistake the views of preschool students for those of their school. And while we must “give deference to an association’s view of what would impair its expression[,]” that does not mean that we must buy that “mere acceptance of a member from a particular group” is enough… Teachers and staff are the ones responsible for disseminating a preschool’s message and developing the curriculum, not the preschool children they teach.

The lawyers for the Archdiocese were furious, which is why they appealed again, this time to the Supreme Court.

They argued that the universal pre-K program had already led two schools in the Archdiocese to “[close] their doors due to shortfalls in funding and decreased enrollment.” (Including one that was shut down after the lawsuit began.)

Across the Archdiocese, parish preschool enrollment has declined almost twenty percent since UPK was enacted. And families committed to Catholic education… are missing out on thousands of dollars of state funding solely because they chose a Catholic preschool for their children.

Again, these families want taxpayer dollars for private religious education they can already access, and they’re whining about it because these Catholics believe they’re above the law.

But now the Supreme Court is taking up the case.

In legalese, the Church and its right-wing lawyers from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty asked the Supreme Court to overturn a 1990 decision (Employment Division v. Smith) that said neutral, generally applicable laws can’t be challenged on the grounds that they violate your religious beliefs. The Supreme Court said they wouldn’t be considering that question, but they could find a way to force Colorado to accept the Catholic schools into the program despite the violation of anti-discrimination laws. They will instead consider whether the exemptions that already exist in Colorado’s program must be extended to the Catholic preschools.

Every time I write about this topic, there’s always a question of why any decent parents would send their kids to a Catholic school if they oppose the Church’s bigotry. But it’s not as simple as that. Sometimes, a Catholic school is the only local option for pre-K. Sometimes, the families are Catholic in name even if they don’t agree with all the teachings. Sometimes, they’re just unaware of the Church’s prejudice.

Whatever the case, it seems obvious that the goal of challenging these rules is no longer about participating in the universal Pre-K program, but rather getting the Supreme Court to create yet another hole in the wall between church and state, perhaps by ruling that religious beliefs can always be a loophole for people who don’t want to follow the law even while receiving government benefits.

The irony is that no one was ever forcing the Catholic Church to do anything that violated its beliefs; the Archdiocese was just unhappy that everyone else was doing pretty damn well by rejecting their bigotry and they couldn’t handle being left behind.

But because the Supreme Court’s majority will do just about anything to let religious zealots circumvent generally applicable laws, we could be seeing a future where even anti-discrimination laws can be nullified by religious bigots who can’t fathom the idea of not being able to discriminate against certain people.

“If the court rules in favor of the religious plaintiffs, it could snowball discrimination by publicly funded entities,” [Freedom From Religion Foundation] Legal Director Patrick Elliott warns. “That would undermine decades of civil rights law and harm vulnerable communities, especially religious and nonreligious minorities and LGBTQ+ families.”

It’s possible the best-case scenario here is that Colorado will have to let a few Catholic schools be bigots with state money in order to make sure the program, with all its benefits, can keep going. The fear, of course, is that the Court will use this case to expand faith-based bigotry in other programs across the country.

The case will be heard later this year.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

Subscribe now

Are young men turning to religion more than ever before? That’s what recent headlines suggest:

Fox News even put together this graphic to mark the news:

They’re basing those off of a recent Gallup poll that found men 18-29 are much more likely than before—and, surprisingly, much more likely than women—to say religion is important in their lives. This doesn’t just defy the overall trend of the past two decades, it defies numbers from the past two years:

Driven by a recent increase, young men in the U.S. have now surpassed young women in saying religion is “very important” in their lives. Gallup’s latest data, from 2024-2025, show 42% of young men saying religion is very important to them, up sharply from 28% in 2022-2023. By contrast, during this period, young women’s attachment to religion has held steady at about 30%.

Although young men had previously tied young women on this key marker of religiosity, young men now lead by a statistically significant margin.

42% is a shockingly high number. We haven’t seen it among young men since the turn of the century. It suggests that the grip on young men we’ve seen by the Republican Party and conservative podcasters and the “manosphere” is now being shared by religious leaders too. It suggests young men are desperate to follow any older white guy who speaks with authority and tells them the secrets of how to control the women in their lives.

It’s all the more shocking when you realize the same number for women in that age group is pretty much as low as it’s ever been, at 29%.

That 13-point difference between young men and women is even more jarring when you realize there’s a 27-point swing among Americans 65 and older. In that group, women (64%) are far more likely than men (50%) to say religion is important in their lives.

The same article from Gallup says that religious attendance (at least once a month) among men and women ages 18-29 has also gone up in recent years to 40% for young men and 39% for young women—all while religious attendance numbers for older Americans continue going downward.

Here’s what’s not surprising: The rise in religious attendance is much higher among young Republicans than Democrats. That only affirms that the link between religion and politics on the right is as strong as ever.

BUT. There are some big caveats to all of this.

The first involves the question about importance of religion. Gallup’s margins of error for young men and women are huge—7% and 10%, respectively. Simply put, they’re not getting those numbers from a large sample size, so take them with a huge grain of salt.

The 2024-2025 results for importance of religion are based on 4,015 U.S. adults, including 295 men aged 18-29 and 145 women aged 18-29. The margins of errors for these gender subgroups are ±7 and ±10 percentage points, respectively.

(By comparison, the error margins for the other questions are under 5%.)

Another concern is that other surveys haven’t seen the same results. As the Washington Post notes, “A December report by Pew Research Center found few shifts in church attendance or other measures of religiosity among young adults in recent years.”

PRRI, another polling group, hasn’t seen those results in their data, either. They say we’re focusing on the wrong takeaway entirely: The real story is that young women are leaving religion, not that young men are becoming religious.

“Looking at young adults, there is a shift happening, but it’s not among Gen Z men, as some suggest. Instead, young women’s declining religiosity has brought them on par with their male counterparts,” said Melissa Deckman, CEO of PRRI.

Unless and until we see the Gallup results replicated in other surveys, there’s no reason to run with their numbers just yet.

But let’s say you assume the numbers are accurate. If I were a church leader, I wouldn’t be celebrating the future just yet. If you believe that religion, politics, and overall cultural trends are all intertwined, and that’s why young men are becoming more religious, then what happens when those same men begin to turn away from Trump and the embarrassments in his orbit?

In 2024, young men (under 25) supported Trump over Kamala Harris by 5 points. That number has dropped by 25 points; his net approval is -19% among young men today. If they’re turning away from Trump, they’re likely to turn away from the people who support him as well as the institutions that prop him up despite all the evidence that Trump is a disaster for the country.

To put it another way, anyone getting excited about the rise of religion among young men should wait a year or two to see how these numbers look as Trumpism (hopefully) fades out.

And why would anyone get excited about the sort of young men who are supposedly being drawn to church these days due to conservative politics? If you’re drawn to faith because you believe in the tripe spread by Doug Wilson, Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, the ghost of Charlie Kirk, or any of the other wannabe alpha males who hog the spotlight, then the religion you’re allegedly attracted to isn’t one that makes the world a better place. It’s one that’s infested with misogyny, cruelty, and racism. It’s not like they’re joining church because they want to help the poor. And if women are leaving those same spaces, it won’t be long before those men follow.

Finally, consider the wording of the question: “How important would you say religion is in your own life”? Religion is extremely important in my own life because I fight against it. I’m not sure others would interpret it the same way, but the attendance numbers feel like a better proxy for what people are doing, not a question about the importance of faith, which sounds like something you should agree with.

In any case, this is why I think the merging of cultural religion and politics will eventually backfire on conservatives. Trump and his allies aren’t just pushing people away from the Republican Party right now; they’re dragging down everyone associated with them, including right-wing lobbying groups like AIPAC and right-wing churches whose pastors lack the courage to speak out against Republican-fueled atrocities.

I don’t say this often, but our society would be so much better off if young men were listening to the pope.

Subscribe now

In the latest effort by conservatives to spread the lie that we live in a Christian Nation, members of the Trump Administration will be participating in a week-long Bible recitation. It’s part of an initiative called “America Reads the Bible,” taking place at the Museum of the Bible, to commemorate “250 Years of the Bible in America.”

Donald Trump, fresh off posting an AI image of himself as Jesus healing a Jeffrey Epstein-lookalike and getting into a one-sided flame war with Pope Leo, will be joining in the action, perhaps in an attempt to do some damage control.

A recording of Trump reading a verse from the Old Testament will be released next week as part of a celebration of the Bible, organizers of the event said Friday.

One of the organizers of the event said Trump will be reading a passage that includes 2 Chronicles 7:14, a section about repentance:

… if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

I guess that makes sense. If the man lies during every speech and press conference, he might as well read a Bible verse he doesn’t believe in either.

It’s not like they were going to ask him to read the Sermon on the Mount.

Or anything from the Gospels.

And they sure as hell weren’t going to ask him to follow the message of Jesus because he’s never been interested in that. So I guess this is the next best thing for the right-wing Christians who have latched onto a man now being dubbed the Antichrist by many on the right.

I’m glad they’re recording it. It might be the only proof we ever get of Trump actually opening up the book.

Other administration officials are also participating in the charade:

In addition to the president, the lineup features several Cabinet officials and Republican lawmakers, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; White House chief of staff Susie Wiles; Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins; Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum; and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.

If they really wanted to troll everyone, they would have Hegseth read Ezekiel 25:17.

In a saner world, the people who cause as much harm in the world as that group does would never be asked to hold a Bible, much less read it, but conservatives have gone all in on hypocrisy. That’s why the organizers wouldn’t even address the fact that Trump is participating in this event after a week spent pissing off countless Christians with his online antics:

Bunni Pounds, the founder of Christians Engaged and an organizer of the Bible event, welcomed the president’s participation and declined to weigh in on the controversies — though she noted that the president’s reading might be relevant.

“It’s a scripture about repentance,” Pounds said. “None of us are perfect.”

(I’ll give you a moment to come to terms with her name.)

And while no one’s perfect, the rest of us at least put in some damn effort, unlike Trump, who goes out of his way to be cruel and chaotic. That the people organizing this event won’t denounce his actions tells you a hell of a lot more about their values than some reading of the Bible that no one will ever listen to in full because why would anyone ever subject themselves to that?

On a side note, the recording by Trump is reportedly two-and-a-half minutes long. But 2 Chronicles 7:14 only takes a few seconds to read. That means he’s probably reading a longer passage that includes that verse in which God appears to Solomon. That section includes a part in which God threatens those who disobey Him.

… But if you turn away and forsake the decrees and commands I have given you and go off to serve other gods and worship them… This temple will become a heap of rubble. All who pass by will be appalled and say, ‘Why has the Lord done such a thing to this land and to this temple?’

Maybe that is the perfect passage for Trump to read. The organizers just don’t realize why.

More broadly speaking, this event isn’t really about honoring the Bible. It’s about projecting power over non-Christians. The fact that so many self-described Christian leaders are participating in the performance—when they would be appalled by a Democrat even citing a verse from the Qur’an in a speech—tells you everything you need to know about their intentions.

If any of these people actually gave a damn about Christianity, they wouldn’t be reading a section of a book they’ve never bothered to read in full for an audience that’s never going to listen to them. They would talk from the heart about things like humility, repentance, compassion, and the vulnerable. But the same dishonest, cruel authoritarians who only care about Christianity to the extent that it keeps them in power don’t actually care about following any of the lessons from the faith. They don’t care if they have a leader shaped by the Bible; they just want one who knows how to use the Bible to control everyone else. That’s what Christian Nationalism is all about.

Subscribe now

70% of Americans say Donald Trump is not religious, according to new polling from the Pew Research Center.

(The researchers remind everyone that this survey was conducted “just before Trump criticized Pope Leo XIV and posted an image on social media depicting himself as a Jesus-like figure.”)

It raises two thoughts:

1. That makes perfect sense. In no way is Trump virtuous or godly and it’s absurd for anyone to think he cares about a “higher power” when he already sees himself as God.

2. How DARE anyone pretend he’s anything BUT a conservative Christian? He’s their problem, not ours. They OWN him. Everything he does is in the name of Jesus. You better BELIEVE he’s religious.

Somehow, both of those things are true.

It’s an insane line to straddle, too, because conservative Christians have spent the past decade insisting that Trump is one of their own. The now-dead abuse advocate James Dobson even insisted in June of 2016 that Trump had become “born again,” adding that he personally knew the person who “led him to Christ” (though he wouldn’t tell anyone who it was). Dobson believed Trump “really made a commitment,” even if he was only a “baby Christian.” (Half right!)

Trump’s ally, Pastor Mark Burns (who famously lied about his own credentials), said he’s “personally heard [Trump] profess his faith in the Lord Jesus.”

Evangelical huckster Hank Kunneman claimed Trump was anointed by God.

Robert Jeffress agreed Trump was “born again” and a Christ follower.

Trump himself has said he identifies as a Christian:

“Though I was confirmed at a Presbyterian church as a child, I now consider myself to be a non-denominational Christian,” Trump, who has repeatedly identified as a Presbyterian in the past, said in a written response to RNS.

Saying that his parents “taught me the importance of faith and prayer from a young age,” Trump went on to say that “Melania and I have gotten to visit some amazing churches and meet with great faith leaders from around the world. During the unprecedented COVID-19 outbreak, I tuned into several virtual church services and know that millions of Americans did the same.”

In recent years, Trump has also posed for many photo ops in which evangelical Christian leaders pray for him with hands on his body like they’re performing a magic trick. But that trick rests on the assumption that Trump is accepting their prayers because he believes the same nonsense.

And that’s just the preachers around him. Trump himself has fueled the speculation by doing things like selling an overpriced cheaply made Bible plastered with his name:

And he held up a Bible in front of a church after his team used tear gas to drive away peaceful protesters:

To a large extent, his Christian cosplaying has worked. In 2023, Republican voters said Donald Trump was more religious than Mitt Romney and Joe Biden. They just overlooked the fact that Trump was a thrice-married racist who paid hush money to porn stars he was having affairs with when his current wife was pregnant with his fifth child. That he was the Two Corinthians guy. That he said he doesn’t need forgiveness. That he couldn’t even name his favorite Bible verse.

The new Pew Research poll is, of course, a survey of all Americans, not just Republicans, but even if you break down the numbers, 49% of Republicans admit Trump isn’t very religious, while 51% of white evangelicals agree! (The rest are hopelessly delusional.) But how many of them with large platforms will ever say that on the record? How many will admit they know Trump doesn’t give a shit about their faith but they all play along with it because their religious base is too damn stupid to handle the truth?

All of this shows how GOP voters don’t actually give a damn what politicians believe. As long as they pay conservative Christians proper lip service, many of those voters will assume they’re devout.

Interestingly enough, 87% of atheists say Trump isn’t religious either, a higher percentage than any other group. But we’re not the hypocrites here. Conservative Christians are.

Here’s the more accurate reading of where we’re at:

The relationship between Trump and conservative Christians has always been transactional. Trump gave them whatever they wanted—credibility they never earned, federal judges who prioritized right-wing religious beliefs over a plain reading of the law, access to political power, etc.—and they gave him their votes over and over. No scandals dissuaded them. No wars bothered them. No attempt to overthrow our democracy gave them pause. No amount of sinning in real time made them budge. They’re just as immoral as he is.

But at no point was Trump ever really Christian, and he never will be because he doesn’t think about religion, and deep down, you know he’s annoyed that he surrounded by people who resemble Mike Pence instead of anyone he respects.

But none of these people will admit that.

The preachers have constantly acted like Trump is one of them (even if he doesn’t look or act like it) and he’s never said otherwise. He might say he’s a bad Christian—to the point that he might not get into Heaven—but he’ll never say he’s not a Christian, because he knows that would erode the support he needs.

So it’s not shocking that 70% of Americans say Trump isn’t religious, but don’t let that get in the way of the fact that white evangelicals are responsible for this era. He’s breaking the country with their help and they should be held accountable for it. And as long as conservative Christians continue to pretend he’s one of them, they should always be tied together in the minds of Americans.

As for the people who genuinely believe he’s religious, imagine spending your entire life pretending to be someone who knows right from wrong because of your faith, only to fall victim to the most obvious scam of all time. It’s just the latest con Trump has pulled over many American voters.

Subscribe now

In 1981, lawyer Ishmael Jaffree found out that his children were subject to the Lord’s Prayer every day at school. Then they had to say prayers at lunch. There were additional Bible readings in class. This was happening in Mobile, Alabama even though the Supreme Court had ruled in the 1960s that mandatory Christian prayers in public schools were unconstitutional.

The state tried to get around the law by saying these Christian prayers were purely voluntary… and that teachers had permission to recite prayers with “willing students.” But even if non-participating students couldn’t be punished, the coercion was in full effect. Jaffree’s kids were repeatedly harassed and shunned by their classmates for not saying the Christian prayers.

The school district didn’t fix the problem when Jaffree brought this to their attention, so he filed a federal lawsuit in 1982—and that case eventually made it to the Supreme Court. In 1985, Jaffree was on the winning side in a 6-3 decision that effectively said it was fine to have a moment of silence, but it wasn’t legal to have these supposedly voluntary prayers nor was it okay for teachers to join in with “willing students.”

It was arguably the last time a Supreme Court ruling strengthened the wall of separation between church and state. It’s been downhill ever since.

Despite all the backlash and threats his family received, Jaffree told an audience at the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s convention in 1985 that he would do it all over again because he was “absolutely committed to the idea of separation of church and state. There’s no question that my religious view is a minority, and unless people like me are willing to challenge these cases, then we don’t have a chance.”

I mention all this because, unbeknownst to me, Jaffree died in July of 2024 at the age of 80.

It didn’t make a lot of news at the time (though Al.com published a brief obituary) and it turns out FFRF wasn’t aware of this, either. They only found out last week and quickly published an obituary expressing their appreciation for his fight.

But then something else interesting happened.

FFRF informed the New York Times about Jaffree, leading the newspaper to publish their own obituary (gift article) about him nearly two years after his death.

They even credit FFRF with giving them the nudge: “His death, which was not widely reported at the time, was brought to the attention of The New York Times last week by the Freedom From Religion Foundation.”

It’s a wonderful piece that gives readers even more insight into the life of this courageous man, including a passage about what caused Jaffree to flip from being extremely religious to becoming an agnostic:

[His mother] Ms. Hobbs was a strict Baptist, and when her son [then named Frederick Hobbs] was young she would send him out to preach on street corners. He wasn’t wholly obedient, though: He was expelled from high school for violating the dress code.

He spent a few years working odd jobs before enrolling at Cuyahoga Community College, then transferred to Cleveland State University.

Arriving on that campus in 1968, he encountered ideas like Afrocentrism and existentialism that challenged his conservative upbringing. He was especially influenced by an atheist professor whose last name was Jaffree; in his honor, he changed his name to Ishmael Jaffree.

When I asked FFRF how this pseudo-collaboration happened, they told me their newsletter editor Bill Dunn “discovered Ishmael had died without the kind of memorial and attention he deserves.” They shared their own obituary with an editor at the Times, leading to the additional coverage.

Also surprising? This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened.

FFRF said it was their heads up that led the Times to publish an obituary of another secular champion, Vashti McCollum, whose 1948 Supreme Court case helped end the practice of public schools setting aside class time for religious instruction. In that situation, however, it took a week for the obituary to get published, not years.

It’s a reminder that even major news outlets dedicated to covering these kinds of stories don’t always know what’s happening in our world unless we tell them.

Subscribe now

An openly non-religious candidate for Congress made a slew of offensive comments on online forums well over a decade ago, and they’re now threatening to derail his campaign.

Nate Blouin is a state senator running in Utah's newly redrawn (and—importantly—left-leaning) 1st Congressional District. Democrats in Utah are hoping to finally have representation in Congress, which is why this is one of those races where the primary may be a bigger deal than the general. Also, if elected, Blouin (pronounced BLUE-in) would be the first person to enter Congress as openly non-religious.

Since getting elected to the legislature, Blouin has carved out a niche as a progressive in the Bernie Sanders vein with a focus on the climate crisis. During his current campaign, he’s called for abolishing ICE, safeguarding health care for transgender people, and passing Medicare for All. Blouin says he wouldn’t have run if this was a swing district, where a more moderate Democrat might have a better chance, but given that the district appears to be safely blue, he believes Democrats should elect someone who can champion more progressive policies—and I happen to agree with that strategy. It’s also why he’s been endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC.

In fact, just last week, I proudly hosted a virtual phone-banking event on his behalf because I want more people like him in Congress. At a time when we’re inundated with Christian Nationalism, Project 2025, and whatever the hell Pete Hegseth is doing to Christianize our military, we need more strong, progressive, Humanist voices who will represent us in ways our community is just not used to. (To be clear, no one should support Blouin because he's non-religious. You should support him because of his political positions. The fact that he's openly non-religious is just an added bonus.)

That’s why it was a shock to see reporting in Punchbowl News this morning that Blouin made a slew of offensive posts on online forums between 2009 and 2015. He used derogatory and misogynistic language. He made crass “jokes” about domestic violence and assault.

Some of the claims are extremely over-the-top, though.

When answering a question about what local issue would make him riot, he responded “Something about the mormon church being a bunch of bigoted assholes.” That’s not unfair criticism. The Mormon Church is famously anti-LGBTQ.

Punchbowl also says:

Blouin recommended buying a GoPro camera “for filming porn with your underage sister.”

Sounds bad but the context doesn’t support that at all. Someone asked on a skiing forum if a GoPro camera was the best option, or if there was something else he should consider. Blouin, apparently not a fan of GoPro, sarcastically responded, “for filming porn with your underage sister, yeah, that's a good call bro.”

He’s not actually recommending anyone use it for that purpose. Obviously. If I ask a bunch of expert chefs if a particular kind of rolling pin is worth buying, and someone responds, “sure, it’s what I use when I’m screwing your mom,” that’s not meant to be taken literally.

But Punchbowl News doesn’t appear to speak fluent sarcasm.

Punchbowl also says Blouin “threatened to ‘skull fuck’ someone.”

That’s also not what happened. In a Reddit forum for skiers, a user asked what websites were best to purchase discounted gear. One commenter suggested a hack: There was a website meant to give employees information on the products their stores may carry. If you just lied to them, by registering and saying you worked for a sporting goods store, it would allow you to get an employee discount on the products you wanted.

When the user asked what he should enter in all the fields (to perpetuate the lie), Blouin urged him not to do that.

Well, he actually said, “i will skull fuck you if you do this.”

That’s not a threat. That’s just a person saying don’t do it… with the language of a troll. It’s definitely crude. But it’s not meant to be taken literally. Obviously.

That’s not to excuse any of this. Those remarks, and other more pointed ones, are awful. There’s no way around that. They also strike me as the sort of stuff some young wannabe edgelord says to get a rise out of people on forums when he thinks he’s anonymous. (Graham Platner, who’s currently running for U.S. Senate in Maine, has admitted to doing the same thing in his past.)

It’s worth stressing that these are all comments he made between the ages of 19 and 25. That doesn’t make those comments okay. It does, however, raise questions about what he believes today. Are those still his views? Does he make comments like that today?

There’s no indication I’ve seen of any of that. Simply put, Blouin, who’s 36 now, is no longer the same guy he was in his early 20s. Neither am I (and, in many ways, thank goodness for that).

More on that in a moment.

Here’s what Punchbowl News doesn’t mention: There’s nothing in Blouin’s legislative history, or career as a public figure, or anything else in his goddamn life, that suggests those comments reflect who he is today.

It honestly feels cheap to use people’s idiotic decade-old online comments against them at a time when the current Republican president says far worse things on a daily basis, with the full support of his conservative allies. (For example, Punchbowl calls out Blouin for using the word “retarded,” and yes, that’s deeply offensive. Also, Trump just said that word this month in a press conference and used it to describe a sitting governor last Thanksgiving. He faced no consequences for that whatsoever because Republicans are never held to any sort of standard by political reporters. A Republican senator, just yesterday, said Somali Americans should be kicked out of the country “if you talk like they talk.” That open racism barely made a blip in the news.)

In response to his old comments resurfacing, Blouin issued an apology saying he’s “ashamed” of those comments now and has “thankfully evolved past” all that. He added, “All I can say is I’ve spent the past decade of my life trying to become someone worth trusting.”

My response to an article you may have seen today: There's no excuse for these posts -- they're vulgar, stupid, and reflect a version of me in my early twenties that I’m ashamed of and have thankfully evolved past. When a reporter sent me these posts, I was horrified to see my use of language toward women and about a faith that my family, friends, and millions of Utahns practice.

I won’t minimize what I wrote, and I believe every candidate forced to look at their old online activity should take full accountability for the person they once were behind their computer screen. To the people I hurt with my words, I sincerely apologize.

All I can say is I’ve spent the past decade of my life trying to become someone worth trusting -- as a neighbor, as an advocate, and now as a public servant -- to fight for working families, for health care, for the dignity of every person in this district. I will keep showing up every day as the person I've worked to become. That is my promise to you.

I think that last bit is crucial. We should judge people for who they are, not who they were. If they have a track record of public service, then they should be judged on that. And if they have a troubling past, we should know if they’ve truly changed. Blouin has made campaign promises. He has public positions on a variety of issues. He has taken votes. That’s what voters should care about.

A Republican with a pristine online past who wants to ban abortion access and deport immigrants is infinitely more dangerous than a Democrat who fights for civil rights and social justice but made unwholesome remarks on random online forums well over a decade ago.

It’s insane that anyone would even question that.

I’ll reiterate something that should be common knowledge at this point: If you want to see younger candidates in office, you have to accept that they’ve spent the majority of their lives making comments and videos on the internet—many of which, in hindsight, will be deeply embarrassing—because they didn’t think those things would ever come back to haunt them.

Hell, there will be candidates in the future whose nudes are online. Or candidates who did dumb stunts to go viral. There will also be candidates who said thoughtful things in the past who have since become monsters (see: Vance, JD).

In a statement sent to me, Utah State Rep. Sahara Hayes said she was judging Blouin by who is is today:

Nate has taken full responsibility for his comments, as he and every person who has made shameful comments online should. The statements that he made were hurtful then and are hurtful now. The fact is, many young candidates have a digital record of almost every year of their lives. It’s up to Utahns whether they want to judge their candidates based on online comments made 17 years ago, or on their current character and positions on health care, housing, reproductive rights, and more. The Nate of today has proven himself to be a tireless advocate for his constituents, and that is who I am supporting.

This isn’t a partisan thing. I don’t think Republicans should be condemned for idiotic things they said in the past, either… but only if they’ve truly changed. The reason former Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson got so much shit for obscene comments he made on adult websites was because he was a Christian hypocrite who also currently wanted to pass policies that would hurt women and LGBTQ people.

In Blouin’s case, there’s no evidence that he’s anything but a progressive champion today. That doesn’t excuse his terribly offensive comments. Rather, that’s proof that he’s not the same guy he used to be.

I would go on to say there’s actually concrete evidence of this change in his life.

In 2017 (years after those offensive comments were made), Blouin resigned from the Utah Democratic Party, where he was an intern, because he didn’t believe the party was doing enough to criticize a candidate accused of harassing women. (I have a copy of the letter he sent to Party officials.)

In 2022, he ran for State Senate against an incumbent Democrat, Gene Davis, who had been accused of sexual abuse. (Interestingly enough, one of Blouin’s more moderate Democratic opponents, Ben McAdams, endorsed Davis in 2018 even though those allegations were public in 2016. McAdams never rescinded that endorsement.)

If you want to look at character, what matters more? Blouin’s actions over the past decade, or his poorly chosen words from well over a decade ago? This isn’t a complicated question.

I reached out to Blouin’s campaign to see if he would chat with me for this piece, and he was not available. Still, this feels like a pathetic attempt to undermine an otherwise stellar campaign. Two of his primary opponents have called for him to drop out, but again, they cite no evidence that his online comments reflect who he is today. They’re acting like the online persona he took on in 2009 should stain him forever even when there’s clear-cut evidence that he supports women, minorities, civil rights, environmental justice, etc. To say he “trivializes or undermines the seriousness of sexual violence, assault, and harassment” is to ignore what he’s done to taken those issues seriously over the past decade.

Amanda Litman, the president of Run for Something, a group that’s encouraged young progressives to run for office, called the Punchbowl News piece an “oppo dump against Nate” and praised his “pitch-perfect” response. She added that the piece was an example of how people are going to “discredit” younger candidates “who grew up online.” What matters, she says, is “taking accountability and proving growth.” Blouin has done that.

If this news is the reason Blouin’s campaign ends, I fear what that means for other candidates like him. No one is safe, especially not young people who want to run for office after years of building up a base of followers online. It’s not that everyone says offensive things on the internet—obviously they don’t—but that things we believed or said years ago (in settings where provocation is often rewarded, no less) shouldn’t be the defining moments of our lives.

Especially if there’s evidence that we’ve changed.

In Blouin’s case, that evidence is everywhere.

Subscribe now

Donald Trump’s “Religious Liberty Commission” was formed to “offer diverse perspectives on how the Federal Government can defend religious liberty for all Americans.” But during their seventh and final meeting on Monday, held at the Museum of the Bible, the group’s leader denounced the very idea of church/state separation, calling it a “lie.”

Chair Dan Patrick, also the Lt. Governor of Texas, asked the meeting’s featured speaker if public businesses and schools should be required to put up a poster, much like OSHA warning signs, reminding people that “the separation of church and state is the biggest lie that's been told in America since our founding.”

We have, in a typical building or a classroom, teacher’s room, wherever it may be, we have posters, all types of federal posters, up about OSHA regulations and various regulations you must follow. Your rights must be protected. Uh, we’ve talked about it a little bit on this Commission.

Would it not be a good recommendation that every school, every university, every business has to have that one sheet on the bulletin board about protecting people’s religious liberty, and that the separation of church and state is the biggest lie that’s been told in America since our founding?

The speaker, law professor Helen Alvaré of the right-wing Antonin Scalia Law School (which was hilariously once named the Antonin Scalia School of Law—you figure out the acronym) and a former staffer for the right-wing U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, responded by saying “it would be an appropriate time” to do just that.

Because of course she would. Tearing down the very idea of religious freedom—and the notion that the government shouldn’t take a position on religion—is why she was invited to speak in the first place.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State denounced the comments, calling them an “attack on our democracy.”

[Church/state separation] is an American original, something we should be proud of, fight for, and cherish.

“If this commission really cared about religious freedom, it would join Americans United in demanding a national recommitment to church-state separation as the best way to defend religious freedom for all.”

(AU is one of several groups suing the Commission over its obvious pro-Christian bias.)

At another point in the meeting, Commission member and First Liberty Institute CEO Kelly Shackelford made another suggestion: What if they asked Trump to get the IRS to issue a “small fine” to a church that endorses a candidate from the pulpit? By directly violating the Johnson Amendment and getting punished by the IRS—something the IRS, historically, has not done—Christian groups would have standing to file a lawsuit that could eliminate the Johnson Amendment once and for all.

… There’s a lot that [the Department of Justice] can do. And… I would add one more that I think is sort of an IRS and DOJ recommendation, is we just saw, just a few weeks ago, yet again, this whole idea of scaring churches from talking about political issues… There was a lawsuit that should have been decided. We had a judge find a way not to rule. Just happened a few weeks ago.

And there is a way to deal with this. And that is: If the president would ask the IRS to go ahead and issue a small fine against any church for talking about politics, and then make clear to the DOJ we want a decision on the constitutionality of this IRS regulation versus the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, then we can finally get a precedent that then will make clear to every church the freedom they have.

But until we get that, everybody’s gonna be scared. And this is something that the president can do.

Nobody is scared. Pastors routinely endorse candidates from the pulpit—and often brag about it—because they know damn well the Trump administration doesn’t get about justice or the law. But Shackelford’s point here is that the Commission should use its power to force the president’s (weirdly discolored) hand.

The reason all this matters is because this group only has two jobs: producing a report on the state of religious liberty in America and advising the White House (and connected agencies) on policies it should adopt.

We can now be assured that the report and advice will be built on the faulty assumption that church/state separation is unnecessary and that churches (by which they mean white evangelical ones) should be allowed to endorse Republicans from the pulpit, further contributing to the idea that this is a Christian Nation.

In some ways, this was already a foregone conclusion. This Committee and its meetings have always been just for show. If Republicans want to pass pro-Christian executive orders or resolutions, they already have the numbers to do it, whether or not their desires are legal. It’s not like GOP officials are sitting around reading white papers and thinking, “Wait a minute, maybe we should protect religious freedom for Muslims!” Hell, Dan Patrick didn’t even realize that Trump extended the life of this Commission through 2027; Patrick is treating this body as if it’s about to be disbanded while Trump wants to keep it going past the midterms for no apparent reason.

It raises an interesting question of whether the recommendations will even matter. Why write a report with suggestions when Trump sure as hell isn’t going to read it? And if Republicans don’t act on this Christian Nationalist fantasy list, will anyone on the Commission say anything about it? It’s doubtful. They rarely speak up in the face of injustice; why would they draw more attention to the fact that Trump ignores them too?

But until that happens, we should assume the worst. This Commission, with no real religious diversity at all, was selected with the understanding that they would support Christian Nationalist ideals. When one member, Carrie Prejean Boller, dared to question the group’s definition of antisemitism, she was kicked out by Patrick.

The final report won’t be about religious freedom at all. It’ll just be an extension of Project 2025. It’ll be a government-backed document attempting to rewrite history while also urging the adoption of policies that will elevate Christianity over other religions. It’ll be a report that aims to end the concept of religious liberty altogether in favor of pro-Christian policies. What else would you expect when the foundation of religious liberty—church/state separation—is being called a “lie”?

That’s the danger. It’s not that the comments or report will have a long-term effect on their own but that we’re normalizing the ideas underlying them. What used to be the deranged rants of fringe pastors are now conversations shaping how our government treats religious minorities. They want to end government neutrality on religion, require public schools to push their propaganda, and give their churches the ability to become funnels for dark money campaigns promoting their preferred conservative candidates.

If those barriers fall, we’re all screwed, because church/state separation is good for church and state. As history shows us, whenever one religion gains political power, freedom for everyone else disappears.

Subscribe now

By now, you’ve probably seen the news about Congressman Eric Swalwell. The outspoken Democrat stood a good chance of becoming California’s next governor but he suspended his campaign and resigned from Congress in the span of a day after credible allegations of sexual assault against multiple women were published by CNN and the San Francisco Chronicle. (And after online influencers like Arielle Fodor and Cheyenne Hunt used their platforms to call attention to the accusations.)

For people who only knew Swalwell through his constant media appearances where he came across as a liberal bulldog—and, to be clear, he voted that way as well—that might come as a shock.

But there have been plenty of hints over the years that his actions didn’t always match his public rhetoric.

I’ve alluded to one of those stories in many of my public talks over the years, but I’ll mention it here.

In 2007, Congressman Pete Stark made history when, at the urging of the Secular Coalition for America, he went public about being a non-theistic Unitarian, making him the only member of Congress willing to say he didn’t believe in a higher power. It was a courageous thing to do especially because it wasn’t clear if the announcement would affect his future campaigns. Thankfully, it didn’t. Stark had been in Congress since 1973, his constituents knew him well, and he was comfortably re-elected in 2008 and 2010, both times with over 70% of the vote.

In 2012, however, Stark was challenged in the Democratic primary by an upstart city council member from the town of Dublin: Eric Swalwell. It was the young energetic lawyer versus the older, stale, liberal “firebrand.” Ironically, the San Francisco Chronicle endorsed Swalwell at the time saying Stark’s “hyper-partisanship and boorish antics… have grown old. He is, to put it bluntly, an embarrassment to the district.”

Swalwell knew Stark was vehemently liberal. The sort of guy who, in 2001, voted “present” on a resolution wishing former president Ronald Reagan a happy birthday. The sort of guy who, in 2011, voted against reauthorizing a voucher program that would have given students money to attend private religious schools.

And the sort of guy who, in 2011, voted against a resolution reaffirming "In God We Trust" as our national motto.

One of the ways Swalwell tried to attack Stark during their campaign was to denounce him over that motto vote.

Yesterday, the U.S. Congress voted 398-9 to re-affirm our national motto, “In God We Trust.” Since 1864, the phrase, “In God We Trust” has appeared on U.S. currency and in 1956 it was recognized as our national motto. Since the Civil War this inspirational motto has captured the spirit of our country and guided its people through world wars and the attacks of September 11.

“It seems like too often these days Congress can’t agree on anything. Yesterday, 398 Members agreed to re-affirm our national motto,” said Eric Swalwell, Dublin City Councilmember and candidate for Congress (CA-15). “Congressman Stark was one of nine members of Congress who disagreed. The Fifteenth Congressional District deserves a Member of Congress who is in touch with its people, can work well with others, and can honor our national motto.”

The idea that Stark was out of touch because he refused to honor a Christian Nationalist motto might seem jarring to people who seen Swalwell advocate for progressive legislation during his time in office, but Swalwell was perfectly willing to throw the open atheist under the bus if it meant boosting his own campaign.

That attack, along with everything else Swalwell said, did the trick.

Both men were on the ballot in the general election because of the state’s top-two jungle primaries, and Swalwell beat Stark that November 52% to 48%, ending the career of one of the most courageous liberals to ever be elected.

Given all that, it’s a bit ironic that Swalwell later joined the Congressional Freethought Caucus.

Here’s another interesting twist to the story: Pete Stark’s son, Fish Stark, is now the executive director of the American Humanist Association, a group that works to make life easier for people with no religious faith. Fish lived through that whole campaign in 2012 and watched Swalwell trash his father for reasons that went well beyond politics.

Yesterday, before Swalwell announced his resignation but after he suspended his gubernatorial campaign, Fish posted his own thread reminding people that his father nailed his criticism of Swalwell when they were competing against each other:

AIPAC bankrolled Eric Swalwell's campaign to push my dad, Pete Stark, out of Congress.

Fourteen years *to the day* before the allegations, at a debate, Dad called Swalwell a "slimeball," a "crook," & said "you're going to jail."

He was right about everything.

The press called it an embarrassing outburst.

I'd call it the most accurate character assessment anyone ever made of Eric Swalwell.

People knew Eric was shady. It didn't matter. AIPAC, Big Pharma, and corporate Democrats wanted someone they could control. And they got him.

People knew Eric Swalwell took illegal $ from developers who later went to jail. Google "James Tong Swalwell".

People knew he faked being part of an MTV film crew so he could film + judge swimsuit competitions over Spring Break in Mexico.

His character was obvious even in 2012.

Swalwell's clear ethical issues didn't matter. Pete Stark was voting for conditions on aid to Israel and calling out Democrats for being anti-Medicare For All before it was cool, so he had to go.

As long as the Democratic Party is afraid of Pete Starks, we'll get Eric Swalwells.

(Quick correction: While AIPAC only began donating money to candidates in 2021, pro-Israel lobbying groups were among Swalwell’s donors in 2012.)

It’s also worth pointing out that politicians are often accused of varying degrees of bad behavior, but it takes courage for someone in your own party to call for your resignation. It’s a lot easier to do it after others have already taken that step.

Who was the first member of Congress to call for Swalwell’s resignation?

Rep. Jared Huffman, the only current openly Humanist member of Congress, and in many ways the heir to Pete Stark’s secular legacy.

Huffman didn’t just call for someone in his party to resign; it meant booting out someone who’s a member of the Freethought Caucus he co-founded.

That right there is godless morality in action.

Meanwhile, virtually no evangelical Christian Republicans publicly demanded the resignation of Rep. Tony Gonzalez, who had an affair with an aide who later died by suicide. (Last night, Gonzalez announced he would also be leaving Congress before his term was up.) And that’s to say nothing of Donald Trump, whose affairs and sexual assaults are well-documented.

So Eric Swalwell is gone. I’ll admit there were plenty of times during his congressional career when I was actively rooting for him, but he can always be replaced by someone whose values actually align with their positions. It’s not a loss. I’m grateful, though, that the pressure for him to step away from public life came from other Democrats who understand that principles matter far more than the person claiming to represent them.