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Over the holiday weekend, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York issued a religion-heavy message marking the nation’s 250th anniversary:

Happy 250th, America!

The founding fathers called America God’s noble experiment. I believe in all three words to this day: we are one nation under God, we have clung to noble ideas for longer than any other nation, and we are an experiment always changing, trying to make ourselves better.

God bless America, and I hope everyone has a wonderful day celebrating with their friends and family.

You expect that kind of rhetoric from Republicans, not the leader of Democrats, but that’s besides the point. Schumer claimed the Founding Fathers referred to their new country as “God’s noble experiment” before riffing on all three words.

So… when exactly did the Founding Fathers—any of them—say that?

The answer, as far as I can tell, is never.

In fact, if you search for that phrase, the only time it ever seems to come up is in speeches delivered by… Chuck Schumer.

Like in a 2025 speech about Americans’ right to protest:

I say to the American people, do not be afraid to exercise your right to free speech. Be proud that you are doing it. Do not be afraid to exercise your right to free speech. Do not be afraid to protest peacefully against Donald Trump’s eroding of our democracy. Do not be afraid to show how much you love this beautiful democracy, as the Founding Fathers called it, God's noble experiment. We have to keep this precious democracy.

And in a 2022 speech about voting rights:

Members of this body now face a choice—they can follow in the footsteps of our patriotic predecessors in this chamber.

Or they can sit by just as the segregationist-oriented Democrats in the post-civil war era did and try to have democracy unravel. I do not believe that we want our democracy to unravel.

I do not believe that is the ultimate destiny of this country. It is a grand country. As the founding fathers called it, God’s noble experiment.

And in a 2018 speech about the Russia investigation and stock buybacks:

Somehow President Trump doesn’t grasp the rudiments of our democracy and our system of laws. President Trump seems to have a view that the Justice Department exists to protect his interests and prosecute his enemies. But in the long history of this country — God’s noble experiment as the founding fathers called it — that’s never been what the Justice Department has stood for.

And in a 2017 speech about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Mandatory Arbitration Rule:

I worry about this country, Mr. President. I love this country. It's been so good to me, my family, my people. I still believe to this day it is what the founding fathers called it when they left constitution hall, God's noble experiment. We are one nation under God. God's. Noble, we're a noble country.

And in 2016, after Trump was elected (and Schumer was re-elected):

“As the leader-to-be of the Senate Democrats — God willing, my colleagues all said they would vote for me on Wednesday — I look forward to hearing from the American people and charting a path to achieve our sacred goals and defend our values.

“When the Founding Fathers finished writing the Constitution over in Philadelphia at Constitution Hall, they said they had created God’s Noble Experiment. I believe those three words are every bit as relevant today as they were then.

“We are under God, a nation of faith. We are noble, we believe in democracy and that everybody has equal opportunity. And experiment, that means we keep changing and adapting to the times as we’ve seen in election after election.

And in this 2009 speech during the confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor when she was nominated to the Supreme Court:

Mr. Chairman, people felt at the founding of America that we were ‘‘God’s noble experiment.’’ Judge Sotomayor’s personal story shows that today, more than 200 years later, we are still God’s noble experiment.

And in this 2003 speech opposing the nomination of a right-wing federal judge:

I believe to this day what was said when America was founded, that we are God’s noble experiment. We still are. That is why the debate today and in the following weeks has so much vitality. For this beautiful work of art to maintain its beauty and brilliance, the Senate must hold up its end of the bargain. We have a duty, a responsibility, an obligation to the judiciary, to the Constitution, and, yes, to the American people, to carefully evaluate these nominees and decide whether they merit confirmation.

I may have missed a few dozen. But the point is the only person who believes the Founding Fathers said that is the only guy who keeps repeating the damn line. And after he said it this weekend, commenters chimed in to tell him he was flat-out putting words in their mouths. Including Yale historian Joanne Freeman:

According to Adam Keiper, Executive Editor of The Bulwark, the only reference to that phrase he could find before Chuck Schumer seemingly conjured it out of thin air was in a 1939 book review that was published by a professor at the (now firmly right-wing) Hillsdale College:

In the late forties, the cause of the Nativists was kept alive by the great influx of immigrants and the passions engendered by the Mexican war. In order to purify the immigrant stream at its source, the crusaders began with great zeal to convert the Catholics of Europe to the Protestant faith. This foreign endeavor had its counterpart in their efforts to save the middle West from the designs of “Popery.” To the mid-century Protestants, this was more than a religious cause. They were saving American democracy, God’s noble experiment, on whose success hung the fate of all democracies. In this struggle they had no doubts of their ultimate victory. As they read the signs of providential guidance in the past discovery and settlement of America, they faced the future optimistic and unafraid, for the dice were loaded in favor of Protestantism.

Even then, the author wasn’t quoting the Founders.

So here’s where we’re at: The Senate Democratic leader has spent more than two decades attributing a quotation to the Founding Fathers that appears to have no historical basis whatsoever. It’s not just a careless mistake either. It’s a myth that he’s helped manufacture through sheer repetition. And because he keeps saying it, we risk journalists and future politicians and the David Bartons of the world repeating it as if it were authentic.

This isn’t some innocuous mistake. Schumer’s constant repetition of a fake phrase is inadvertently propping up Christian Nationalist mythology. Because if America was founded as “God’s noble experiment,” then it implies some divine mission that was present from the beginning as well as a specific religious identity. It’s the same argument Republicans make to say any move toward a more secular government is a betrayal of our origins.

Democrats—especially the Democrats’ Senate leader!— shouldn’t be validating that worldview by fabricating religious rhetoric for the Founders. There are plenty of genuine quotations celebrating our grand experiment and the noble underpinings of it without bringing God into the equation.

He should apologize for lying to everyone and stop repeating a line that has no basis in reality unless he can point to a citation for it.

American Atheists, which first brought this to my attention, is calling on supporters to sign a petition demanding that Schumer “correct the record, retract his fabricated statements, and apologize.” They added:

“It’s disturbing to see any American politician fabricate — apparently from whole cloth — a quotation that is indistinguishable from the junk history being pushed by David Barton and the rest of the White Christian Nationalist movement,” said Nick Fish, president of American Atheists. “It’s particularly galling in the wake of Christian Nationalist hijacking of our nation’s 250th anniversary and their attempts to redefine America in stark, exclusionary terms.”

…

“That Chuck Schumer has seemingly been repeating this sentiment for more than 20 years doesn’t make it true. The truth matters. And the truth is that the United States is an experiment in secular self government, not theocratic rule. A nation that promises religious pluralism, not religious tests of any kind,” added Fish.

Incidentally, Schumer has been under fire this past year for a different story he’s been telling for decades about the Baileys, a middle-class couple he supposedly thinks about when making every decision.

Except the Baileys don’t exist either.

Making up lies that serve his preferred narrative appears to be just a regular part of Schumer’s political career. Democrats deserve so much better than what they’re getting from him.

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It’s been a while since we’ve talked about how the Creationists at Ark Encounter are still desperately trying to convince people they do real “science.” (Usually, the conversations revolve around their low attendance.) But Ken Ham still hasn’t changed his rhetoric; he’s still mad that reality contradicts his mythology. That’s why he’s now lashing out at local newspapers for saying as much.

To make sense of it, we can just look to his latest video, where he makes a series of mistakes, purposely or not, to convince his gullible followers that the mainstream media is against them.

He wants to argue that good journalists should be objective, which, in his view, means not taking a position on what counts as science. So he brings up an example of a newspaper that got it right and one that got it wrong.

The one that did it right? The Northern Kentucky Tribune, which posted a brief article about how Ark Encounter was “celebrating its 10th anniversary.” Except it’s not an article at all. It’s literally a press release that Ken Ham’s team sent the paper, which they republished with only a handful of small changes and a straightforward headline.

Ham even admits that… while trying to imply the exact opposite:

For instance, the Northern Kentucky Tribune simply reported the news. They published our press release announcing the Ark Encounter’s 10th anniversary celebration with the headline “Ark Encounter to mark 10 year anniversary with guest speakers, concerts, and more beginning July 9.”

That’s what journalists used to call reporting the news.

That’s not reporting the news. There’s no “reporting” involved whatsoever. It’s an age-old trick of sending a newspaper exactly what you want them to say and then pretending you’ve earned the coverage if they go through with it.

This isn’t new for Answers in Genesis. They literally pay Fox News to run segments about them, then suggest to their followers that Fox is covering them only because they’re doing something incredible.

They’re liars. It’s how they roll.

If that’s the good example, what’s the bad example?

That, he says, was the article published in the Cincinnati Enquirer. He sent them the same press release but the bastards there didn’t just copy and paste it like he wanted! Reporter Jolene Almendarez actually provided readers with context and understanding. You know, like good journalists do.

It seems like she felt the most newsworthy aspect of that press release was that astronauts were going to be part of the anniversary festivities. And not just any astronauts. We’re talking about two men who spent significant time in outer space and another man who walked on the moon!

Why would astronauts, typically thought of as pro-science, come to a place that’s widely seen as anti-science? That was the real story. So she ran with it.

She even explained her logic in a video she posted on X/Twitter:

One thing you take away from that delightful video is that she’s clearly not an activist. There’s a story here worth telling and she’s excited to tell it. She’s not taking a position on Young Earth Creationism. She’s just highlighting why astronauts appearing at the Ark may sound contradictory. To stress that point, she even pointed out that an intern at the newspaper reached out to Bill Nye for comment, and Nye (correctly) stated that the Ark was “anti-science.”

It led to this headline for her story:

Ken Ham is naturally furious about that because he hates actual journalism.

First, he insisted, “That’s not reporting the news. That’s framing the story with a conclusion before readers even begin reading.” He’s wrong. That’s why “anti-science” is in quotes. The story is the apparent contradiction and that’s what the headline highlights.

(The answer, by the way, is that those three astronauts are also Young Earth Creationists. Sounds ridiculous but it’s true. If Ham wasn’t primed to be so damn angry all the time, he could easily pretend that this story was pro-Creationism because it shows how science and the Bible don’t have to be in opposition!)

He wasn’t done whining. Later in the video, he got mad that she reached out to Nye at all as a stand-in for the scientific community. Because who truly represents that group? The overwhelming majority of professional scientists who accept evolution, or the handful of reactionary cranks who don’t?

The reporter repeatedly appeals to what credible scientists or mainstream science supposedly believes. But who decides which scientists are credible? Is a scientist no longer credible simply because he or she believes Genesis?

Yeah, man. If you believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis, then you’re ignoring scientific realities, and you become no longer credible. That’s how credibility works.

More to the point: You can be an accomplished person with batshit crazy beliefs. You can have a Ph.D. in science while still rejecting basic science. You can be a well-known “historian” whose biography gets pulled from the shelves because it contains way too many lies. And you can be an astronaut who thinks the universe is approximately 6,000 years old.

There’s nothing weird about educated people with massive blind spots. The question is whether their controversial beliefs are backed up by any evidence—and in the case of Creationists, the answer is a very obvious no.

Ham uses this as proof that the media has an “anti-God agenda.” Which is another lie. The media isn’t anti-God. On its best days, it’s anti-bullshit. And bullshit is the only thing Ark Encounter has to offer people. Or, in reporter-speak, there’s no proof, much less widely accepted scientific evidence, for the claims made by Creationists.

You don’t need to be a trained scientist to say that. You don’t need to be a theologian to say that. You just need to be a reporter who understands how to lay out a story and speak to people who know what they’re talking about.

Not that Ham understands that.

Does this reporter have expertise in science? Does she have training in theology? Not what I’ve been able to research. She has qualifications in journalism education. Yet throughout the article, she in essence confidently makes pronouncements about both science and theology while presenting only one side of the story.

This, again, is Journalism 101. To paraphrase a famous line, if there’s a thunderstorm outside and some idiot insists it’s not raining, your job is not to pretend there are two equal sides to the story. Your job is to go outside and check, and then tell us it’s raining.

Ken Ham seems to think that he and his merry band of crackpots deserve to have their beliefs taken seriously by the very nature of their existence. But there aren’t two sides to this story. There’s one that’s backed by everyone who knows what they’re talking about—who get published in peer-reviewed journals, and understand the science in depth in a way that Ham doesn’t, and can explain it to others with a style he doesn’t possess—and there’s the view backed by fundamentalist Christians and the people they’ve duped.

Ham goes on to criticize the reporter:

This reporter needs to go to a good journalism school, in my opinion, one that teaches proper journalism.

I assure you that every journalism school would tell this reporter to keep doing what she’s doing, because she’s killing it. Meanwhile, Ken Ham needs to go back to elementary school since he apparently slept through every science class.

At the end of his video, he insists there’s something to his beliefs because “hundreds of thousands of people visit the Ark Encounter, and many come skeptical” and “Our research indicates about 80,000 [people] a year become Christians as a result of visiting the Ark.”

Somehow, that “research” is nowhere to be found. But you can see Ark Encounter attendance numbers meticulously laid out right here.

Early in the video, Ham accuses the reporter of publishing an “opinion piece” rather than a news piece. But I read the article and it’s more than fair to Ham’s perspective. It accurately describes what they believe while correctly framing that as a fringe view among scientists who study this stuff.

At the Ark Encounter, placards claim the Earth is only a few thousand years old instead of 4.5 billion years, as the vast majority of scientists agree. And displays show dinosaurs, like velociraptors, in bamboo cages, alive at the same time as humans, which mainstream science also debunks.

That’s… accurate! Ham can’t have it both ways. He can’t pretend to fight against mainstream science and then demand to be included among mainstream scientists.

As for how the reporter resolves the apparent contradiction of the astronauts who believe this nonsense, she simply quotes them:

During [Jeff] Williams’ time at NASA, he spent 534 days in space throughout four missions. In an interview with the Institute of Creation Research, he said he doesn’t find a conflict between science and scripture. “If you have a presupposition that excludes the possibility of a God, that excludes the possibility of supernatural acts, and that everything has to be explained just with natural processes, then you’ve basically limited what you can let the objective observation of science tell you,” he said.

That’s it. She doesn’t say that’s right or wrong. She just lets him do the talking.

Same with Charlie Duke, who actually stepped foot on the moon:

Duke was the 10th person to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 16 mission in 1972, according to the NASA website. During his time on the moon, he collected moon rocks estimated to be more than 4 billion years old. But after his time at NASA, he became a born-again Christian and believes in the literal interpretation of Genesis — that God created the earth in six days, The Washington Post reported.

This is what Ham is mad about. It’s the same thing Trump is mad about when newspaper say his election denial conspiracy theories have never been proven in court and that there’s no evidence to back them up. These people live in denial and they can’t handle when people call them out on it because they surround themselves with sycophants who believe every lie they’re told.

I reached out to Almendarez, the reporter, to see if she had any response to Ham’s video, but she didn’t comment any further. She doesn’t need to. The article speaks for itself.

On a side note, I have no clue who designed the thumbnail for Ham’s video, but someone went to the trouble of writing an actual parody article where squiggles would have sufficed. It quotes “Cincinnati Expirer editor-in-chief, Mr. I.B. Tolerant” as saying “We’ve been trying to take down the Ark Encounter since it opened.”

They put more work into that thumbnail than they’ve ever spent trying to prove Young Earth Creationism is true.

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Earlier today, a pastor went viral for a sermon in which he emphatically declared that “There has never been a Christian nation and never will be! You don’t live in one now! A Christian nation wouldn’t have killed and displaced 20 million Native Americans, or thought owning slaves was pleasing to God!”

A clip of the sermon, delivered by Pastor Loran Livingston of Central Church in Charlotte, North Carolina on June 28, was first shared by The Tennessee Holler. (While it looks like a straight two-minute clip, there’s actually an edit in the middle.)

There has never been a Christian nation.

You don’t live in one now.

We had godly people get on boats and come over here so they could worship. Godly people. We’ve had the greatest Bible preachers in the 15, 16, 1700s. Godly people. Some of the people that constructed this country, godly people, but it has never been a Christian nation—and never will be.

…

A Christian nation would never have killed and displaced 20 million Native Americans. Who are still left out and living in poverty.

A Christian nation would never have thought that owning slaves was pleasing to God—or that it lined up with Scripture in any way, shape, or size.

And we not only practiced it, but we were so obsessed with it that we went to war about it. We had a Civil War, and in that Civil War, 500,000 Americans died.

That’s more… Americans that died in World War II, or any other war we’ve ever had. Our own civil war. We killed 500,000 of our own people so people could have the right to own other people as property!

Those are powerful words from an effective speaker! Livingston was saying we don’t live in a Christian nation because a nation that was truly Christian would never do the horrible things we’ve done!

In fact, in other parts of the same sermon, he decries our obsession with spending billions of dollars on sports’ stadiums “while the poor, the hungry, the jobless sit in the shadow of those arenas in rat-infested low-income housing.” He condemns Donald Trump for signing an executive order to celebrate Shabbat because, as he puts it, “no government official ought to have his hands in anybody’s faith.” He even goes after “Big Pharma” for its price-gouging and says “A Christian nation would weep and do something about our military veterans sleeping on the streets.”

Is Livingston the hero we’ve been waiting for?

Someone courageously and forcefully rebuking the scourge of Christian Nationalism from his pulpit?

Not quite.

Look, I shared that viral clip the moment I saw it, too, but it was only afterwards that I watched the full sermon—he delivered two of the same ones that morning with minimal differences—and it became very clear Livingston is no hero at all.

When he says we don’t live in a “Christian nation,” it’s not an assessment of American history. It’s that our country isn’t righteous enough to be “Christian” in all the ways he wishes it was. To him, “Christian nation” is aspirational and we’ve got a long way to go.

In fact, if you listen to different cuttings of the same sermon, the takeaway is much more bleak.

He lamented that we already have religion in our government—but not in the sense that Christianity is used as an excuse to promote bad policies. Instead, he argued that plenty of people are known for they promote—whether they’re Jewish, Muslim, or gay (?!)—and those are all religions of another kind. He would much rather live in a country where people followed the teachings of Jesus, something he said Christian politicians don’t do either.

Oh, brothers and sisters, we have religion in our government. I’m talking about our government. We have Judaism in the Senate and Congress. You know who they are.

We have Islam in the government. You know, the Muslims that make the noise.

We have atheism in our leadership. That’s a religion. We don’t believe there’s a God. Then that makes you your own god. That’s a religion.

…

We have the LGBTQ religion in Congress and the Senate and in other places of leadership. It’s there. That’s—see, that’s your religion. Whatever you embrace and pour your energy into and think about and work for becomes your religion. They’re there.

Let’s set aside the fact that atheism isn’t a religion and that atheists don’t think we’re our own god. Let’s set aside the fact that the Muslims in Congress don’t try to use their faith as the sole basis to push their beliefs on everyone else. Let’s set aside whatever he thinks the “LGBTQ religion” is and that the only reason Congress members in that community ever bring it up is because their conservative Christian colleagues push for laws to oppress them.

This is not a pastor defending church/state separation.

It gets worse.

In his attempt to explain what a truly “Christian” nation would look like, he attacked abortion access (“racist!”), transgender rights (“abusive!”), and same-sex unions (“perverted!”) as proof that we’re not righteous.

This is a straight two-minute clip with no edits.

No Christian nation would thoughtlessly murder 80 million unborn babies. Mostly minorities. Thoughtlessly throw them in a trash can and be done with it. Mostly minorities!

I’m pro-choice, people say. Well, uh, you are for the most racist stance in this country, knowing that abortion affects minorities more than anybody else, and you stand for that?

Do you think a Christian nation would be gender confused?

A Christian nation would fund and finance the butchering of children’s bodies to change their sex, because abusive adults were so empty and lost that they would advise young children who don’t even understand biology, much less the sexual process, to have their bodies changed?

Do you think a Christian nation would praise and promote same-sex union? A woman marrying a woman and a man marrying a man?—You notice I said “union.” I didn’t say “marriage.” The only definition of marriage is one woman and one man—Or any other perverted union?

Equating abortion to murder, and implying that all abortions occur by throwing babies into trash cans, shows how little he knows about the procedure. And it’s always interesting to hear conservative Christians pretend their real concern here is racism, because it’s the only time they ever seem to care about racism—when they can use it to ban abortion access.

The idea that we’re “butchering” kids’ bodies suggests there’s no real thought that goes into it and ignores the very real concerns affecting trans youth. He also falsely pretends adults are pressuring kids to do that—and that the supportive parents of trans kids are somehow “abusive.” (Most trans children don’t go through with any sort of gender affirming surgery.)

And this guy still has a problem with same-sex marriage to the point he won’t even use the “M” word to describe it. It’s homophobia, pure and simple.

Later in the same section, Livingston also insisted “No Christian nation would ban the Bible—or remove the Bible from anything”… even though we don’t ban the Bible or remove it from anything.

The point is: This guy doesn’t want church/state separation and he’s not some progressive preaching hero. He’s the same brand of bigot we’ve seen before, except he’s also willing to call out some of the obvious hypocrisies of the right.

Don’t get thrown off by the viral clip. The full context reveals that Livingston is just as conservative as any white evangelical or Southern Baptist preacher. He just knows how to frame his material so it’s not entirely focused on the hate. Don’t let him get away with it.

This is the problem with viral sermon clips. They allow people to assume someone’s a hero or villain with no broader context. Livingston is now benefitting from the fact that most people are never going to hear his full sermon. It’s like he took a selfie, used a great filter, and people assume that’s what he really looks like. But he’s not a fearless critic of Christian Nationalism. He’s just promoting a different version of it—one that’s hostile to reproductive rights, LGBTQ people, and religious pluralism.

He’s not rejecting the idea that America should be governed by Christian values. He’s arguing that America hasn’t been governed by his version of Christian values strongly enough. That’s a fundamentally different message than the one millions of people now think they’re applauding.

There’s no reason to give him unearned praise simply because he said something accurate (and important!) about slavery or the genocide of Native Americans. Plenty of reactionary preachers are fully capable of recognizing historical atrocities. But in this man’s ideal world, we’d punish rape victims by not allowing them access to abortions, ban gay couples from getting married, and further marginalize trans people. We’re not any better off in his utopia than we are in the America he’s condemning right now.

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This weekend could have been a huge celebration of the country’s 250th anniversary. But a bipartisan-backed festival that could have drawn in millions of Americans was hijacked by Donald Trump, who replaced it with the now-disastrous “Great American State Fair.” There’s a remarkable lack of people on the National Mall, because who wants to visit Washington, D.C. for what’s essentially a giant Trump rally, with live coverage from Fox News, a Confederate flag, overpriced food, and a heat wave that makes it unpleasant to be outside at all.

Despite all that, there are still people who want to make things worse: evangelists.

According to an article (gift link) from the Washington Post’s Michelle Boorstein, Christian missionaries see the event as fertile ground to convert people:

Jason Jimenez saw a mission field.

“Has anyone told you that God loves you and that he has a plan for your life?” the 38-year-old Bible student began each conversation as he moved in the baking, bright sun.

For Jimenez and the more than 1,000 other missionaries who came to Washington, D.C., to win souls for Christ at the Great American State Fair, the Trump-administration-run event was “the perfect environment,” he said.

A thousand missionaries! Given the tens of people attending the event, it’s entirely possible the missionaries are outnumbering the people they’re trying to target, and vastly outnumbering the people who might actually be willing to be their targets. At some point, mathematically, these missionaries have to be trying to convert other missionaries, right?

These aren’t random Christians, either. They came in with a game plan:

As morning turned to afternoon, Jimenez described some of the tactics of the missionaries he works with. All Revival Ministries missionaries at the Mall have a “stat card” where they write the goal of how many souls they hope to save that day, how many people they spoke with and whether those people said yes or no to Christ. His team also uses an app that reflects the by-minute numbers and where missionaries are on the Mall, so the group doesn’t annoy people by crowding up and reaching out more than once.

Around lunch time, his app said about 40 teams that day had reached 2,231 people.

They’re gamifying conversions and wrongly think it’s not annoying if they reach out only once. They’re even deluded about their delusions. And, of course, there’s no actual accomplishment occurring even if anyone is converted, except in their own fantasies.

There’s another problem with their assumptions: The sort of people who are bothering to come to this event are far more likely to be MAGA types who are already Christian. The evangelists even implied as much, saying they wanted to be on the National Mall because they knew this event would draw in “patriotic people” who might be more receptive to their message. It’s hard to believe, though, that there are Trump-loving “patriots” who haven’t heard about Jesus—much less thousands of them who need to be baptized right away. (For that, David’s Tent, a ministry that’s been on the National Mall for over a decade, has a pool ready to go. You have to wonder if anyone’s voluntarily getting baptized just to avoid the heat.)

Perhaps the best indication of how brainwashed some of these attendees already are is seen in this passage… which may be my favorite sentence in the whole piece:

“This country was based on faith, and we believe God has his hand on this nation,” Jacyln Stursman, 46, a tax accountant from Iowa, said as a Mennonite vocal group performed behind her on a huge stage.

“In the Constitution it says ‘under God,’” her daughter Abigail, 20, who is studying to become a teacher, said — incorrectly. The Pledge of Allegiance includes the phrase “under God.” The Constitution’s text makes no mention of a deity.

Just an astonishing amount of ignorance, in so few words, from someone who thinks she’s qualified to teach… anything. (Kudos to Boorstein for quoting her and correcting her in the same sentence.)

Anyway, to state the obvious, missionaries would have been present even if this had been a truly non-partisan event, but they would have been overshadowed by the sheer number of other storylines. Given how little there is to discuss about the event, the missionaries may have accomplished more by simply being there—and being written about—than converting anyone.

What makes all of this even more futile is the desire by the missionaries to rise above partisan politics.

Into that atmosphere come the evangelists, who are trying to stay away from partisan politics while still tapping into the revival atmosphere the White House has helped elevate.

Democrats and Republicans are “the same snake with two heads,” Eric Gonyon, crusade director at Revival Ministries, said after leading the first of three daily “soul-winning training” sessions Wednesday morning.

If you’re so broken inside that you believe both parties are the “same”—and you can’t even bring yourself to denounce everything the Trump administration, with Republican support, has been doing to destroy the country from the inside, then how can you possibly be trusted on any other issue—especially what these people would consider the most important issue of all? If your religion can’t help you pinpoint evil when it’s staring you in the face, then your moral compass is broken and there’s no reason for anyone to take you seriously.

You could argue that, at this point, progressive Christians who point to all the ways Trump is violating the Gospel message would have a much easier time winning people over to their side. Not conservatives who think politics can be ignored in service of a more transcendent message. We don’t have the luxury of pretending things are normal, yet these evangelists think visitors to the Massive Trump Rally can set aside politics when the very place they’re all at is an extension of our current broken Republican-run system.

If talking to the missionaries is supposed to get you into Heaven, we’re all better off looking forward to Hell, where at least you’ll find some peace and quiet.

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There was a time when candidates for higher office, regardless of their beliefs, wanted to pivot to the center in order to be as electable as possible. But in a polarized areas where all the action occurs in the primaries, there’s much less of an incentive to be moderate.

In Tennessee, Republican gubernatorial candidate Monty Fritts, a graduate of Liberty University and current state representative, is going to the extremes. Considering that a Republican nominee in a statewide election is all but guaranteed to win, Fritts is trying to move to the right of Sen. Marsha Blackburn, the current frontrunner for governor who’s already a right-wing MAGA cultist.

Fritts said in a May interview with Nashville’s Phil Williams that he’s a proud “Christian Nationalist” who would support laws that violate any sense of religious pluralism.

… he acknowledged that he would like to outlaw Muslim calls to prayer and, if possible, ban Islam itself, along with Buddhism, Hinduism and “other pagan religions.” He wants to treat abortion as murder and would deny the morning-after pill to rape victims.

He would also outlaw same-sex marriage and criminalize some sexual acts between consenting adults of the same sex.

“I just kinda boiled the two words down to a ‘Christian’ — I am that, I will not deny Christ — and I am a nationalist. I am an America-first, Tennessee-first person. So I didn’t think that was a detrimental term,” Fritts said, explaining his use of the term Christian nationalist.

When asked why enacting religiously driven policies is not effectively imposing his beliefs on others, Fritts said it comes down to wanting what is best for his fellow citizens.

“Well, again, it’s back to the we want the best for our fellow citizens,” Fritts said.

It’s not just that Fritts wants to impose Christianity on everyone in the state. It’s that he wants to impose his extremist version of Christianity, which, like so many other religious zealots, he believes is the only true form of the faith.

How did he rationalize banning Islam and the building of mosques? Simple, he argued. It’s not a religion at all because Muslims do not belong to “a movement of seeking God.” Therefore, it’s a political ideology. Even though he refused to use the same logic to go after Jews.

Fritts argued that Muslims are not protected under the First Amendment because, in his view, Islam is a political worldview rather than a true religion. Courts have repeatedly rejected that argument.

When asked whether his position would also apply to Judaism, since most Jewish people do not recognize Jesus as king, Fritts said he would not outlaw Judaism. He pointed to Messianic Jews — a group that combines Jewish identity with belief in Jesus — as a distinction, but declined to directly address the question of traditional Jewish practice.

“I think to to try to split the hair to get to to get me to say that, I’m not willing to say that,” Fritts said.

Fritts made that point while adding “I have friends that are, um, cultural Muslims.” (Fact-check needed.)

What happens, Williams asked, if the courts say all of this is unconstitutional?

“Let's cross that bridge when we get to it,” Fritts responded.

In the meantime, Fritts has support anti-Muslim bigots. When a Texas massage therapist went viral for telling two Muslim women in a grocery store that they were “not welcome” in America because “this is not a Muslim country,” Fritts openly celebrated the therapist, saying, “most career… politicians are not willing to embrace America and Tennessee’s Christian heritage.”

The sad thing is that this kind of thinking is no longer on the fringes of the Republican Party. One Republican activist told the Times Free Press that the race is Blackburn’s to lose, given her polling advantage and name recognition, but Fritts could be a dark horse. The way he said it, though, was a bit revealing.

"I think definitely Marsha Blackburn — it's hers to lose — I mean, she's got such a strong lead. But I don't really believe that John Rose and Monty Fritts could be at 15% total," Robert said. "Monty Fritts has this huge kind of cult following."

Indeed. You have to be part of a cult to be on Fritts’ side. And we know that because he’s been pushing extremist legislation while serving the past four years in the Tennessee State House.

A few years ago, Republicans tried passing a law that would allow county clerks to pull a Kim Davis and refuse to certify marriage licenses for anyone they oppose for religious or personal reasons. Fritts insisted this wasn’t about anti-gay bigotry at all; rathe he was just trying to protect old people.

“When you look at some of the research that we have found on this, that … young folks are trying to marry older folks to get to their financial accounts,” Fritts said. “I think there are other things that we need to do.”

Right. He wanted to stop the scourge of sugar babies. Even he didn’t want to admit what he was really thinking… which is to say he’s somehow gotten even more extremist since then.

He also co-sponsored an anti-abortion amendment that would have allowed Tennessee officials to execute women who have abortions along with any doctors who dared to help them.

He also wants to execute doctors who help transgender children.

More recently, Fritts posted a couple of campaign videos calling on Blackburn and their other GOP opponent to debate him, and they featured Dane Chisholm, an anti-Jewish (a “malevolent force throughout history”), pro-Hitler (“a great man!”), wildly racist (Black people should “return to Africa”) fan of Nick Fuentes.

Fritts have nothing to say about that association.

This is what the Republican Party has to offer the state of Tennessee. It’s not like Blackburn will be that much worse, though. Her positions are just as extreme, except she hasn’t openly called for the death of her ideological opponents.

Every political movement has its fringe extremists. What’s scary these days is that someone who openly fantasizes about outlawing entire religions, criminalizing same-sex relationships, executing doctors, and ignoring the Constitution isn’t immediately disqualified from serious consideration by his own party.

He’s not hiding any of this. He’s campaigning on it. But instead of becoming a political pariah, he’s praised as the sort of guy who has a “cult following.”

What does that say about today’s GOP? We already knew they were extremists, but the as Republicans fight to beat each other in primaries, they see the only path forward as being more extreme than everyone else in the race. (Just look at James Fishback in Florida.)

If advocating religious persecution, celebrating anti-Muslim harassment, and surrounding yourself with a Hitler admirer still leaves you with a viable statewide campaign, your party is fundamentally broken.

Marsha Blackburn is in no way the “safe” choice here. She’s not leading the polls because she’s a principled alternative to Fritts, but because she’s had years to hone her culture-war grievances and authoritarian impulses. Republicans in Tennessee know her and embrace her. And once Fritts loses, he’ll openly fight for her election. For now, though, when someone like him argues that Blackburn isn’t conservative enough, it says less about him than it does about how low the Republican Party will go.

The Tennessee gubernatorial primary will take place on August 6.

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How much can you make from slapping your name on an overpriced, made-in-China Bible with sticky pages that no one else was buying, then pitching the whole thing as a Christian Nationalist gift for your most devoted and gullible fans?

If you’re Donald Trump, the answer is $1,514,521. So far.

The White House released Trump’s most recent financial disclosure form, covering all of 2025, and it showed he made $208,486 from the Trump Bible. The year before that, when he was actively campaigning and right after he got re-elected, he made $1,306,035 from the book.

That report, from the Office of Government Ethics (ha!), covers the first year after Trump re-entered the White House and shows, among other things, that he made about $1.4 billion from crypto-related schemes and $80 million from lawsuits against media companies he sued (like ABC and CBS), leading to a net worth of over $6 billion. But a portion of that money came from the expensive Bible he began hawking in 2024.

The “God Bless the USA” Bible includes the KJV translation, along with the text of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance, and (the kicker) the “handwritten chorus” of Lee Greenwood’s famous song.

It’s a Christian Nationalist’s wet dream.

Trump first advertised the $59.99 (plus shipping!) book in March of 2024, just before Easter, on his social network, though the video was posted on Greenwood’s Rumble page:

Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country, and I truly believe that we need to bring them back, and we have to bring them back fast. I think it’s one of the biggest problems we have. That’s why our country is going haywire. We’ve lost religion in our country. All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It’s my favorite book…

…

… In the end, we do not answer to bureaucrats in Washington. We answer to God in Heaven. Christians are under siege. We must protect content that is pro-God. We love God, and we have to protect anything that is pro-God… Our Founding Fathers did a tremendous thing when they built America on Judeo-Christian values. Now that foundation is under attack, perhaps as never before…

…

… I think you all should get a “God Bless the USA” Bible now and help spread our Christian values with others. There you have it. Let’s make America pray again. God bless you and God bless the USA.

It’s his “favorite book,” he said… even though when he was asked in 2015 to share his favorite verse, he couldn’t think of a single one. When that was followed up with a question about whether he preferred the Old or New Testament, Trump responded “Probably equal.”

It wasn’t clear at the time what Trump’s personal involvement was—or how much of a cut he got for every copy sold—but it was a perfect opportunity to remind conservative Christian voters that their faith and his politics were intertwined. He was quite literally pandering to Christians, selling them something they already own (and could easily get for free) at a time when he just wanted their cash.

But the backstory behind this book was even more interesting than Trump’s personal involvement.

This supposedly patriotic Bible first hawked by Greenwood was first advertised in 2021, slated for publication on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. It was $49.99 at the time—I guess Trump’s endorsement jacked up the price. But when it was initially announced, there was serious pushback in Christian circles.

That’s because the NIV translation used in that particular Bible meant it presumably had a stamp of approval from Zondervan, one of the largest Christian book publishers in the world. One petition made the concerns explicit:

This is a toxic mix that will exacerbate the challenges to American evangelicalism, adding fuel to the Christian nationalism and anti-Muslim sentiments found in many segments of the evangelical church.

That petition called for Zondervan/HarperCollins to cease publication of this book.

A handful of popular progressive Christians—some of whom had written books for the same publisher—also denounced the project:

American nationalism is its own civil religion, where America rather than Jesus is the center of attention. Instead of Jesus and the Church being the light of the world and the hope for humanity, America becomes the Messianic force in the world…. It has its own theology — manifest destiny, the doctrine of discovery and American exceptionalism. And this is precisely why it is dangerous to mesh patriotism with orthodox Christian faith.

After all, the Bible does not say “God bless America.” It says, “God so loved the world.” The national anthem should not be in the church hymnal, and the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States should not be in the Bible.

…

We don’t need to add anything to the Bible. We just need to live out what it already says.

At a time when many Americans were still coming to terms with Christian Nationalism, this was an explicit attempt to merge church and state in a way that made many Christians uncomfortable. (Ah, the good old days.)

Incredibly, the pushback had an effect.

HarperCollins, along with its Christian imprints Zondervan and Thomas Nelson, said they would not be publishing the book at all. In fact, they said they never even finalized a contract; the project was announced prematurely.

But then that book was resurrected. This time, it used the (non-trademarked) KJV text with Trump’s stamp of approval. (“Yes, this is the only Bible endorsed by President Trump!” said the website’s FAQ.)

The publishers also made clear this was the KJV translation and “We do not offer additional translations at this time.” (Got that, Zondervan?)

Oh. And the pages might be sticky. Because why not.

Would the Trump-approved version of the book sell? It wasn’t clear if it would, but you had to imagine the sort of people buying it aren’t the kind of folks who read books, period. Buying it, much like purchasing a red MAGA hat, was nothing more than a symbol of devotion to the only Higher Power conservative Christians care about: Trump.

The website also noted that the website “uses Donald J. Trump’s name, likeness and image under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC, which license may be terminated or revoked according to its terms.” In other words, Trump wasn’t really even involved with this. They were just paying him to for his name. (At that point, Trump should really have packaged the product with his Trump Vodka since that would be the only way the experience would be pleasurable.)

The Washington Post said this was nothing new. Trump had already made headlines for doing the same thing with ugly sneakers.

CIC Ventures LLC, a company that Trump reported owning in his 2023 financial disclosure, has a similar arrangement with 45Footwear, which also says it uses Trump’s “name, likeness and image under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC, which license may be terminated or revoked according to its terms.”

A Trump spokesperson and God Bless the USA Bible did not immediately respond to questions about how much Trump was paid for the licensing deal or stands to make from each book sale.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: For Christians to accept Trump as a protector of their faith means they’re supporting a thrice-married racist who paid hush money to a porn star he was having an affair with when his current wife was pregnant with his fifth child. A sexual abuser. The Two Corinthians guy. The candidate caught bragging about non-consensually grabbing women because he was a celebrity. The guy who lies about everything. The guy who says he doesn’t need forgiveness. The guy who held up a Bible in front of a church after his team used tear gas to drive away peaceful protesters. And that was only stuff from the first term. He’s only gotten worse since then.

If you think that guy is in any way compatible with the main character of your favorite book, good luck trying to get the people who live in reality to accept your beliefs.

Since Trump began promoting that Bible, at least one of his acolytes treated it like it’s a textbook. Literally. Oklahoma’s former Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters said he wanted to spend $6 million on 55,000 copies of the Trump Bible so he could send one to teachers all over the state. (After the legislature balked at playing along, Walters purchased 500 copies for use in AP Government classes.) It was a complete waste of money and not just because the content was, again, already available for free online.

There are now additional versions of the Trump Bible available for purchase, too. For $99.99 (plus shipping!), you can get the Presidential Edition, First Lady Edition, Platinum Edition, America 250 Edition, and more.

What we don’t know from the White House’s disclosures is how much Trump makes from each copy sold or how many copies have been sold. Needless to say you can buy near-identical versions of this book (with a similar cover) for waaaaaay less than what they’re selling it for, according to Christianity Today.

Tim Wildsmith, a Baptist minister in Nashville who reviews Bibles on his YouTube channel, said the God Bless the USA Bible appears to be cheaply made.

“I would expect this Bible to be maybe $15 to $20 tops,” Wildsmith said. “It disappoints me that it’s even out there, and it disappoints me that people are making money off of this. … This feels more like a money grab than anything else.”

Right. Of course it was always a money grab. That’s an accurate assessment of everything Trump does. He would sell off the country’s national parks if he thought the money would go directly into his pocket. And yet conservative Christians, by and large, still don’t give a damn that he’ll use their religion to enrich himself in every way except spiritually.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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A Catholic order in Australia that was on the hook for paying hundreds of millions of dollars to victims of sexual abuse has spent several years offloading its property to another organization so that it can’t be sold off. It’s corruption on top of corruption, and all of it’s coming to light because of reporting by Guardian Australia.

You may recall that, in 2013, the nation’s government launched a Royal Commission into “Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.” The commission found serious problems with the Anglican church and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, but the Catholic Church received the bulk of the attention for good reason: The investigations found that 7% of Catholic priests in the country had been accused of sexually abusing children between the years of 1950 and 2010.

It was even higher for specific Catholic orders. Among the Hospitaller Order of the Brothers of Saint John of God, an astonishing 40% of the members had sexual abuse allegations lodged against them.

The Christian Brothers, a separate order with around 680 current members, was next on the list. 22% of their members between 1950 and 2010 were alleged predators. The commission found that the order “completely failed… to protect the most vulnerable children in their care," often by moving accused members to different schools and orphanages, and that some senior leaders in the group deliberately lied to police when it came to their knowledge of the abuse happening within their ranks.

Between 1980 and 2015, 1,015 people made child abuse claims against the Christian Brothers, the highest number of claims against any Catholic order. The claims identified 483 different alleged perpetrators across 100 Christian Brothers schools.

Just as in the United States, as these predators were exposed, survivors began filing lawsuits against the individuals (if they were alive) and the organizations in general, trying to get justice for things that happened to them long ago. In many cases, the lawsuits were successful. Over three dozen dioceses in the U.S. have filed for bankruptcy as a way to prevent further lawsuits while limiting payouts to survivors. (Even then, the payouts can run in the billions of dollars.)

One of the arguments that lawyers for the Catholic Church make, however, is that they simply don’t have enough money to pay the survivors what they’re demanding. But they have buildings! So the negotiations sometimes involve figuring out which buildings—which assets of the dioceses—can be sold off to raise more money for the Church leaders’ crimes.

That’s what the Christian Brothers just did, according to Guardian Australia.

… the order is telling a court it is broke.

This week, the Christian Brothers applied for a court-ordered moratorium on all remaining civil cases lodged against it by survivors. If granted, it would permanently halt at least 200 civil claims.

The order says it wants to instead sell its remaining property portfolio – 36 properties, worth about $216m – and divvy up the leftovers between a range of creditors, including survivors, using a scheme run by retired judges. It has already confirmed the sell-off will not provide enough cash for it to pay creditors all of what they are owed.

To put that another way, the order is saying that they’re willing to sell off all of their property and add that money to the pot used to pay off victims… but that’s it. They won’t have any more money after that, even if it’s far less than what they ought to be paying.

But it turns out they’re lying.

Reporter Christopher Knaus writes that, over the past decade, since the Royal Commission began looking into the issue, the Christian Brothers have been quietly transferring many of their buildings—26 of them, at least—to a group called Edmund Rice Education Australia. Edmund Rice was the founder of the Christian Brothers, though the EREA is a legally separate entity from the order.

As the Christian Brothers have slowly started to close up shop, making them the first religious entity in Australia to “put themselves out of existence” as a result of the sexual abuse scandals, they’ve been moving all their stuff to the EREA. They insist that’s just a regular part of operational handover.

But those buildings are worth at least $50 million. (Another estimate of the property transferred to the EREA between 2013 and 2017 is over $2 billion.)

That’s why it’s revealing that the properties were sold off for $1 each—if that—with most of them being sold in 2018, long after the Royal Commission was underway.

The whole scheme suggests these weren’t normal real estate transactions but rather a way to get those properties off the books so that they couldn’t be used in future sexual abuse compensation negotiations against the Christian Brothers. The EREA, according to a financial statement covering 2024, held $2.95 billion in assets with roughly $346 million in cash.

Knaus puts it bluntly:

The $1 transfers have now left the Christian Brothers without control of a significant pool of assets they could use to pay out survivors.

To make the strategy even more obvious, Edmund Rice Education Australia said it would not be selling off the properties to assist survivors because they’re not directly linked to the Christian Brothers and are therefore “not responsible for the financial affairs or liabilities of the Christian Brothers.” How convenient.

As a lawyer for one of the survivors put it, “This is just rubbing salt into the wounds of victims of child abuse.”

It’s unclear if and how this will affect legal cases against the order. There was a hearing scheduled for last week in the New South Wales Supreme Court, but after this revelation, lawyers for the survivors were given an extension to consider how this would affect them.

If it turns out these allegations are true, however, it would be even further evidence of how the Catholic Church’s entities don’t actually care about accountability and repentance. The organizations are as interested in protecting their wealth as they once were in protecting abusive priests. They could just wave a white flag and admit they failed as a religious organization and don’t deserve any of the schools or buildings they still have—better to sell them off and give the proceeds to victims—but that thought never crossed their minds.

That’s why these transfers don’t sound like investments in ministry at all. They seem designed to make sure survivors can never receive the full compensation courts might otherwise award them.

What message does that send to survivors, who spent years overcoming trauma, shame, and fear just to tell their stories? That the Catholic order didn’t care when they were victimized the first time, and they still don’t give a damn if they’re victimized again now.

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In a bizarre, disturbing scene that’s gone viral on TikTok, a church appeared to stage a fake execution of a man—involving realistic-looking guns and military uniforms—during Vacation Bible School. As the man is being murdered, the children are cheering in unison, “Take him out! Blow him up!” The military men then take the body outside (and out of view), where it’s suggested by the pastor they’re going to “blow him up.”

The clip was first posted by the user 24sirewsnaeht (“The answer is 42” backwards). It’s not clear how that user obtained this footage or why it’s the only video currently on the channel. (The person did not respond to a request for comment.)

I don’t remember this scene in the Gospels.

This apparently took place at Mt. Olivet Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky—the backdrop of the clip matches the backdrop seen in other images of the church. I attempted to reach the pastor, Dewayne Walker, but the church didn’t respond to an email or my multiple phone calls.

According to various commenters, the church was trying to show how “sin” needed to be destroyed, which is why all the kids and their parents seemed to go along with the cosplay and paintball guns. But still. What the hell is wrong with everyone involved in this potentially traumatizing charade? At a time when mass shootings are rampant, what’s the educational value of any of this—and, yes, they can be traumatized by being exposed to realistic scenes like this even if they’re “safe” in the scene.

And think about what the skit is attempting to teach even in the best case scenario: that sin needs to be destroyed. The problem with that mentality is that Baptist churches like this one routinely tell children that LGBTQ people are sinners. And doctors who perform abortions are sinners. And people who vote for Democrats are sinners. What’s the line between murdering Satan-In-Human-Form and committing real acts of violence against whoever your pastor tells you is evil? It’s not hard to see the thread connecting skits like this with all-too-real faith-based violence.

I knew Vacation Bible School could destroy the brains of children, but this method wasn’t on my list.

Even if this was a skit, no decent adult should have approved it in the name of Jesus. The fact that adults are scattered around the room just watching this happen, doing nothing about it, only adds to the criticism that this is a form of mass delusion. Those adults are just as responsible for normalizing this behavior as the pastor in charge. They had every opportunity to stand up and shout “This is inappropriate. This isn’t what I want my kids being taught.” Instead, they smiled and celebrated the execution. They modeled for their kids the idea that violence (even the spiritual kind) is perfectly fine as long as it’s justified in faith.

Just imagine if a drag queen reading a book at a library staged a scene like this to destroy an avatar of “bigotry,” while children in the room (and their parents!) cheered it all on. That would be condemned by the right as a form of hate speech and violence and radicalization. We’d never hear the end of it. So where is the outcry from right-wing Christians? The people who routinely blame violent video games and movies for actual mass shootings are nowhere to be found. Because when it’s violence in the name of Jesus, they’ll excuse it.

Religious indoctrination is bad enough, but throwing weapons and fake executions into the mix makes it so much more disturbing. So far, the church hasn’t publicly responded to the outcry. They’ve limited who can comment on their Facebook page.

By the way, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Just last year, a Pennsylvania pastor strapped an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle to his chest and proceeded to aim it directly in the faces of his congregation while encouraging them to “overwhelm your enemy with a violent action of faith.”

So much for Jesus being the Prince of Peace.

I’ll update this story as more information comes to light.

UPDATE 1: Pastor Dewayne Walker has now responded to the backlash:

Walker says he’s “befuddled” by the criticism because it was just a “small part” of Vacation Bible School. He confirmed that the victim in the skit represented sin and evil and this was a scene of “spiritual warfare.”

“It’s a character called the Devil!”

He tried to explain that there was buildup missing from the clip in which the bad guy was doing bad things, but at no point does he acknowledge the actual criticism of how this scene—even in his version!—is disturbing and traumatizing.

Instead, he goes after a straw man, suggesting everyone’s mad because they thought he was encouraging Christians to kill other people, which they’re not.

He ends with this: “You may think we went over the top. You may think it was a little bit extreme. And maybe you’re right. But don’t you believe that the Devil is really using extreme measures in this generation?”

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A majority of Americans now support public school teachers leading students in prayer.

According to a new Pew Research Center survey, 53% of Americans say teachers should be allowed to lead their classes in prayer as long as students aren’t required to participate. Another 8% say teachers should be allowed to lead prayers and students should be required to take part. That means 61% of Americans believe government employees should be allowed to lead religious exercises in public school classrooms.

Those troubling numbers could make it easier for Christian Nationalists to enact their theocratic agenda in states where promoting conservative Christianity is somehow an educational priority. It’s also a warning to church/state separation advocates that we have a lot more work to do in convincing people why teacher-led prayers in school are always a bad idea.

The survey asked a number of questions about school prayer in the wake of legislation intended to put Ten Commandments posters up in classrooms and implement prayer time in schools.

On the simple question of whether people favor or oppose letting teachers lead their classes in prayer, there are far too many people willing to put up with it. Even many people who oppose prayer in schools think it’s okay if it’s voluntary for students.

61% of Americans, in other words, believe there are circumstances in which it’d be okay to have teachers leading prayers in school.

Why is that a problem? Because public schools are government institutions. Teachers aren’t acting as private citizens when they’re on the clock. And students already have the right to pray on their own—silently, with friends, within religious clubs, etc.

Furthermore, those prayers are never generic. They push the idea that there’s something legitimate about religious beliefs, which isn’t what any government institution should be promoting. In any given public school, there are children of parents who are atheist, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, etc. The pressure that would be placed on them to join in with their classmates is deeply coercive and unfair. Giving them the option to opt out isn’t as generous as it sounds when they risk being ostracized or ridiculed.

That’s why courts have long distinguished between private prayer (always okay) and school-sponsored prayers (not okay). Children should never have to say a prayer—especially one for a religion they don’t belong to—in order to fit in.

But it’s telling which Americans support school-sponsored prayers, and it’s exactly the people you’d expect: the ones who know their religion would be the one promoted in school. White evangelicals and Black Protestants love the idea of teacher-led prayers (which are optional for students). Religiously unaffiliated people generally oppose it.

It’s somewhat shocking to me that the gap isn’t larger when broken down by age. 64% of Americans 50 and older like the idea of teacher led-prayer, while 59% of Americans under 50 feel the same. You would think younger Americans, who are more likely to have more religiously diverse classmates, would understand the consequences of all this.

Meanwhile, the political divide couldn’t be more clear. Republicans overwhelmingly support teacher-led prayers (79%) while only 44% of Democrats say the same. This isn’t a religious issue so much as a partisan one.

The same survey also found that a majority of people in every demographic group support student-led prayers, which, of course, are legal. (I’m not sure who these people are who oppose that. Or why.)

What all this information tells us is that Christian Nationalists are having at least some success in convincing Americans that prayer and education can go hand-in-hand when reality and history suggest otherwise. It’s why they’ve been able to get (Christian) chaplains to replace social workers, and states to capitulate to (Christian) LifeWise so that kids can leave school during the day to receive religious indoctrination, and coaches leading (Christian) prayers while on the job.

There’s simply not enough opposition in enough places to help people realize that shoving Christianity—and it’s always a conservative form of Christianity—into schools is bad for everyone. And at a time when Donald Trump and his Republican allies are equating patriotism with Christianity, we need more pushback against it, not less.

I wonder if the results would have been any different, though, if the language in the questions was different. For example, instead of asking if people support teachers leading their classes in prayer, would people be more likely to oppose it if they said “Christian prayer” instead, since that’s what students would be hearing?

Pew’s own survey hints that they would.

While 57% of Americans support coach-led prayer (a generically religious concept), only 50% support displaying the Ten Commandments in classrooms (a specifically Christian message).

In other words, the more explicitly Christian the proposal becomes, the more support drops.

It seems that even some people who are okay with the generic concept of religion back off when they find out it’s a particular brand of religion.

That raises an obvious question: When Americans tell pollsters they support "teacher-led prayer," what exactly are they imagining? A generic moment of reflection? A non-denominational invocation? Or the kind of Christian prayer that would almost certainly dominate in practice?

The fact is we don’t need more religion anywhere, much less Christianity in public schools.

What’s alarming about these results isn’t that 8% of Americans support mandatory prayer in schools. It’s that only 37% oppose teacher-led prayer altogether.

Students have always had the right to pray. That’s not what’s at stake here. What’s at stake is whether government employees should be allowed to lead religious prayers in public schools. A majority of Americans say yes, and that’s horrifying. It’s exactly the kind of public support Christian Nationalists need if they want to keep eroding the wall separating church and state. They’re relying on everyone’s ignorance to accomplish their goals.

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The Trump administration’s “Religious Liberty Commission” has now issued its final report documenting how the government can defend religious liberty for everyone and the main answer boils down to…

… eliminating church/state separation.

The chair of the group Dan Patrick, who’s also the Lt. Governor of Texas, said as much during an Oval Office meeting on Friday as Donald Trump struggled to stay awake.

… The separation of church and state is not in the Constitution. And from this day forward, if anyone says that to you, and they’re in public office or serving in any angecy in any capacity, they have to point out exactly where you have violated the Constitution, because you have not. And from this day forward, that phrase should have no power over the people of all faiths ever again in America.

He’s lying, of course. As the saying goes, the word “religion” appears in the Constitution twice, and both times, it’s preceded by the word “No.” No one ever said the phrase “separation of church and state” appears in the Constitution; rather, it’s that the First Amendment has long been interpreted to mean that the government cannot establish or endorse one religion over another—or religion over non-religion.

No matter what Dan Patrick and his Christian Nationalist colleagues say, and no matter how badly they wish their religion was the default faith for the country, church/state separation is very much alive.

So what the hell was he talking about?

Let’s back up a minute: On May 1 of 2025, the same day as the conservative Christian “National Day of Prayer,” Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the “Religious Liberty Commission.” That group was formed to “offer diverse perspectives on how the Federal Government can defend religious liberty for all Americans” and they really only had two jobs: Produce a report about religious liberty (e.g. the foundations of it, the impact of it, the threats to it, how to protect it) and advise the White House on what policies to pursue to strengthen it.

It was all symbolic, 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.

That’s not what this was.

Instead, this was a gathering of conservative Christian zealots like evangelist Franklin Graham, conspiracy theorist Eric Metaxas, Dr. Phil (for some reason), Dr. Ben Carson, Pastor Paula White-Cain, along with a token orthodox Jew who supported Christian Nationalist ideals.

It was so skewed in terms of ideological makeup that a coalition of religious and non-religious groups sued over the lack of contrarian voices as required by law. (There’s been no resolution to that case.)

That’s why it was no surprise when, this past April, during their seventh and final meeting (held at the Museum of the Bible, naturally), Dan Patrick claimed “the separation of church and state is the biggest lie that's been told in America since our founding.” He even suggested every public school, university, and business ought to have a sign up somewhere reminding people that there’s no such thing as church/state separation.

At another point during that same meeting, commission member (and First Liberty Institute CEO) Kelly Shackelford urged the Trump administration to direct the IRS to issue a “small fine” to a church that endorsed 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.

The point is: We all knew what the final report was going to look like because these Christian buffoons were broadcasting it from a mile away.

And now we have their draft writeup.

The Washington Post’s Michelle Boorstein summarizes the loooooong document:

The 224-page report recommended the Justice Department issue guidance to promote “an originalist understanding” of how the Constitution sees the relationship between religion and government. The founders had diverse views about the topic, but recent Supreme Court rulings have suggested a more narrow interpretation of what justices considered constraints on religious freedom.

Friday’s report also said faith-based groups working with the government shouldn’t have to accommodate civil rights laws or anything that conflicts with their religious beliefs; public schools should allow religious displays (it mentioned only the Ten Commandments); and soldiers who refused to be vaccinated and were punished should have their positions restored and be financially compensated. It called for the end to the Johnson Amendment, which bars nonprofits from making political endorsements.

The document also says religious liberty “acts as a bridge between church and state,” as if the two shall be merged, but the analogy fails as soon as you realize a bridge is meant to go in two directions while the report only ever calls for the government to make concessions to Christians.

Rev. Paul Raushenbush, head of the Interfaith Alliance and one of the people who sued over the commission’s one-sided makeup, called out the bullshit contained in the report:

The draft report, he wrote in a statement, “reflects the narrow, Christian nationalist worldview of the illegitimate commission. … A betrayal of the original intention of the promise of religious freedom guaranteed in the First Amendment, the report and the commission behind it fail to represent and uplift the importance of religious diversity and tolerance for all faiths in our country — not just a special, chosen few. The report is a wish list of divisive, unpopular ideas far-right religious groups have pushed for years.”

He also correctly pointed out that, for all the talk of religious liberty, the report contained nothing about Islamophobia or the need protect the religious freedom of people who weren’t Christians or Jews. They went above and beyond to talk about Christians who didn’t want to get vaccinated, or who (falsely) believe liberals want to “trans” their children, or who aren’t allowed to put up a crucifix on their classroom wall, but they somehow ignored all the actual instances of persecution against people who don’t share their faith.

The report includes a list of 12 things the Trump administration should do to make life easier for conservative Christians. While some of them are pointless—like putting up “Know Your Rights” posters everywhere—there are concerning items on the list.

#5 urges the government to nominate and confirm federal judges who are hostile to the idea of church/state separation.

#9 is “Repeal the Johnson Amendment.”

#11 calls on the Trump administration to reinstate eligibility for anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists who lost their jobs because they wanted to spread COVID instead of keeping people safe… or, as this document puts it, because of “their religious beliefs about the COVID-19 vaccine.”

There is actually a place where the public can submit comments about the draft report until July 12, after which the final draft will be released, but there’s no reason to believe anyone involved on the Trump side will take criticism seriously. The people who constantly whine about impending “Sharia law” want to implement rules that privilege their faith over everyone else’s.

The conclusions were written before the commission was ever formed and everyone who’s on it is there to play their role as a conservative Christian stooge. 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!” The one member who dared to question what everyone was thinking—former beauty pageant contestant Carrie Prejean Boller, who tried to distinguish between accusations of antisemitism from legitimate criticisms of Israel’s government—was kicked out of the group.

That’s why this report isn’t really about religious freedom at all. It’s just an extension of Project 2025. It’s a government-backed document attempting to rewrite history while also urging the adoption of policies that will elevate Christianity over other religions. It’s a report that aims to end the concept of religious liberty altogether in favor of pro-Christian policies.

That’s the danger here. It’s not that the report will have a long-term effect on its own but that we risk normalizing the ideas underlying it. 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 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.

The irony of this commission is that there was a perfectly easy way to promote the same goals without being so obviously shambolic: They could have easily put together a diverse group to advise the president—allowing people to think they respect religious diversity—then just ignore their recommendations entirely. But this administration isn’t even politically strategic like that. They know Republicans aren’t going to hold them accountable for anything, so they don’t care if this commission is a moral and constitutional failure.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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On Friday, the Texas State Board of Education officially mandated Bible readings in public schools as part of a revised curriculum. The Republican-dominated board voted 9-5 to include Christian stories in a longer required reading list—while excluding stories from any other major religion that teach similar lessons.

It’s not a surprise that it happened, but it’s still disappointing.

While conservatives claim this isn’t about indoctrination, the message is clear: Texas thinks Christianity is the only religion that matters. As if we didn’t already know that when the same lawmakers passed laws forcing the Ten Commandments to go up in every classroom and allowing schools to hire chaplains to counsel students. This is the same Board that approved a separate state-approved reading and language arts curriculum for public schools that was filled with biblical references (and errors).

And it’s not just me saying this. The people who advocated for the new reading list sure as hell saw this as a way to advertise Christianity:

Board member Brandon Hall during a news conference Thursday called the proposals a “generational opportunity” to overhaul the state curriculum.

“We’re going to stop watering down American history. We’re going to teach the truth. Our nation was founded as a Christian nation, and Texas is a Christian state,” said Hall, a Republican who is a pastor in Springtown. He said the Bible has had a “remarkable impact on our culture, our societies and our laws.”

…

“We don’t have to incorporate every religious belief in our history or in our literary works, because our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian values,” said Susan Perez, founder of a Christian parent advocacy group, Citizens for Education Reform, in a school board meeting Monday.

There’s a very good argument that could be made for teaching children about the Bible in the name of cultural literacy. Without knowing the story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, for example, you may miss out on a lot of references made in literature, art, and pop culture. But not every story in the Bible is relevant, even in that context. Furthermore, Texas is even using the Bible to teach otherwise generic lessons like humility and love. They’re also using the Bible as supportive material for other books, as if you can’t understand the Diary of Anne Frank or Elie Wiesel’s Night without knowing the Christian references.

The full list can be seen here. It includes:

• 1st Grade: Noah’s Ark by Peter Spier

• 2nd Grade: David and Goliath (excerpt from The Children’s Book of Heroes) by William J. Bennett (editor)

• 3rd Grade: ROAR! – Daniel and the Lion’s Den – Children’s Adapted Version by CBN [Christian Broadcasting Network]

• 4th Grade: The Necessity of Humility (Book of Luke, Chapter 14, Verses 7- 11) - New International Reader’s Version: New Testament

• 5th Grade: Moses (Book of Exodus, Chapter 3: The Burning Bush and Book of Exodus, Chapter 14: The Parting of the Red Sea) - New International Reader’s Version: Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

• 6th Grade: Do Not Be Anxious (Book of Matthew, Chapter 6, Verses 25- 34) English Standard Version: New Testament (This is included in lessons for All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot)

• 7th Grade: The Shepherd's Psalm (Book of Psalms, Chapter 23) King James Version: Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (This is included in lessons for The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank)

• 7th Grade: The Eight Beatitudes (Book of Matthew, Chapter 5 Verses 1- 12) King James Version: New Testament (This is included in lessons for The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton.)

• 8th Grade: To Everything There is a Season (Book of Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3) King James Version: Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (This is included in lessons for The Giver by Lois Lowry.)

• 8th Grade: Book of Lamentations, Chapter 3 Tanakh: Jewish Publication Society 1917 (This is included in lessons for Night by Elie Wiesel.)

• 9th Grade: Parable of the Prodigal Son (Book of Luke, Chapter 15, Verses 11-32) English Standard Translation: New Testament (This is included in lessons for Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.)

• 10th Grade: The Book of Job (Book of Job, Chapters 1-7,11,14,19,28,38-42) New International Reader’s Version: Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (This is included in lessons for Dante’s Inferno.)

• 11th Grade: Adam and Eve (Book of Genesis, Chapters 2 and 3 New International Reader’s Version: Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (This is included in lessons for The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.)

• 12th Grade: The Definition of Love (Book of 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13) English Standard Version: New Testament (This is included in lessons for Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.)

Educators will now have a few years to work the new material into their lessons:

On Friday, board members decided to stagger implementation of the reading list: elementary school students will see the new standards in the 2030-31 school year, sixth graders in the 2031-32 school year, seventh and eighth graders in the 2032-33 school year, and high school students in the 2033-34 school year.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State said this was an effort “to misuse public schools to impose one narrow set of religious beliefs and indoctrinate a new generation of Americans in the lie that America is a Christian country.” The Freedom From Religion Foundation was even more blunt:

A required reading list that overwhelmingly favors Christian texts while excluding the writings and literary traditions of other faiths, not to mention the perspectives of millions of nonreligious Americans, sends an unmistakable message about who belongs and who does not.

… compelling every student to read a curated selection of bible passages and Christian parables, while giving little or no comparable treatment to other traditions, crosses the line from education into religious promotion.

The question now is whether all this will be taught objectively. Will Christian teachers in public schools be able to resist the temptation to tell kids these stories reflect reality? What happens to students whose parents don’t want them to receive religious lessons? Keep in mind that, because these readings are required, they could also be seen on standardized tests, which means students who aren’t familiar with them could see that reflected in their scores.

Even beyond the biblical infusion here, this required list hamstrings the ability of teachers and school districts to decide what materials their students should read. If they’re forced to teach certain books, it limits their ability to include anything beyond that. The focus on certain “classic” books is also drawing scrutiny because of the lack of diversity in authors and lack of contemporary novels on the list.

There may be a silver lining to all this, though, as noted by a Catholic priest on CNN:

“And, you know, as a priest, I have to tell you… forced scripture doesn’t deepen faith. I think it breeds resentment when the state and not a family or a teacher decides which Bible passages children must read, I think something sacred’s been handed to politics,” he continued.

Anytime you force kids to read the Bible, some of them are going to realize the stories are fictional. They’re going to tell their friends. They’re going to ask the teachers uncomfortable questions. There’s no greater tool for atheism than the Bible. That doesn’t make what they’re doing in Texas okay, but they clearly haven’t thought this one through.

And what happens if teachers tell students these stories are fictional? Or incorporate additional material, like Greek mythology, to reinforce the lessons? There are going to be Christian parents who don’t like how these lessons are taught.

There will inevitably be lawsuits, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they come from Bible-loving parents who don’t appreciate how public schools aren’t giving their holy book the deference they think it deserves.

And what happens if Texas, which is ranked 29th in the country when it comes to K-12 education (by one metric), gets worse after implementing this reading curriculum?

This is what it looks like, though, when right-wing activists use the government to elevate one religion—their religion—over all others. Texas isn’t just acknowledging that the Bible has influenced Western culture; it’s requiring kids to embrace Christianity in a way it’s denying all other faiths and traditions.

But once the Bible becomes just another piece of assigned text, it loses the aura of holiness. Students are going to have questions and some parents will surely regret that they’re asking their public school teachers instead of their pastors. Kids are going to notice contradictions. They’re going to read about a burning bush, and a talking snake, and God’s cruelty (with Job) and they’re going to realize this book they’ve been raised to revere is full of bullshit.

If conservatives think mandatory Bible reading will create more Christians, they haven’t been paying attention to what actually happens when young people are encouraged to read the book critically instead of devotionally.

That may be the greatest failure of this entire stunt. Critics already have a few years to put together material to contextualize the Bible lessons in a way Christians aren’t going to like. The fact that we’re even having this conversation is a sign of failure. After all, if your religion has to be propped up by state mandates, it’s an admission your religion can’t survive on its own.

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An anti-LGBTQ judge from Texas has been rewarded $640,000 for (1) refusing to do her job and (2) being Christian. It’s the culmination of a multi-year crusade by a conservative activist in a position of power.

Back in December of 2019, Justice of The Peace Dianne Hensley refused to marry gay couples who visited her courthouse, even though she’s a public official and not a priest. She was given a public warning by the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct… which was really nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Instead of removing her from the job she refused to do, though, the Commission merely said she was “casting doubt on her capacity to act impartially” and that she could be punished in the future.

Hensley responded by suing the Commission because how dare anyone point out her Christian bigotry.

In its lawsuit, First Liberty argues, “The Commission violated the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act by investigating and punishing Judge Hensley for recusing herself from officiating at same-sex weddings, in accordance with the commands of her Christian faith.” Adding, “By investigating and punishing her for acting in accordance with the commands of her Christian faith, the State of Texas has substantially burdened the free exercise of her religion, with no compelling justification.”

No “compelling justification”?! The compelling justification was that people deserve to be treated equally under the law. A judge who offered to perform wedding ceremonies for straight couples but not gay ones had no business being a judge. Being Christian shouldn’t allow government officials to ignore the law. It wasn’t okay when Kim Davis tried the stunt, and it shouldn’t have been okay with Hensley.

And “substantially burdened”?! In no way did the Commission impede on her rights.

She was asking for $10,000 in damages because that was the money she was losing by not being allowed to perform opposite-sex weddings. (Not performing any weddings was the only legal option she had at that point.) She also requested a declaration that everyone in her position could pull the same stunt if their God commanded it.

In 2021, a judge tossed out her case on technicalities, including the fact that the commission had sovereign immunity from such lawsuits. An appeals court later affirmed that ruling. But Hensley asked the state’s highest court to take up the case, and that’s what they did in 2023.

Her lawyer, Jonathan Mitchell—better known as the former state solicitor general behind Texas’ infamous abortion “bounty” law—argued that she had every right to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation:

Mitchell further argued that state law protects people’s religious freedom unless there is a “furtherance of a compelling governmental interest.” He also said it prohibits wedding officiants from discriminating based on race, national origin or religion.

“Notably absent from that list of protected criteria that I just mentioned is any mention of discrimination on account of sex or sexual orientation,” Mitchell told justices. “It’s still permissible for wedding officiants — whether they’re judges or members of the clergy — to discriminate based on any other characteristic, as long as it’s not race, national origin or religion, when they decide which weddings they will officiate.”

Being a Christian, you see, allowed Hensley to be an anti-LGBTQ bigot, just not a racist one… even though both involve characteristics that people don’t choose for themselves.

The thing is: Hensley could have avoided this entire situation if she simply opted out of performing marriages and didn’t whine about it. No one was forcing her to perform that service. But she wanted the ability to get paid to sign marriage certificates for straight couples and not gay ones, and she believed her religion took priority over the law, even though she was working for the government. If we allow officials like her to pick and choose which rules to follow, it would throw the government into chaos. It would make a mockery out of civil rights.

As the commission’s lawyer explained, no one was punishing, or even threatening to punish, Hensley for her religious views. It was all about her actions. If a Christian judge made it clear that he didn’t want to perform any marriages because of his anti-gay bigotry, that would be just fine. Hensley, however, wanted to offer the service while excluding certain people. That was the problem.

(Side note: In an interview with The Dallas Morning News in late 2023, Hensley said she hadn’t performed any marriages in years. She also claimed, falsely, that children with opposite-sex parents fare better in life. Then there was this anecdote about her now-deceased gay (!) brother:

After he had a falling out with their parents over what she described as “economics,” Hensley said she hired a detective to track him down once a year and take a photograph as a gift for their mother. One year, he was in Paris. Another year in Japan. Then Dubai.

Creepy.)

In any case, if Hensley wanted to get ordained and perform private wedding ceremonies just for straight, white, evangelical couples, no one would be complaining. But she had no business discriminating against certain Texans when she was working for the government.

Her lawyers argued that the U.S. Supreme Court already sided with a Colorado website designer who refused to make wedding websites for gay couples (something no gay person actually asked her to do). But there was an obvious difference between a private business owner and a government official. Her own attorneys chose not to understand that difference.

The concern over what the Texas Supreme Court would do was very real. After all, if she won, what would stop other judges from using religion as an excuse to deny justice to other potential clients?

But the case never really got resolved after that.

The Texas Supreme Court avoided her religious freedom argument, then the Texas Commission on Judicial Conduct dismissed its (already mild) sanctions on Hensley, then an appeals court said she could still proceed with her lawsuit… it was a hot mess with no end in sight. And while all that was happening, another bigoted Christian judge filed his own lawsuit for the same underlying reasons.

At some point, the Texas Supreme Court was going to have to make a decision.

Last year, they did just that. They issued an edict saying it was perfectly fine for judges to refuse to perform same-sex weddings if that conflicted with their personal religious beliefs. More importantly, that act of open bigotry wouldn’t be treated as evidence that those judges have any animosity against LGBTQ people.

How did they make the change? The Court altered the state’s judicial conduct code—the ethics rules for judges—by saying “It is not a violation of these canons for a judge to publicly refrain from performing a wedding ceremony based upon a sincerely held religious belief.”

Canon 4, by the way, is a set of rules dictating how judges should act in their free time so that people have no reason to doubt their impartiality in cases. It includes common sense items like how judges can join non-profit groups but not if those groups are likely to appear before the court. But now, all eight justices said, another item could be added to that list: There was no violation of the ethical rules if judges refused to perform weddings because their religion says those couples are sinning.

It wasn’t a ruling on her case. It was just a coincidental rule change… that gave Hensley everything she ever wanted. It also raised a number of other ethical questions. For example, couldn’t that same edict be used to allow judges to avoid ethical consequences if they refused to perform wedding ceremonies for mixed-race couples, or mixed-religion couples, as long as their bigotry stemmed from their faith? What about people who had sex before marriage if pre-marital abstinence was a principle of their religion?

And even if the ethical code for judges now permitted faith-based bigotry, it didn’t change the law itself. Which meant that if a gay couple went to a Texas court to get married, and a judge refused to sign off on it because of his or her faith, the gay couple could still file a lawsuit against that judge.

The entire situation left gay couples in Texas in a bind. On paper, they were free to get married if they chose to. But the state’s highest court now said judges who didn’t want to perform the ceremony and sign the necessary documents were free to do so.

It was state-sanctioned discrimination.

In any case, Hensley has already moved on to the profit stage of this particular grift.

On Friday, the District Court of Travis County announced that Hensley would receive the $10,000 in damages along with $630,000 in legal fees, paid by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct. (No wonder her lawyers with First Liberty are celebrating.) Meanwhile, other similar cases are still moving through the courts because plenty of other right-wing judges also want to get rich off of their hate.

“Although the Hensley litigation has concluded, the Commission is still facing a statewide class-action lawsuit on behalf of justices of the peace who were unwilling to perform same-sex marriages and stopped performing weddings entirely to avoid disciplinary action from the Commission,” First Liberty Institute added. “The class action is seeking damages in the tens of millions of dollars for income lost by justices of the peace throughout the state.”

Yes, why won’t anyone think about the poor justices of the peace who refuse to follow the law and can’t perform their side hustle…?

Naturally, her team thanked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (now a scandal-prone candidate for U.S. Senate) for his guidance:

“Judge Hensley always adhered to the law and the legal guidance provided by the Attorney General of Texas,” said Hiram Sasser, Executive General Counsel for First Liberty Institute. “We are grateful that this case has concluded and that Judge Hensley was vindicated.”

Hensley’s “victory” here amounts to a declaration that prejudice is perfectly compatible with public service as long as you’re Christian. Instead of standing for equality under the law, people like Hensley have decided religion—and realistically, only their religion—supersedes the rules everyone else has to follow. All so that they can further discriminate against people who are already struggling to protect their rights across the state.

Hensley, by the way, filed a separate federal lawsuit last December urging the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell. I guess she figures she’s on a roll when it comes to harming gay couples, so she may as well keep going.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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In a stunning turn of events, a Christian high school in Tennessee has agreed to pay a former student $10,000 after denying her the chance to walk at graduation, which they did after she publicly came out as a lesbian and suggested some of her more conservative/Trump-y relatives may not take the news well.

I first wrote about Morgan Armstrong last year, but the story is so damn amazing, I’m reposting it here with relevant updates.

Morgan was a high school senior and star basketball player last year, but just before she was set to graduate, administrators told her family they needed to have a meeting.

Turns out they had seen a public post on Morgan’s Facebook page highlighting her same-sex relationship. She posted it shortly after turning 18.

Administrators had also seen a private message posted for her Snapchat friends asking them to “like” her post because she had a lot of Trump-supporting acquaintances. That message, which one student must have leaked to school officials, said: “Go like and comment on my post guys bc if no one on my socials knew i was gay then they sure as hell do now so this is a big thing tbh, also i’m kinda scared about the facebook comments bc i have some ruthless trump supporting ‘jesus’ mfs on there.”

It was clear what she meant by that. There are a lot of conservative Christian bigots who might respond to her post by telling her she’s some kind of sinner who needs Jesus. Not all Christians are bigots, obviously, but the Trump-supporting ones? Gotta watch out for them. And she had people in her life who fit that description.

I knew what she was saying. You knew what she was saying. But why did the school give a damn what she was saying?

Simple: Morgan attended Tennessee Christian Preparatory School, one of those schools where “homosexual behavior” is not allowed. But that’s not why she was in trouble, apparently. According to the adults at the school, the problem was acknowledging the open cruelty of Trump supporters. They said she violated their Social Media Policy by disparaging those bigots… because she was effectively disparaging them.

Armstrong and her father said they met with principal Kylie Machacek and head of schools Jared Tilley.

Armstrong said the school presented the family with a letter, referring to the post and the private message that they had obtained. That letter read, “Morgan posted on social media platforms, such as Instagram, a disparaging remark, reflecting the people at Tennessee Christian. The comment reflected on the institution, facility, staff, alumni and students in the most negative possible way.”

If you read a post calling out conservative Christian bigots and your first response is, “How dare she talk about us like that?”… then maybe you’re the problem.

She didn’t mention the school, or any of her teachers, or any of her classmates in any of those posts. She correctly pointed out there were assholes out there—there are!—and the school overreacted by assuming she was targeting them.

The school’s policy says students cannot post anything that’s “threatening, harassing, illegal, obscene, defamatory, slanderous, harassing, bullying, or hostile towards any individual or entity.” But she wasn’t “defamatory” or “slanderous” or even “hostile” regarding what bigots do; she described them accurately! So what was the big deal?

In any case, because of their overreaction, the school officials banned Morgan from attending graduation as well as any end-of-season athletic banquet.

They also told her they’d mail her the diploma in a month because they refused to give it to her on stage.

Then they threatened to sabotage her future by sending proof of her posts to her prospective colleges, like some kind of bizarre academic blackmail.

Morgan will not comment about the school or people associated with the school. If online slander continues, records of posts and messages will be forwarded to colleges and universities as part of a comprehensive student file.

Again, she never slandered the school or anyone in it. But if she continued, the school insisted, she wouldn’t get her diploma at all.

Her parents, who were both openly in support of their daughter, couldn’t believe it:

“I was shocked and then I went to anger,” said Monica Armstrong, Morgan’s mother.

I want to reiterate that the school didn’t comment on her relationship—even though, deep down, you just know that’s what this was all about. They focused on her (honest) admission that conservative bigots wouldn’t like it… which they took as a personal insult for some reason. Because of that interpretation, they were threatening to punish her with whatever leverage they still had.

But the school made a huge mistake.

While private Christian schools have every right to set their own ridiculous policies, the expectation is that they’re at least going to honor what both sides agreed to in writing.

That created a problem for administrators. Because even if you believe Morgan violated the school’s rules, the school’s handbook said a first-time violation for breaking their Social Media Policy was, at worst, a one-day in-school suspension. Not banning someone from attending her own graduation and refusing to hand over the diploma she earned.

By going from 0 to 60 at the first sign of pushback, the school was ignoring its own stated rules.

That’s why Morgan’s family filed a lawsuit against the Christian school. They said the letter she received “falsely” stated she was insulting people at the school.

Nothing in Morgan’s public post was vulgar, disrespectful, or slanderous, and the post does not refer to the Defendant in any respect.

They said the same thing about her private Snapchat request—she wasn’t talking about the school or the people in it. She was referring to bigots in her extended family, not good kind Christians. (And surely the folks at Tennessee Christian Preparatory School are good kind Christians, right?)

Instead, Morgan’s statement describing “some ruthless trump supporting ‘jesus’ mfs” referred to members of Morgan’s own family with whom she was connected on social media—people who, in Morgan’s view, profess but do not practice Christian principles of love, acceptance, and compassion.

This section, in my mind, is what everything boiled down to:

52. Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that Morgan actually violated the Defendant’s Social Media Policy (she did not) and was not disciplined pretextually for being gay (she was), because Morgan had never before been disciplined for violating the Defendant’s Social Media Policy, the maximum consequence that the Defendant could permissibly impose for a first-time Social Media Policy violation was “minor”—a “1 day in-school suspension.”

53. Nevertheless, in its haste to suspend Morgan for being gay, the Defendant violated its own Disciplinary Policy and summarily imposed a “Long-term suspension (more than 10 days)” instead.

54. As a result, Morgan was forbidden from attending school from that point forward, and she was not permitted to take final exams.

You have to wonder what the school thought it would accomplish by punishing one of its best students for something so harmless. Instead of giving her the sendoff she deserved, they ruined what should have been highlights of her high school experience.

The lawsuit ended with a request that, if the school lost the case, they remove the suspension from her record, allow her to take her final exams, give her the damn diploma, stop threatening her college prospects, and pay any associated legal costs. (The school said she didn’t have to take the final exams, and they wouldn’t hold it against her grade-wise. Still, if she scored well on them, it could have improved her grade point average. That’s why she really wanted a chance to show what she could do.)

At the time, the school issued a press release “firmly [rejecting] the misleading allegations outlined in a recent lawsuit supposedly filed against the school.”

The irony in all this was, by punishing Morgan over nothing, the administrators confirmed what critics of Christian schools often say: These institutions are hotbeds of bigotry. They have no love for LGBTQ students. They pressure students to suppress their emotions. They make a big deal over little things while ignoring much more serious problems.

It’s mind-boggling that any private school would rather withhold a student’s diploma for expressing genuine concern about the inevitable reactions to her relationship than just let it slide because no reasonable person would actually give a damn.

The silver lining to all this was that there was an overwhelmingly positive response on behalf of Morgan. News outlets covered the story and any neutral explanation of what happened made the school look absolutely horrible. But they brought this upon themselves. That’s the price you pay when bigotry is your biggest selling point.

Meanwhile, Morgan’s family held a small protest/celebration on the day she was supposed to be graduating with her classmates:

When I spoke to Morgan last year, I learned a lot more about her situation than the media coverage revealed.

For example, the biggest question I had was why she ended up going to a conservative Christian school in the first place. If she and her parents were relatively progressive on LGBTQ issues, what drew them there? That answer was extremely straightforward: The school offered Morgan a spot on their basketball team back in middle school along with a partial scholarship to go with it, and her family decided that was an offer they couldn’t turn down. While they are Christian, they didn’t see their values as clashing with the school’s idea of religion… until now. When it came to how she felt about Christianity, Morgan told me, “this situation definitely didn’t help.”

I also wondered why she decided to post the pictures of her and her girlfriend in the spring instead of just waiting a month or two until she was finally done with high school. Morgan said she did that on purpose. She had known for years that she’s attracted to other girls, and she’s also known her school disapproves of that, and “I didn’t want that fear to hold me down anymore.” Plus, she added, her straight friends posted pictures with their boyfriends and girlfriends all the time. So why couldn’t she?

That’s also why she filed the lawsuit. Even if the school won’t change its stance on homosexuality, she didn’t want them to target anyone else in the future like they did to her. In fact, she received so many messages and calls of support from former students at her school who are now openly LGBTQ. She wanted the “continuous cycle” of shame and hate to end.

It wasn’t all supportive, though. Morgan said her friends at school mostly blocked her on social media after this controversy went public. Maybe that’s to avoid the wrath of the school’s prying eyes, but it’s not like they contacted her privately either to let her know they were still on her side.

The irony, she said, was that many of them had known she was gay for years. It was only after this story went viral that they decided to cut their ties. Her girlfriend Sophie, however, was right there with her. (It must have been hard to watch Morgan go through all this, but the two were still as close as ever.)

When we spoke, Morgan didn’t know where she’d go to college. She figured she wouldn’t be playing basketball anywhere, but for her sake, I hoped she would end up in a place where she would be accepted and not treated as some kind of outcast.

I had mostly forgotten about this story, assuming nothing much would come of it. I figured Morgan would go to college, the school wouldn’t admit any wrongdoing, and both sides would move on.

I was wrong.

This week, her attorney Daniel A. Horwitz announced that the two sides had reached a settlement. While the two sides “disagree” on whether Morgan violated school policies, the school has retroactively rescinded her suspension. Administrators also said they never trashed Morgan to any of her prospective colleges and promise never to do so in the future.

And the school said they’d pay her $10,000. Which is essentially the amount for tuition for a single year (even though Morgan had received at least a partial scholarship).

In an interview Horwitz told me “this is as good a result as—perhaps an even better result than—the court system could have provided in a litigated judgment. Paired with the rescission of her suspension, her receipt of her diploma, and the permanent injunction involved, this was a total, spectacular win.”

Horwitz, who worked on this case pro bono, added in a press release:

… “School is a place where every student is entitled to feel welcome, accepted, and supported.”

Horwitz continued, “It is not a place where any administrator should feel comfortable disciplining or threatening kids for being gay. We were proud to represent Morgan and her family in this righteous lawsuit, and we are thrilled to have prevailed on their behalf. We hope Morgan’s bravery will inspire others to stand up for themselves the way that she did.”

I also had a chance to catch up with Morgan yesterday. She told me she was just glad everything was over since this issue had taking up a lot of space in her brain over the past year.

She’s currently attending a college online while working a full-time job, making a clean break from her high school and the area where she grew up. And she’s still with Sophie, who’s been supportive throughout this whole ordeal.

When we spoke last year, she told me she was on the fence about her Christian faith, saying “this situation definitely didn’t help.” So where was she on that now? “I’m still questioning,” she told me, adding that she was probably “leaning to the not-believing side.” When so many of your interactions with Christians are as negative as the ones she’s had, it’s hard to argue with that.

It’s also the same reason she’s not particularly close to the people she attended high school with. Many of them had blocked her on social media last year when everything went down. I figured some of them would come around after the controversy subsided… but they didn’t. Morgan said they still have her blocked and the feeling is mutual. “At first, it was a bad thing,” she said, but these days, she’s “made peace with it. What’s done is done.” (She’s building a new life in a new city, and that may be the healthiest option.)

The biggest thing she wanted to say was that she had seen chatter on social media that she did this for attention or money. But no one asks for this kind of attention, and she never wanted money from the school anyway. (Remember, it was the school that offered money as part of the settlement.) There was only one reason Morgan wanted to go through with this lawsuit, she explained: “It was about standing up for what happened. My only goal was to clear my record.”

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The Supreme Court has made it official: Religious freedom only applies if you’re a conservative Christian. The conservative super-majority ruled 6-3 on Tuesday, along partisan lines, that a Rastafarian man whose hair was cut off against his will—violating his religious beliefs—had no legal remedies available to him.

The case centered around Damon Landor, who hadn’t cut his hair in decades because he follows the Nazarite vow—which includes a reference to Numbers 6:5: “… No razor may be used on their head… they must let their hair grow long.”

He continued that vow even after entering two Louisiana jails in 2020, for a five-month sentence over a drug-related charge. When he was transferred to a third facility—the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center—Landor worried they might try to cut his hair to fit in with inmate grooming policies, so he showed officers paperwork that said federal law was on his side: The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA) basically says prisons that receive federal funding can’t violate someone’s religious beliefs unless there’s a really good reason for it.

The officers didn’t care. They threw his paperwork in the trash, handcuffed him to a chair, and shaved off his hair.

He later sued, seeking damages from both the prison and the individual officers for violating his rights. The lower courts ruled against him, but the Supreme Court took up his case. Unfortunately, the conservatives have now also dismissed his arguments, leaving him with no more recourse.

Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch said the individual officers never consented to following RLUIPA, so they couldn’t be held accountable for what they did… as if it was okay for them to violate the law because they didn’t know any better. Even though the state-run prison received federal funding and essentially agreed to follow federal law as a result, he argued, the same couldn’t be said of the employees.

In this case, Gorsuch continued, the Louisiana Department of Corrections “does not dispute that it is a recipient of federal funds” and “that it has agreed” to be sued by private plaintiffs under RLUIPA “as a condition of accepting those funds.” But Landor does not contend that the prison officials who are the defendants in his lawsuit have “voluntarily and knowingly consented to answer private suits under RLUIPA,” Gorsuch noted, and therefore his lawsuit against them cannot go forward. Gorsuch wrote, for example, that it did not matter that the prison officials received paychecks from the Louisiana Department of Corrections, which in turn received federal funding, so that they “should be deemed to have implicitly consented to RLUIPA liability.”

If that sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is. Alexis Romero and Mark Joseph Stern of Slate couldn’t believe that line of reasoning:

… the state officials in this case arguably did agree to be bound by federal law. After all, they signed an employment contract with a prison that receives federal funding by virtue of RLUIPA. State officials are trained on their inmates’ rights, and prison litigation has been around for centuries, under RLUIPA and other statutes. There’s no serious argument that these state officials were blind to the consequences that might come from violating the rights of the prisoners they’re in charge of.

The liberal justices said as much in their dissent, adding that the majority just gave federal employees permission to ignore RLUIPA whenever they want.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, dissented. She argued that, as a result of the majority’s ruling, “[p]risoners like Landor who suffer violations of their religious freedom in state prisons—no matter how blatant—will often be left remediless. And encroachments on prisoners’ statutory rights are likely to happen with fair frequency, as state-empowered prison officials will have little incentive to abide by federal law, even if it is handed to them on a piece of paper.”

To get a little more technical, Gorsuch justified his decision by saying his issue was with the way Congress worded RLUIPA, but with a dysfunctional Congress run by Republicans, there’s no quick fix even if the correction is obvious. (Ian Millhiser of Vox notes that this could have a serious effect on women who need emergency abortions in red states.)

What makes this decision all the more infuriating is that everyone seems to agree that Landor’s rights were violated. The conservatives on SCOTUS said it. The state admitted it, too, even saying they had changed their rules to prevent this kind of incident in the future. But the ruling still means Landor can’t receive any sort of compensation for what he went through.

“We condemn the conduct as alleged in this case and have taken steps to prevent this problem from recurring, but we are grateful the court agreed with the state in this matter,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, a Republican, said in a statement.

She added that religious rights are “deeply important” but that the state has its own laws that protect them.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State had filed an amicus brief in this case on Landor’s behalf, saying RLUIPA permitted lawsuits against individual officers. They even said, “Without the possibility of individual liability, officers (and institutions) can blatantly and/or repeatedly violate RLUIPA with few to no consequences.” They were, of course, disappointed with Tuesday’s decision:

“Today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision endangers the religious freedom of incarcerated people, like Damon Landor, who are particularly vulnerable to abuse and having unnecessary burdens placed on their religious exercise. Once again, we see a court that will bend over backward for the religious freedom of Christians, but allows the government to trample the religious freedom of non-Christians. We can only hope this faulty decision doesn’t embolden more prison officials to ignore the religious-freedom rights of incarcerated people to observe their faith as long as they don’t harm others.”

That’s really the big takeaway here. The Supreme Court has rewarded Christians who filed religious freedom lawsuits even when the facts were not on their side (like Joe Kennedy) or when they suffered no actual damages (like the wedding website creator). Here’s a Rastafarian whose story is not in dispute and who actually suffered, and the Supreme Court’s conservatives are giving him a pat on the back and nothing of value. Hell, Gorsuch, who went out of his way to give Kennedy a victory by lying about the nature of his case, is the same person now saying there’s nothing he can do for Landor.

This man literally waved the law in front of the officers but the Supreme Court insisted those officers can’t be held accountable for not following the rules. What else could Landor have possibly done?

Even more concerning is how this decision gives a green light to other officers who may want to sidestep the law when it involves a non-Christian inmate, according to Elizabeth Reiner Platt, the director of the Law, Rights & Religion Project.

Without any threat of financial punishment, employees of state jails and prisons can trample inmates’ religious rights with impunity. And while courts may still order prisons to accommodate incarcerated people’s religious beliefs — such as by providing halal meals — this means little in cases like Landor’s, when the damage has already been done.

Landor can still theoretically pursue damages through the state courts, but the bottom line is that the Supreme Court used this case to make it even harder for a non-Christian to receive justice even when there’s no dispute about what happened to him. It’s fair to wonder if the outcome would have been different here if a Christian—specifically a white Christian—prisoner was on the receiving end of a faith-based infraction.

If there are no punishments for violating someone’s rights, they’re not really rights at all.

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Two months ago, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints sued one of its most prominent critics, podcast host John Dehlin, on grounds of trademark and copyright infringement… as if listeners to his show might be confused between the podcast and the Mormon Church itself.

Dehlin is now fighting back in court.

A quick recap: 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.

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.

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 took the opposite approach. In April, after months of conversations between the two sides, the Mormon Church sued Dehlin, arguing he had 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.

As I said at the time, in absolutely no world was anyone listening to Dehlin’s podcast and confusing it with Official Church Propaganda. Perhaps there was a case where someone searching for information about Mormonism stumbled across the podcast, but even if that happened, that person would quickly realize 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?

Nevertheless, the Mormon Church insisted there was confusion. To make that argument, the lawsuit included 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 were more comments where those came from, but to me, they all seemed 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 did those people say they genuinely confused Dehlin’s words (or his guest’s words) for Church policy. The fact that some of those commenters said they stopped listening immediately after their realization were points in Dehlin’s favor!

(Also, for a podcast this popular, it was deeply unfair for the Church to go searching for comments suggesting confusion was afoot because you’re bound to find anything you want. That’s the nature of popular comment threads. Anyone who spends any time on social knows you can’t always blame the owner of an account for what people say under that account, especially when the owner isn’t baiting it.)

To avoid confusion, the LDS Church demanded that Dehlin include a disclaimer everywhere saying that his podcast wasn’t an official product of the religious sect. But that, too, was beyond parody. No one should have to open their show by explaining which groups they’re not affiliated with.

Making matters worse for the Church, there are pro-Mormon podcasts that use the “M” word in their titles, too, yet there was no indication the LDS Church ever went after any of them for trademark violations even though those podcasts were not official products of the Church either.

This past February, the two sides met in person to discuss their positions.

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 decided to go to court. I felt their case was weak.

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

Those seemed like perfectly normal cases of “fair use.”

The Church was also mad that Dehlin used the word “Mormon” at all... which was wildly ironic given that the LDS Church itself urged people to stop using the word because they didn’t want to be known that way to the point that even the famous Mormon Tabernacle Choir had been renamed the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square.) And yet here they were telling the court that it was their word and not anyone else’s… and they had the paperwork from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to back it up.

This is all, they said, 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 that kind of influence. The Mormon Church was 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 asked the court to stop Dehlin from using any logos or imagery that was “confusingly similar” to the LDS Church’s, and they wanted a jury trial.

Dehlin issued some informal responses to all this at the time, 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 added that it was “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 said 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 insisted it wasn’t 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. They argued:

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.

Uh-huh. Sure it doesn’t….

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 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 suggested a window into, well, the secret lives of Mormon wives.

In my mind, it was truly amazing this is how the LDS Church was wasting its time and money. Pope Leo is fighting fascism while the Mormon Church is fighting a podcaster.

And now, Dehlin’s team has filed its official response in court, calling on the judge to dismiss the entire case. While many of the arguments are ones I’ve written about above, it’s worth noting how Dehlin defends himself.

When it comes to the use of the word “Mormon” and whether it constitutes trademark infringement, the LDS Church has to show there’s no artistic/editorial relevance and that Dehlin is trying to mislead people.

It’s not hard to rebut any of that:

… the word “Mormon” has a strong cultural significance far beyond any alleged source-identifying function claimed by the Church; it is used as a ubiquitous and descriptive reference to Mormonism writ large, including the history, traditions, culture, and people within Mormonism beyond just the Church itself… Indeed, the Church itself has publicly declared that “Mormon” is only a “nickname” for members of the Church and is “correctly used in proper names” or “when used as an adjective.”

…

Defendants’ MORMON STORIES podcast series uses the term “Mormon” in the title to signal the subject matter of the series—stories about Mormonism, Mormon culture, Mormon history, and Mormon experiences. There is nothing in the title of the podcast that is overtly misleading or deceptive—indeed, it accurately and creatively describes the content that the listener can anticipate engaging with.

Dehlin also points out the LDS Church waited 20 years before filing this lawsuit—suggesting they waited until the podcast became incredibly popular to try to silence it rather than go after it the moment they found out about its name. It’s not like they only learned about the podcast this year! In fact, he says, it’s “impossible for the Church to claim it was not aware of Defendants’ use of MORMON STORIES for more than a decade before filing the present action.”

In a separate filing, responding to the LDS Church’s lawsuit line by line, Dehlin goes into more depth about the podcast and his own history with the Mormon Church. My favorite bit there may be the inclusion of a chart from December of 2015 in which the Church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles—a second-tier group of leaders—held a meeting to discuss why people were leaving the LDS Church… and included Dehlin as a reason for that.

Dehlin says that chart alone is “effectively an admission that his MORMON STORIES podcast did not create confusion about the podcast being affiliated with or sponsored by the Church.”

Not only that, but in 2010, the LDS Church trademarked its own “Book of Mormon Stories” podcast and told the United States Patent & Trademark Office that no other podcasts with similar names “would create a likelihood of confusion with the Church’s podcast name.”

Elsewhere in the response, he argues the LDS Church has no ownership of the blue color or a generic “light rays” design.

Dehlin adds in a press release that he made changes to appease the LDS Church, but they made no compromises for him, and the lawsuit came as a shock:

According to today’s filing, Mormon Stories Podcast and the Open Stories Foundation have included disclaimers indicating its clear independence from The LDS Church since its founding. Mormon Stories’ use of the color blue and “rays” in its branding began well over a decade ago, and did not begin around 2022 as suggested by the Church’s claims. But, to avoid expensive litigation, Mormon Stories and the Open Stories Foundation engaged in months of mediation after first being contacted by The Church in late 2025, and agreed to numerous changes requested by Church representatives, including modifications to branding, disclaimers, logos, and imagery.

“We made substantial changes in good faith because we believed reasonable compromise could resolve this matter,” Dehlin said. “We were surprised to learn that despite accepting most of The Church’s requested changes, litigation would proceed. It feels like we were the only ones making compromises, and The Church took an all-or-nothing, one-sided approach to mediation, which included unreasonable demands. It is also very disappointing that The Church chose to publicly mischaracterize what happened in mediation.”

While the court will eventually have to weigh in, none of this is a good look for the Mormon 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.

Dehlin is fighting back by making several points:

1. The Church’s own documents—noting they’ve known about him for a long time—undermine their argument that their only concern is trademark violations.

2. The 20-year delay suggests there was never really any confusion about what Dehlin was up to.

3. The idea that the Church needs to protect the word “Mormon” is ridiculous given that Church leaders have openly distanced themselves from the word.

4. The word “Mormon” is a generic word that’s bigger than just the religious institution. You can’t copyright it any more than a church can copyright “Christian.”

5. He has a First Amendment right to criticize the Church.

Overall, though, this is how you know his 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.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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The latest lie coming from Christian pseudo-historian David Barton and his equally ignorant son Tim Barton is one that’s easy to fact-check, yet a very gullible religious audience ate it up without question.

A quick refresher: Barton has made a career out of twisting and distorting the words of the Founding Fathers and the Bible in defense of Christian Nationalism, homophobia, and bigotry. He’s such an egregious Christian liar that he claimed to have an earned Ph.D. that was later revealed to be a hoax. And he once wrote a book about Thomas Jefferson that was so full of misinformation that his Christian publishers pulled the book from the shelves, saying, “There were historical details—matters of fact, not matters of opinion, that were not supported at all.” (The book was ironically titled The Jefferson Lies.)

And yet conservative Christians and Republican politicians still cite him as an authoritative source of information to the point that Barton is literally a consultant for the Texas Board of Education. Conservatives all know the sort of people who take them seriously aren’t really interested in honesty. They just want someone to say, with total confidence, whatever they all wish was true. Barton has capitalized on that by tying together his religious fantasies and his ignorance of U.S. history.

That’s what he and his son were doing this past April at World Outreach Church in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Midway through their interview with the church’s pastor, Tim Barton claimed that Americans owed a debt of gratitude to preacher John Wise, who allegedly inspired the Declaration of Independence. To make his point, Tim held up a book containing two of Wise’s sermons and explained the connection to the Founders:

This is a book with two sermons from John Wise. These sermons were actually preached back in the early 1700s, but this was reprinted in 1772…

… In one of these two sermons, John Wise, and I quote, says, “All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” [Lengthy pause]

That’s in the Declaration!

This is also where they got the idea he taught that God’s preferred form of government was the consent of the governed. He taught—and this is in these sermons, these two sermons—he taught that taxation without representation is tyranny.

Those are all things that show up in the Declaration.

This was reprinted by the Founding Fathers…

There’s just one problem with that link: The material Tim Barton was quoting never appears in those sermons. He flat-out lied about that.

You can read the “sermons” here. The part he literally quoted? It’s not in there. There are references to basic concepts of democracy but it’s not like those were original thoughts either. They were ideas that had been floating around at the time.

Warren Throckmorton, who brought this to my attention and who’s written extensively about the Bartons and their lies, pointed out that it’s far more likely both Wise and Jefferson were influenced by someone else: Enlightenment writer Samuel Pufendorf.

The more general claim that ministers and sermons directly contributed to what Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence is not supported by an appeal to John Wise. Whereas Wise’s books may have encouraged some readers to integrate Enlightenment views of natural rights with Christian theology, there is no evidence that Jefferson owned or read Wise’s books. It seems more plausible that Jefferson was influenced by Pufendorf independent of Wise. Furthermore, Jefferson’s own testimony points to other influences.

There’s a simple way to counter this, of course. The Bartons could just show us where in Wise’s sermons he ever said—and I quote—”All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” They won’t do that because they have a longstanding habit of never opening the books they cite.

Why would they lie about this? Because they know their audience won’t challenge them. They know the pastor isn’t going to follow up and ask, “Wait, what page is that quote on?” They also have a larger purpose in mind. Throckmorton writes:

Christian nationalists want their audiences to believe the US is a nation inspired and created by Christian influences alone. They seem to feel this gives them an advantage in political battles now. If the nation was inspired by Christian principles at the founding, the reasoning goes, then surely it ought to be ruled by Christian principles (as they define them) now.

He’s absolutely right about that. It’s obvious why Tim Barton was saying this: He wanted to make the point that the Founding Fathers took their best ideas from Christianity, furthering the idea that we live in a “Christian nation.”

That’s why these aren’t honest mistakes. It’s not like two researchers overlooked a footnote or misremembered a quotation. The younger Barton held up this book in front of a church audience and attributed to it a specific sentence that does not exist. It’s the same move pastors make whenever they insist God’s commands are perfectly in line with Republican cruelty. They know damn well that the members of their congregation are never going to dig into their lies.

But it’s not like this is the first time the Bartons have done this. That’s why no actual historians take them seriously. They’re con artists. Their goal isn’t to understand the Founding Fathers; it’s to rewrite history in a way that elevates conservative Christian goals. Every lie they tell serves the same purpose: convincing Republicans that their political agenda is the natural continuation of America’s original mission. They have their conclusion figured out before they ever dig into the evidence.

The Bartons know what every professional liar has already figured out: Confident lies are way more persuasive than verifiable truths. It’s what they’ve built their careers on.

And the problem with that is that these lies are used to justify real policy changes. If you can convince Christians that America was founded exclusively on Christian principles, you can argue that Christianity deserves special authority today. Hell, you can argue that children need to be taught Christianity in school for historical reasons, not religious ones. That’s what this is all about. If you can rewrite the past convincingly enough, you can reshape the future. And far too many white evangelicals love being lied to.

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Tucked away in Florida’s recently approved $114.5 billion budget is $15 million for security funding in Catholic schools. Specifically, 68 schools in the Archdiocese of Miami, covering Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties.

While “security funding” may be secular on the surface—allowing it to evade constitutional concerns—the move allows the Archdiocese to shift around its own resources. By receiving taxpayer dollars for building upgrades, they now have a new pool of their own money to spend on religious indoctrination—more teachers, more textbooks, more administrators.

Ultimately, Republicans in Florida are promoting the spread of Christianity.

All of this is on top of a massive voucher program in Florida that has already diverted money that should be going to public schools to private (and often religious) schools. In the same budget, the “Family Empowerment Scholarship” program, which allows parents to send their kids to their preferred schools, is projected to receive $4.5 billion. (The program has been criticized its lack of oversight and wasted dollars.)

In this case, the security cash involves a lot of upgrades that private schools ought to be able to pay for on their own:

The plan is to invest in building and equipment upgrades like fences, bulletproof glass and video recording systems as well as fund more safety officers and their training, according to budget documents. Covering the costs of hiring additional law enforcement will likely be high on the priority list for the new funding, said [superintendent of Catholic Schools in the Archdiocese of Miami Jim] Rigg.

While this is only meant to be a one-year infusion of cash, the Catholic Schools superintendent hinted that it would be the start of a long-term relationship: “We’re hoping this is the beginning of much more to come.”

The Miami Herald noted that this money was the result of direct lobbying by the Catholic Church and was meant to deal with rising violence in schools.

Catholic leaders began advocating for the security grants after last year’s mass shooting at a Catholic Church in Minneapolis, which killed two children and injured 28 others.

That’s a very real concern, but you know where else there were mass shootings? In public schools. Something Rigg himself noted with no sense of self-awareness:

“Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the site of the tragic 2018 shooting at a public school, is within the boundaries of the Archdiocese and still weighs on the psyche of people in South Florida,” Rigg added.

He correctly notes that public schools already receive funding for security—the new budget includes $290 million through “Florida’s Safe Schools Allocation” for public school security upgrades—but private schools shouldn’t be receiving any taxpayer funds for things tuition dollars should be covering. If they can’t make the math work on their own, they have no business running their own side schools.

Even in the budget request for this $15,000,000, advocates gave the game away. They say the improved security will “increase or improve economic activity” in the state because better security will lead to more families moving to Florida “because of the safety and quality of Catholic schools” which will lead to higher “enrollment in Catholic schools and preschools.”

Why should Florida lawmakers care if there’s higher enrollment in Catholic schools? That’s not their job.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation denounced this giveaway, but they didn’t say they planned to file a lawsuit. That may be because this is an uphill battle and trying to convince the courts that this is blatant religious favoritism seems like a lost cause right now, especially because the money is going to security and not, say, a stack of Bibles. That doesn’t mean, however, that they can’t sound the alarm:

“This is a blatant example of taxpayers being forced to subsidize religious institutions” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “The government has no business singling out one denomination for special treatment and handing it millions of dollars in public funds, particularly with our public schools, which serve all evenhandedly, being grossly underfunded.”

…

“Every child deserves to be safe at school,” Gaylor says. “But if the state wishes to provide security assistance, it must do so through neutral programs that treat all schools equally, not by carving out special appropriations for politically connected religious organizations.”

Gov. Ron DeSantis has the power to just cross this item off the budget list, but he’s not about to do that. Which means religious authorities in Florida figured out a new way to funnel tax dollars into their coffers. They won’t stop until they’ve sucked out as much public money as they possibly can.

Here’s what will happen in the long term: Public schools, which are already underfunded, will continue to struggle. And when that happens, lawmakers will inevitably cite those struggles—the struggles they fueled— as reasons to expand the voucher program and hand over even more money (for security, capital investments, etc.) to these private religious schools.

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In 2021, Bethany Christian Services, the largest Protestant adoption and foster care agency in the country, announced that it would start working with LGBTQ couples.

While it was a private organization allowed to set its own rules, Bethany relied on federal funds to support its work across 32 states (at the time) and they were facing lawsuits over their refusal to work with openly gay couples. (They had won a Supreme Court case in 2018 in which they were involved, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, but they clearly didn’t want to spend all their time battling lawsuits.)

It wasn’t hard to justify the decision, though. They wanted to make sure kids were in good homes, and that mission prevailed over faith-based bigotry, right? The group’s leader said at the time, “we are not claiming a position on the various doctrinal issues about which Christians may disagree.” The organization even commissioned a survey that found a majority of Christians believed it was better for kids to be adopted by decent parents, even if they were LGBTQ, than remain in foster care. They even reassured their donors at the time that “three past executive directors and CEOs… agreed with the new inclusion policy.”

One pastor celebrated the decision at the time:

When same-sex couples are not excluded, more children get placed into stable, loving homes with dedicated parents. Research overwhelmingly shows that children with two moms or two dads thrive just as well as their classmates who have parents of different genders. Commitment, nurturance, patience and everyday things like changing diapers, making lunches, keeping tabs on screen time and bedtime prayers are what make a family.

…

Many Christians believe this too: If Bethany Christian Services’ new policy of nondiscrimination sticks and spreads, the compassionate face of the church will shine brighter. It’s a sign that brighter days are ahead for the church and the country.

Those brighter days are now gone. Because knowing full well that the Trump administration, with the backing of white evangelicals, are never going to make them do the right thing, Bethany has now chosen the path of bigotry.

Last week, they announced that they would rather see kids not have any parents at all than place them with qualified same-sex parents. Or, as they put it, Bethany was now working to “clarify and reinforce the Christian faith commitments and beliefs.”

At the heart of this effort, Bethany is expanding and reaffirming its Statement of Faith and Belief, which will include both the Apostles’ Creed and longstanding Biblical principles previously affirmed by the organization. All staff and board members will be asked to personally agree and adhere to this statement. Additionally, Bethany will continue its longstanding partnership with the church to find foster families whose beliefs and practices align with our organization’s faith and Christian mission.   

The announcement didn’t include any mention of LGBTQ people because, true to form, they would prefer to just erase those families from existence.

It’s truly incredible to have a bare minimum Statement of Faith and Belief that references the “authority of scripture,” a mandate to “care for the vulnerable,” and “No homo.” (Okay, that last one is paraphrased.) It comes after the previous CEO was replaced by a new guy, Keith Cureton, who told the Christian Post he needed to make the change because “we were really struggling with our identity.”

So when they’re struggling with their identity, it must be accommodated… in order to make life worse for children who may be struggling with theirs. Incredible irony.

In practice, this means children in need of safe, loving, welcoming homes will have fewer options to choose from because a large Christian group with the power to help them has needlessly chosen to double down on exclusion.

And according to Bethany, this wasn’t because of donor pressure or a fear of losing funding under the Trump administration. They just felt like it.

When asked if these changes were due to concerns about funding or based on input from donors, a spokesperson said the decisions were not due to external pressure but “reflect a decision to reinforce our Christian identity by our Board and Executive Leadership following prayer and discernment.”

They always cite prayer and discernment when the real answer is “We’re just bigots”…

What about children who are LGBTQ? Bethany says it’ll continue to help them and place them in homes, but the implication is that those vulnerable children will now be placed in homes where their new parents could send them to “conversion therapy” or deny their very identity. That’s not hypothetical. It’s now part of the contract. (“We further believe God creates human beings in His image as male and female, as determined by biological sex.”)

In case you’re wondering how secular adoption/foster care agencies—which don’t discriminate—deal with these situations, here’s what one state-run agency requires of prospective foster parents:

Respect, accept and support the race, ethnicity, cultural identities, national origin, immigration status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, disabilities, spiritual beliefs, and socioeconomic status, of a child or young adult in the care or custody of the Department, and provide opportunities to enhance the positive self-concept and understanding of the child or young adult’s heritage; and

Assure that all members of the household, excluding a child or young adult in the care or custody of the Department… Do not pose a risk to the safety, health, and well-being needs of a child or young adult in the care or custody of the Department…

That’s what it looks like when an agency puts a child’s needs above parents’ faith-based hate. They’ll proudly work with any qualified adults who want to adopt or take in foster children, including religious ones, but not at the risk of making life worse for the children in their care.

Not so with Bethany, which apparently believes children in need of parents need fewer options. Cureton told the Christian Post that his group would work with families who weren’t sufficiently Christian to “transition” them “to another child placement agency, with a goal of minimizing disruptions for children, because that's our number-one focus." But there simply aren’t enough agencies out there to do this work. What’s the point of being one of the largest Christian adoption/foster care groups in the country if you can’t help qualified people who want to work with you for no reason other than they’re in same-sex relationships (or merely affirm them)?

It’s not that Bethany needs to do this because they’re overwhelmed with clients. In fact, the rule change suggests that Bethany would work with these prospective parents if they were straight, just not if they’re gay. It’s a choice.

Making matters worse, there have been plenty of horror stories about children who were placed in abusive Christian homes. Even if we exclude people who were obvious red flags, the emotional trauma that comes from being an LGBTQ kid in a conservative Christian home cannot be stressed enough:

Adoptees have a lot stacked against them even if they don’t have to wrestle with their sexual identity in a family that might be anti-gay. “A sense of rejection is already present for the adopted foster child. Being rejected for a fundamental part of ‘self’ cuts even deeper,” explained Kelly Crenshaw, a reverend based in Maryland who advocates for LGBTQ youth. “It’s another piece of baggage to carry through life that just makes things more complicated: Are people going to accept me? Will I be allowed to date? Do I have to hide my real self? What if my family doesn’t want me anymore?”

The likelihood of those situations arising with people Bethany works with will now go up.

It’s not like they’re making this change because horrible things happened starting in 2021 when they opened their doors to same-sex parents. If anything, five years ago, the organization effectively acknowledged what research and real-life have said: LGBTQ parents are just as capable of providing safe, loving, stable homes as anyone else. That hasn’t changed. There’s no new research showing otherwise. No crisis forced Bethany’s hand. All that happened is, under a Republican administration, they were given permission to be the worst versions of themselves and they took it. They believe excluding loving families is more important than helping as many children as possible.

It’s such a morally bankrupt decision. Bethany wants credit for caring about vulnerable children while intentionally shrinking the pool of people willing to care for them. Every qualified couple turned away because they’re gay is one less potential home for a child who needs one. This is no longer about finding the best possible placement for children; it’s about promoting one harmful brand of Christianity above all else.

For a group that spends so much time talking about compassion, this is a remarkable failure of it. Bethany could have modeled what genuine Christian care looks like when you put the vulnerable first. Instead, as critics could have predicted, they chose discrimination as soon as they felt they could get away with it.

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A group of Christian athletes on the San Francisco Giants pushed back against the team’s “Pride Night” festivities by writing anti-LGBTQ Bible verses on their caps, a move that violates baseball’s rules. They’re now acting like they’re the real victims in all this.

Last week, the Giants celebrated Pride Night with special rainbow-colored caps for team members—they apparently didn’t have to wear them if they didn’t want to—and a message promoting resources to help LGBTQ people and their loved ones.

It’s not a controversial message in any way… unless you’re a conservative Christian who thinks acknowledging and helping LGBTQ people amounts to a sin.

That was the case for Giants starting pitcher Landen Roupp, who wrote “Gen 9:12-16” on his cap… and relievers JT Brubaker and Ryan Walker, who imitated him… and another pitcher, Sam Hentges, who refused to wear the cap entirely.

You’d be forgiven for not noticing the message given that Roupp gave up four runs in under five innings and left the game before taking the official loss. But those verses are ones in which God says the rainbow is a sign of his covenant with the planet—after he murders nearly everyone on it. In other words, Roupp was arguing that God owns the rainbow, not LGBTQ people. As if a message of unity and inclusion violates his religion.

It’s bad enough that these pitchers wanted to make it clear they’re not on board with celebrating LGBTQ people, but to do it in San Francisco? Who do they think comes to the games?! It’s also not like they care about sending this message on other nights. Just Pride Night. So let’s not pretend like this is anything but anti-LGBTQ.

Roupp and his colleagues later gave the standard Christian monologue to reporters saying they don’t hate LGBTQ people at all. They just don’t like them and that’s a totally different thing! They’re just following the Bible! They’re Christian so you’re not allowed to be mad at them! Stop persecuting them for their free speech!

“Kind of what the verse says, you know, the rainbow is a symbol of God’s covenant to us, and us as believers to stand firm in that. … There’s no hate at all. It’s just what I stand for and what I stand in. I believe in God, and that’s me.”

Roupp then was asked how he’d respond if someone from the LGBTQ+ community took exception to his inscription of the Bible verse on Pride Night.

“First of all, as a believer, I would push them to read the Bible,” Roupp stated. “I think God has blessed me in so many ways, and I don’t think I would be here right now if it wasn’t for him. So, like I said, there’s no hate in it at all, you know, like I said, we live in a country where you’re welcome to believe what you want. There’s a freedom of speech and stuff like that, so that’s really all I have to say about that. I’m just thankful that God has put me in this situation and that I can go out and share his kingdom.”

…

Hentges said Saturday there had been discussions among several players in the days leading up to the Pride event on how to proceed. The reliever referenced “other Christians on the team that have the same beliefs” and said the group went to team leaders and then made a “collective decision.”

“It’s just something that I feel like I was forced to support when I don’t morally support it,” Hentges said. “There wasn’t hatred behind it. I think that’s kind of something that’s misinterpreted. I don’t hate the LGBTQ community. It’s just something I believed and talked with teammates and family, and they supported it.”

There wasn’t hatred behind it. These guys just want LGBTQ people to know they are evil sinners who deserve the wrath of God. You know, Christian Love. It’s such a cop-out of an answer because Roupp and Hentges clearly didn’t want to say what they actually believe about LGBTQ people so they tiptoed around it, as if that would make anything better.

It’s also not a matter of “free speech” because this has nothing to do with the government. MLB sets the rules.

The pathetic responses from the Christian bigots led to predictable praise from fellow religious bigot JD Vance, and an offer to pay future fines from “comedian” Rob Schneider, while the team quickly issued a statement denouncing the players’ actions… but not saying they would do anything about it:

“The San Francisco Giants are proud to support Pride Night and the LGBTQ+ community. Baseball should be a place where everyone feels welcome, respected, and valued.

“We also respect that individuals may make personal choices about participating in team activations. We understand that the choices by individual players have caused pain and anger to many in the LGBTQ+ community and we are sorry for that. Those choices do not change our organization’s commitment to inclusion, belonging, and creating a welcoming environment for all.

“We remain grateful to our fans, partners, employees, players, and coaches who help make Pride Night a meaningful celebration.”

That was followed by a mild rebuke from a Higher Power: Major League Baseball itself.

Not because of the anti-LGBTQ sentiments, which the players are allowed to have, but because there are rules about putting personal messages on your equipment:

“The writing on the cap violates our rules and consistent with normal practice we have warned the players about future violations,” Pat Courtney, MLB’s chief communications officer, told Outsports in a statement.

It was a weak statement that didn’t go into any specifics about what the consequences could be if they did it again—or how immediately those consequences would be implemented. How many strikes will these guys get?

And then, somehow, MLB made it worse. They issued a second statement, watering down the first one, and making it clear that their only concern was the act of writing a message, not the content of the message:

“To be clear, this routine verbal warning not to wear the hat in future games is not disciplinary and had absolutely nothing to do with the content of the message,” MLB said.

“We respect players’ right to free expression. However, writing of any kind, with any message, is prohibited per Major League Baseball’s Uniform Regulations which provides in part that, ‘(a) Player may not write, attach, affix, embroider or otherwise display nicknames or messages on apparel or playing equipment…’. We have given the same warning numerous times in the past to players for messages such as ‘Dad’, ‘Happy Mother’s Day, I Love Mom,’ and names of family members.”

Again, they didn’t say what the consequences would be if these players did something similar in the future. Probably nothing, given that baseball players have put messages on their caps for right-wing and sensible reasons and there’s no evidence of MLB taking any action against them. Hell, Clayton Kershaw did the same thing with the same Bible verses last year. No punishment. In fact, Jim Buzinski of Outsports.com noted, “In reviewing Spotrac’s database of MLB fines and suspensions going back 10 years, I could find no examples of players being fined for a uniform violation.”

It’s not like this is limited to baseball either. Hell, a player on the Chicago Bulls was booted off the team after unleashing an anti-LGBTQ rant back in March (though the team said he was let go for unrelated reasons).

It’s worth reiterating that the players in question didn’t have to wear the Pride Night hats at all. They could have worn the regular ones. Instead, they wore the rainbow caps and wrote a message on them, to be extra dickish to their fans.

Rarely has this kind of pushback been part of a concerted team-wide effort, though. Maybe that’s why MLB put out a statement now when they said nothing publicly in the past.

My concern isn’t that other teams will do this, realizing there are no real penalties. It’s that some teams may stop doing anything Pride-related in the future because they want to avoid controversy altogether.

Whatever the case, God doesn’t appear to be on the Giants’ side. They have one of the worst records in all of baseball. And after their antics this week, there’s even less to root for.

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Oklahoma will have its primaries today, which means right-wing Christian Nationalist pastor Jackson Lahmeyer could finally be the Republican nominee for Congress (after a failed previous attempt). But despite an endorsement from Donald Trump, the campaign may have just suffered a major blow after a woman who worked for his campaign said that Lahmeyer—a married father of five—had been sexting her for months… at least until his wife found out.

A quick recap: Lahmeyer is pastor of the internet-friendly Sheridan.Church, based in Tulsa and the founder of “Pastors for Trump,” which was organized to get conservative Christians to support Trump’s 2024 campaign.

The MAGA base loves him because he’s a massive conspiracy theorist. He has said Black Lives Matter was founded by “witchcraft-practicing lesbians,” signed vaccine exemption forms for anyone who became an online member of his church, claimed Dr. Anthony Fauci was a “mass-murdering Luciferian,” said January 6 was an “inside job” by the FBI, claimed that Alex Jones “did nothing wrong,” and fully embraces QAnon… even though he’s been accused of Satanism by other QAnon conspiracists.

He also seeks the “eradication” of Islam from the country and thinks Black women like Jasmine Crockett are guilty of acting “like a GHETTO fool in Congress.”

Soon after Trump nominated Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin to take over Kristi Noem’s job as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, there was a flurry of replacements and newly vacant seats, including the one Lahmeyer is now angling for in the House.

Oklahoma’s 1st Congressional District is a fairly red district where all the real competition occurs in the GOP primary. The Cook Political Report currently rates it a solid Republican district, meaning Democrats don’t stand a chance. But Lahmeyer has the one thing no one else in his race does: The Trump Stamp of Approval.

That endorsement is what led Caitlin Simmons Key, a former Miss Oklahoma USA and a fundraiser for Lahmeyer's campaign, to post about why she was also supporting him:

… Today, Jackson Lahmeyer received President Donald Trump’s endorsement, and regardless of where anyone lands politically, that is a huge moment in this race.

I support Jackson because I actually KNOW him. I know his family. I see the conversations people don’t see, the work people don’t see, and the heart behind all of it.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years working around politics, it’s this: politics can be ugly… but not every person in politics is.

There are good people trying to do good things, and Jackson is one of them.

She actually KNEW him. She knew his family. She knows he’s a good guy trying to do good things.

And she knew this because the two of them had been texting for months in a way that any white evangelical pastor would say crossed every boundary. She told her story to the right-wing Daily Mail—with the screenshots of their messages to back it up—adding that she remained on Lahmeyer’s payroll even after his wife found the messages.

She says the two of them didn’t have sex. But their text messages were never supposed to be made public because it was clear he would have gone further if he thought he could get away with it, even inviting her to his hotel room. She said no because he was still married to his wife.

‘Eventually the conversations crossed the line of probably what most people would consider appropriate for a married man and a single woman,’ she said.

…

He sent a selfie from his room at a Hyatt Place and floated a 'late invite.' She declined. Key says she was the one urging realism about his marriage. 'And at some point- if u need to get divorced. Then ok,' she texted him. His reply: 'Not right now tho lol.'

…

She put it to him bluntly: ‘U r in love with me and we don’t even have sex.’

‘Well... hahah,’ he replied. ‘I’m a fan of you how about that lol.’

‘Nobody knew how close we were,’ says Key. ‘Not one person on the planet besides me and him.’

When his wife found Lahmeyer’s texts, she was predictably furious—and lashed out against… Key. As if this were a one-sided interaction.

‘How dare you,’ Kendra wrote on May 9. ‘Don’t you ever contact my husband again. He told me everything.’

Key denied it. ‘I am not romantically involved with him. At all. If he feels differently towards me, that is nothing I have control of. I am dating someone!’

‘You are a liar,’ Kendra replied. ‘So just stop. You are out of our lives, don’t ever contact my husband again. Do you understand? Im not kidding. It was romantic, I saw it.’

…

'You are a home wrecking whore. Did you enjoy ruining our family?' Lahmeyer's wife Kendra wrote to Key on May 9: 'He has 5 kids.'

It’s not clear how much, if any, responsibility she puts on Lahmeyer himself, even though he apparently told Key to delete their messages (she didn’t). Did his wife know Key was still on the payroll, presumably so she wouldn’t go running to a British tabloid about their relationship?

In another interaction between the two, he told her she was “super thin and very cute” before leaving Mar-a-Lago to go to a strip club. As conservative Christians do. (Don’t worry, though. He said no to the offer of cocaine.)

Her response was incredible:

Her reply now reads as prophecy: ‘Jackson if u become congressman & if ever got caught u would be headlines.’ Then, one word: ‘Pastor.’

Yes. There would be lots of headlines. Because when you have a right-wing MAGA preacher who promotes “family values” and Trump, the inevitable hypocrisy is bound to be a major part of the campaign. It’s just a matter of which flavor. (Just ask Mark Robinson.) Is Lahmeyer a Christian who wants to help the “least of these” while persecuting refugees? Someone who promises fiscal responsibility while allowing Trump and his family to practically rob the Treasury? Someone who champions “pro-life” policies while opposing programs that keep people healthy and alive? Or a pastor who denounces same-sex relationships while trying to score himself a mistress?

I don’t normally care about these MAGA cultists’ private lives when it doesn’t affect anything else. Former Oklahoma official Ryan Walters recently got divorced. It wasn’t a scandal. There was no evidence of hypocrisy (other than the hypocrisy of an evangelical getting divorced at all despite pushing for covenant marriages). So it wasn’t a story. This, on the other hand, is a secret Lahmeyer didn’t want anyone to know about.

When the story was published Sunday night, Lahmeyer responded by blaming the messenger. He didn’t deny the texts. He just called the story “distorted”—without going into any details about what the Daily Mail purportedly exaggerated—and suggested the story may have been “paid for.” There’s no evidence of that. He also claimed he handled the matter privately and that his wife “may” have more to say soon.

Notice he doesn’t say the story is a lie.

And then his church canceled its Sunday service. Because Jesus can wait if the alternative is being in the spotlight after a story like this breaks.

Will any of this matter in today’s primary? Probably not. Lahmeyer’s base consists of white evangelical voters and they don’t actually give a shit if their most prominent pastors break their own moral codes. They’ll just chalk it up to sin and then celebrate whenever the pastor gets around to his forgiveness tour. Only Democrats are ever held to any standards these days. It’s the Christian Way™.

It should matter, though, because Lahmeyer has built his entire public career around judging other people’s morality. Yet here’s evidence of him violating his own supposed standards and what’s his response? Denial and deflection.

You know how all of these people would react if a Democrat did anything like this. They would spend months treating it as proof of moral corruption. But because Lahmeyer is a Republican, the rules don’t matter. His supporters on Facebook are already calling it a distraction or a lie.

That’s the hypocrisy at the heart of Christian Nationalism.