When Southern Baptists at their annual meeting last week affirmed their longstanding position that the Bible does not authorize churches to put women in certain leadership positions, such as pastor, they were not alone: Some of the largest Christian denominations take the same position, among them the Catholic Church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod), the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Presbyterian Church in America. So do many evangelical denominations as well as many so-called nondenominational1 churches.

The opposite view also is held by many churches, most notably mainline Protestant churches such the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the United Methodist Church, which tend to be liberal theologically and socially. But the recognition of women as pastors or other types of leaders isn’t limited to the liberal churches: Many historically black churches lean toward egalitarianism, as do quite a few theologically conservative, Pentecostal and/or evangelical churches: The Assemblies of God, the Salvation Army, the Church of the Nazarene, the Wesleyan Church and the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel are among them.

In other words, even some churches that have a high view of the Bible, viewing the Bible not only as inspired by also as the ultimate authority for faith and practice and infallible in its original manuscripts, see the Bible as allowing for women to lead churches. This viewpoint is often called egalitarianism, which contrasts with the males-as-leaders view called complementarianism.

So who’s right about what the Bible really says about women in ministry? Perhaps evangelical theologian Preston Sprinkle, who heads The Center for Faith, Sexuality & Gender, is among those best suited to answer that question. He is the author of several books and maintains visibility in social media — and has been criticized by fellow evangelicals both for being too liberal, such as when he says he is fine with calling trans people by their preferred pronouns, and for being too conservative, particularly for his opposition to same-sex marriage.

Having no conclusion on the issue is where Sprinkle begins his newest book, From Genesis to Junia: An Honest Search for What the Bible Really Says About Women in Leadership. He begins like this:

I’m writing this introduction in real time. It’s May 2022, and I’m about to embark on a theological journey to figure out what I think the Bible says about women in church leadership.

I’m a bit nervous about this journey, since I don’t know my destination. I honestly don’t know where I’ll end up. Authors typically write their book’s introduction last, after they’ve written the rest of the book and sorted out their conclusions. That’s how I wrote most of my previous books.

But this one is different. I’m not starting with a settled conclusion and then writing the book to convince you of it. Rather, I’m inviting you to peek over my shoulder as I journey through Scripture to figure out what I believe it says about this contentious issue.

I’m not going to tell you in this review where he ends up; I don’t care to spoil the adventure for readers. But I will tell you how Sprinkle tackled his task.

As an evangelical, Sprinkle was compelled by his belief system to look at each word carefully and fit them together into a coherent whole where more liberal scholars might be willing to read the text with more of a 21st-century perspective end in mind. It isn’t always easy, and Sprinkle’s frustration shows at times, but it’s the type of frustration that leads him to dig deeper for insight, going to studies of ancient Israelite and Greek culture, for example, or seeing how secular Greek writings used certain words. Although Sprinkle does his best to keep his book accessible to those who haven’t done graduate-level Biblical studies, most nonacademic readers are likely see the book as getting bogged down in places.

The Junia of the book title is mentioned only once in the Bible, in Romans 16:7, which refers to her in the context of apostles. Sprinkle’s analysis of that verse shows the challenges he faced in coming to conclusions. As he points out, while Junia is a woman’s name, there has been debate about whether the original text referred to a Junia or a male Junias. It’s also not perfectly clear whether the verse calls her an apostle. And it’s not clear that even if she is an apostle whether she’s the kind of apostle that is a leader.

Sprinkle writes that the most difficult passage he has ever studied in his life is 1 Corinthians 11:3-12, in which Paul talks about women being the glory of man and that they should wear head coverings “because of the angels.” The passage, Sprinkle says, is full of “odd statements” and apparent contradictions. But that doesn’t keep him from writing 23 pages about the matter, plus voluminous footnotes.

He uses twice as much ink on 1 Timothy 2-3 — a section that some opponents of equal gender roles claim seals their case. In that chapter especially, Preston not only examines the Biblical passages but also looks line by line at what scholars on both sides of the issue have written.

I’ll give this much away about the book’s ending: Sprinkle ends up admitting that both sides of the argument have strong cases to make. Near the end, he writes:

It should be clear by now where I’ve landed in this debate. I believe [redacted]. I don’t hold this view with the same level of confidence as I hold doctrines like the Trinity or the deity of Christ. I still think some [differing] arguments have exegetical credibility. But after a long and sometimes tedious journey, I believe [my current] view is more biblically persuasive.

And so it is that readers who believe, as Southern Baptist delegates did last week, that women don’t belong in key leadership roles can find plenty of ammunition in Sprinkle’s book if they care to debate the topic. So will those Wesleyans and Pentecostals who want Biblical backing for their egalitarian views.

It isn’t so much the destination that makes From Genesis to Junias so compelling: It’s the journey. The thoroughly sourced book will almost certainly find itself on the shelves of seminarians and inquisitive churchgoers for decades to come.

Delegates to this week’s annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention overwhelmingly approved a proposed change to the denomination’s constitution to make clear that local churches would not be allowed to have women as pastors.

After a brief debate at a large convention hall in Orlando, Fla., almost three-fourths of the messengers, as the delegates are called, approved the amendment. Under the denomination’s rules, the amendment has to be approved by a two-thirds vote at next year‘s convention before it can go in effect.

The amendment had been proposed by Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and one of the country’s best-known evangelical leaders. The vote was 74.66 percent in favor and 25.09 percent against with the tiny remainder of the votes invalidated.

Specifically, the proposed amendment would require that local Southern Baptist churches, which operate autonomously, may not “affirm, support or endorse a woman serving in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer, specifically preaching to the assembled congregation” if they wish to remain affiliated the SBC, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States.

The subject of women in ministry has been coming up at the convention annually in recent years. If the ban becomes part of the constitution, future debate over the issue would be limited.

Earlier, the messengers selected Willy Rice, pastor of the Calvary Church in Clearwater, Fla., as the next SBC president. Rice, who is generally viewed as an outspoken conservative, received a decisive 57.6 percent majority.

The messengers also gave approval to a long list of resolutions detailed below. Among them were resolutions denouncing assisted suicide and honoring the United States on its 250th anniversary.

Original article (June 10, 2026): Delegates to annual Baptist meeting expected to debate women’s church roles, immigration

An expected 20,000 Southern Baptists are gathering in Orlando, Fla., for their annual meeting this week — and there is likely to be no shortage of controversy.

The Southern Baptist Convention, an association of more than 40,000 churches made up of some 12 million members, is the second-largest Christian denomination in the United States, behind the Catholic Church, and the largest Protestant one. Although the churches are autonomously run, they annually send delegates, known as messengers, to a convention that sets denominational policies and organizes or supports programs such as seminaries and missionary outreach.

It has become almost a tradition that the convention discusses and votes on controversial issues, which in recent years have focused matters of women’s church roles and sexual abuse scandals as well as political matters. Such concerns are coming up again this year as messengers face a flurry of resolutions ranging from the routine (expressing appreciation to the host city) to the national issues of the day such as antisemitism and political violence.

The resolution that likely will have the most influence on how churches operate if it is adopted is one designed to clarify where the SBC stands on women’s roles in the church. As with many other conservative Protestant denominations, Southern Baptists maintain that men and women are of equal worth in the eyes of God but that only men are authorized to authorized to hold roles that the New Testament refers to as pastor, bishop, elder or overseer. Even so, some SBC churches have had women serve in various pastoral roles, ones not including the head pastor of a church, that the churches claim are permitted by the New Testament.

The proposed resolution would “encourage Southern Baptist churches to maintain clarity and integrity in their ministerial titles and practices so that nomenclature is not used in ways that obscure or contradict the Convention’s adopted statement of faith regarding the pastoral office; specifically, we encourage churches to use the titles ‘pastor,’ ‘elder,’ and ‘overseer’ in a manner consistent with the biblical office described in Scripture and affirmed in The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 and not to use these titles in ways that separate the title from the office and function of pastor.”

Politics at the forefront

Of the 11 resolutions scheduled to be voted on, five are related to today’s political issues. The resolution drawing the most attention is one on immigration. It attempts to thread the political needle, calling for compassion for immigrants while also calling for “lawful immigration enforcement carried out justly” and rejecting “amnesty, understood as forgiveness of legal violations without accountability.”

Specifically, the proposed resolution calls on Southern Baptists to “reject racism, nativism, ethnic supremacy, and dehumanizing rhetoric, affirming that Scripture alone defines our identity, worth, and unity in Christ and that no person bearing the image of God should be reduced to a slur, statistic, or political problem.”

But it also notes that “[l]arge-scale and often disorderly migration has strained communities, harmed migrants and American citizens, and diminished confidence in the rule of law, underscoring the need for immigration systems marked by order, clarity, due process, timely adjudication, integrity in asylum processes, fairness, and humane enforcement.”

Other politically oriented resolutions facing the messengers would:

🟪 Affirm Southern Baptist support for religious liberty and call on Southern Baptists “to pursue national renewal through biblically informed civic engagement, including advocating for just laws that are rooted in God’s natural law and consistent with the witness of holy Scripture, and electing public officials who will do the same.” The resolution also calls the United States’ 250th anniversary a “historic milestone to remember and reflect upon God’s providential blessings.”

🟪 Call on governments “to resist efforts to legalize or expand assisted suicide, and to promote policies that affirm the inherent dignity and worth of every person.”

🟪 Call for civility in public discourse, noting that “we reject hatred, malice, slander, dehumanization, intimidation, reckless speech, and contemptible conduct as inconsistent with Christian discipleship, while also rejecting a false peace that refuses necessary truth.”

🟪 Condemn a “new surge of antisemitism in all its forms, including violence, cultural hatred, and conspiracy theories of Jewish controlled cabals, as sinful, unchristian, and an assault on both biblical truth and basic human dignity.”

Church governance also at issue

Other proposed resolutions:

🟪 Express appreciation to the city of Orlando in hosting the convention.

🟪 Call on Southern Baptists to develop or expand plans for inclusion of persons with disabilities.

🟪 Express gratitude to pastors and ministry leaders who have “labored faithfully over many years and finished well, keeping the faith and maintaining a testimony above reproach to the end.”

🟪 Express “heartfelt gratitude to Southern Baptist bivocational and volunteer pastors for their faithful and sacrificial service to Christ and his church.”

🟪 Call for “the responsible use of digital technologies and platforms as aids to ministry, while recognizing that such tools cannot fulfill the biblical functions of the gathered church, cannot replace the personal ministry of pastors and members, and should be used to support and encourage connection to the embodied life of a faithful local church.”

The Pentagon today changed its list of religions prepared for use by chaplains, responding to strong pushback from Latter-day Saint senators and social-media influencers.

The list, which was published last week, listed 21 varieties of Christianity but put the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a category of its own, implying that the LDS church is non-Christian even though its members worship Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

The new list, which includes 31 religions or belief systems in total, is unchanged in substance. The new list takes churches that had been listed as Christian and uses just their names without the theological identifier. Thus, for example, the new version lists Lutherans as Lutheran only, not as Christian (Lutheran).

The Department of Defense said in a post on X (formerly called Twitter) that the list from last week “included redundant and unnecessary labeling, and the mistake has been fixed. … The Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks.”

Original article (June 8, 2026): Military chaplains get a sloppily produced list as Pentagon updates religious classifications

Ever since Pete Hegseth took over the Department of Defense, it has been accused by its critics of operating in chaos as half-baked plans take effect and policies shift without rhyme or reason.

Certainly politicians and pundits making their partisan talking points will continue debate over whether that criticism is justified, but last week’s slashing of a list of religions recognized by the Pentagon appears to fit that pattern.

The official list appeared to be sloppily made, even spelling the names of two religions incorrectly1. It used theological divisions that made little sense, a step that could make it more difficult for military chaplains to meet the needs of military members — the purpose of the list.

Specifically, the list of religions is used by the military’s chaplains to provide spiritual and counseling support to service members; by law and tradition, the chaplains provide support to service members even when they belong to religions other than their own.

The military formally announced Friday that the list of religions, shown at the end of this article, was being streamlined, reducing the number of recognized faiths from 211 to 31. The list does not affect the military status of personnel and has little use beyond the needs of the chaplaincy.

The changes, which were officially adopted May 20 and signed by Undersecretary of Defense Anthony Tata, were the first made to the list since it was first issued in March 2017. “The new list will provide chaplains with clear, readily available information that will better enable them to anticipate the religious support needs of service members and to provide religious support activities that align with service members’ personal faith and practices,” Tata wrote in a memo.

But will the new list actually be better for chaplains? In shortening the list, the military made two huge changes: First is that the shorter listen inevitably left out a number of religions; while it list did include agnosticism, atheism was left out, as were Wicca, Rastafarianism, Native American religions, Eckankar and, among others, any number of religions that might be loosely classified as New Age. Second is that widely different expressions of faith are lumped into much broader categories than existed before.

For a chaplain, those two changes could make their tasks more difficult if they have a need to know something about a service member’s religious outlook before meeting with him or her. The list seems to assume, for example, that all Presbyterians are alike, but they aren’t. The country’s largest Presbyterian church, the Presbyterian Church (USA) is theologically and socially liberal, even solemnizing same-sex marriages and ordaining pastors to the clergy if they are in a same-sex marriage. But some smaller Presbyterian denominations are at least as conservative as the mainline Presbyterian church is liberal. The small Reformed Presbyterian Church General Assembly, to use one example, does not allow women to preach or serve as elders and sees homosexual behavior as sinful. A chaplain who prepares to meet the first type of Presbyterian is unlikely to be equipped to meet with the second kind.

Latter-day Saint lawmakers and influencers raise objections

When it came to the list’s handling of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — putting one of America’s largest denominations in a category of its own rather than listing it as a Christian denomination — the reaction from LDS members using social media was immediate. By the hundreds, maybe thousands, they echoed the thoughts that appeared in a headline of the Salt Lake Tribune: Are Latter-day Saints Christian? The U.S. Defense Department doesn’t appear to think so.

Of course, the LDS church views itself as a Christian denomination, and influencers saw their church’s placement in the list as offensive. Among those joining the fray were Utah’s two U.S. senators, both of them church members.

Said the state’s junior senator, John Curtis on X, formerly known as Twitter:

Latter-day Saints are among the most patriotic, service-oriented individuals in our country. They are also unequivocally Christian — just look at who is in the name of the Church.

It is unacceptable for a government entity to characterize a faith in a manner that contradicts the religion’s own foundational tenets. I am working now to ensure a correction is made.

And Utah’s senior senator, Mike Lee, posted the following above the church’s logo, which features a drawing of Jesus:

If only we, as Latter-day Saints, belonged to a church that had “Jesus Christ” in its name and His image in its logo“The Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks.”“The Pentagon’s job is not to adjudicate theological debates, but instead to ensure sincerely held faith is respected and encouraged in our ranks.” ...

Oh wait

The idea that Latter-day Saints aren’t Christian stems in part from the fact that the church rejects the Nicene Creed, particularly its formulation of the Trinity2. The debate over whether acceptance of that understanding is part of what it takes to truly call oneself a Christian has been waging for hundreds of years. The Catholic, Orthodox and nearly all Protestant churches hold to the traditional
Trinitarian view of the Nicene Creed.

It’s impossible to know what the LDS church’s views on the Trinity had to do with the way it was listed, but the church to which Hegseth belongs, the conservative Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, is one of those that would not be inclined to see Latter-day Saints, nor even some theologically liberal Protestants, as Christian.

Even so, there are two denominations listed as Christian in the military list that do not accept the Trinitarian formulation of the Nicene Creed:

🟪 Jehovah’s Witnesses, who believe that Jesus is separate from God.

🟪 Christian Scientists, who teach a strict form of monotheism in which “Life, Truth, and Love constitute the triune Person called God,” according to the writings of church founder Mary Baker Eddy3.

Also in the list of Christians are the Quakers, who are a diverse set of small organizations that grew out of the Christian tradition. However, not all those groups today consider themselves to be Christian or even believe in a personal God.

The LDS church itself has not issued any statement about the military list, nor have any of its top leaders.

Legal implications?

Does the Pentagon’s placement of the LDS church outside its list of Christian churches have any legal implications? Maybe, suggests David French, a New York Times columnist who is an evangelical Christian, critic of Hegseth and former religious-freedom attorney. He wrote on X on Sunday:

The issue with the Pentagon list excluding the LDS church from Christianity has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with the Establishment Clause.

I’ve spent my whole life around Christians who draw different lines around the faith. It’s a 2,000 year-old argument that will continue for another 2,000 years or until Christ comes again. But that’s a church argument, and it’s none of the state’s business.

Concerns come from other religions as well

Latter-day Saints aren’t the only group that has raised questions about the list. One of them that has is a group that didn’t make the cut of the new list, the Unitarian Universalist Association, generally seen as liberal. According to the Associated Press, it said in a written statement: “This may make it more difficult for our uniformed UUs to access the spiritual care that they need.” The denomination said it is working on a strategic response to support UU service members.

And the Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, a Baptist minister and leader of the Interfaith Alliance, raised similar concerns in a written statement:

Stripping away status from many religious traditions escalates the Trump administration’s Christian nationalist takeover of the Department of Defense. Religious freedom in the military must mean religious freedom for everyone who serves, not just those this administration finds politically useful.

Secretary Hegseth is not “streamlining” anything. He is elevating one narrow religious worldview from the top of the chain of command. That is dangerous, discriminatory and fundamentally un-American. The First Amendment does not allow the government to create a hierarchy of faiths, and it certainly does not allow the Pentagon to decide which beliefs are worthy of recognition.”

Hemant Mehta, who writes as the Friendly Atheist, also raised questions about exclusion on his Substack site:

If you’re an atheist, like I am, the only sensible category would be “No Religion.” What about people who no longer buy into organized religion but still think there’s a Higher Power somewhere up there? They would also be listed under “No Religion.” What about people who never think about religion at all? “No Religion.”

It’s a catch-all term that erases open atheists from the military by lumping them in with people who don’t share their views at all.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is dismissing concerns raised by its religious critics. In his own written statement Friday, Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, said:

This decrease in religious affiliation codes is not designed to make any claims on the legitimacy of any faith or religious belief, nor is it intended to provide a list of “officially approved” religions. Rather, it is designed to allow chaplains to quickly look at the religious composition of their units and determine how they structure resources to best provide for warfighters of all faith groups.

The official list

Here is the current list of religions recognized by the U.S. military for purposes of guiding chaplains. For ease of reading, it has been reformatted and edited for typographical errors:

🟪 Agnostic
🟪 Baha’i
🟪 Buddhism
🟪 Christian (Assemblies of God)
🟪 Christian (Baptist)
🟪 Christian (Brethren)
🟪 Christian (Catholic)
🟪 Christian (Church of Christ)
🟪 Christian (Church of God)
🟪 Christian (Church of the Nazarene)
🟪 Christian (Episcopal/Anglican)
🟪 Christian (Evangelical)
🟪 Christian (Jehovah’s Witnesses)
🟪 Christian (Lutheran)
🟪 Christian (Methodist)
🟪 Christian (nondenominational)
🟪 Christian (Orthodox)
🟪 Christian (other)
🟪 Christian (Pentecostal)
🟪 Christian (Presbyterian)
🟪 Christian (Quaker)
🟪 Christian (Reformed)
🟪 Christian (Christian Scientist)
🟪 Christian (Seventh-day Adventist)
🟪 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
🟪 Hindu
🟪 Islam
🟪 Judaism
🟪 No religion
🟪 Other religions
🟪 Sikh

When a 4-4 Supreme Court tie vote last year had the effect of preventing the opening of a Catholic virtual charter school in Oklahoma, it quickly became clear that the next step for advocates of taxpayer-funded religious schools was to come up with a new proposal that could secure a tie-breaking fifth vote on the court.

And so it is that now, a bit more than one year later, advocates of at least three such schools have taken concrete steps needed to get the issue before the Supreme Court again. If the high court agrees with the schools, the decision would radically upend the state of public education in America, allowing the possibility that taxpayers would be funding religious schools across the country, at least in any state that allows for charter schools.

The high court’s split decision last year involved the St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Charter School that had been approved by a statewide school board in Oklahoma. The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that the plans violated by the Oklahoma and U.S. constitutions, and that decision was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. With Justice Amy Coney Barrett abstaining, apparently due to a conflict of interest, the high court’s split vote allowed the Oklahoma ruling to stand.

Now, organizers have advanced plans for three other religious charter schools, any of which are extremely unlikely to begin operating without Supreme Court approval:

🟪 Last year, the Florida-based National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter Foundation proposed to the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board, the same board that had approved the St. Isidore plan, the creation of a Jewish virtual charter school. But citing the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision, the Oklahoma board rejected the plan. Now, the Becket law firm, one of the country’s leading litigators involved in religious-freedom cases, is taking Oklahoma to court on behalf of Ben Gamla.

🟪 In Knox County, Tenn., the proposed evangelical Christian Wilberforce Academy of Knoxville last year tried to get the Knox County Board of Education to approve a charter. But the board said no — leading to a lawsuit by the school and the intervention of the American Civil Liberties Union in opposing the school. As with the Ben Gamla proposal, the Wilberforce plan will be decided by a trial court and then, in all likelihood, appealed regardless of which side prevails.

🟪 Most recently, Union University, a Kentucky-based evangelical school with about 2,700 undergraduate and graduate students, received approval from the Jackson-Madison County School System Board on April 30 to sponsor a K-12 charter school, Union Academy.

Union Academy has the support of the Alliance Defending Liberty, another major litigant in religious-freedom cases. So far, there have been no lawsuits to prevent the school from opening as planned in the fall of 2027, although such as lawsuit is inevitable. Not only does the school raise constitutional questions, it also is in conflict with a state law that prevents the creation of charter schools that have a religious mission.

The ADF is looking forward to defending the school. It said in a written statement:

Tennessee parents and children are better off with more educational choices, not fewer. The Jackson-Madison County School System Board was right to approve Union Academy’s request to operate as a charter school and should be commended for refusing to engage in unconstitutional discrimination based upon the school’s religious character. Alliance Defending Freedom wholeheartedly supports Union Academy in its endeavor to become the nation’s first religious charter school, opening up educational options and freedom for more Tennessee families.

Of course, opponents disagree. Although the ACLU has yet to weigh in specifically on the Union Academy plan, it has spoken about religious charter schools in general:

Church-state separation is a cornerstone of our democracy. It’s critical to preserving the right of every person to decide for themselves — without pressure from the government — which religious beliefs, if any, to hold and practice. It also ensures that the government doesn’t undermine religion either by co-opting it for political purposes or rendering religious institutions dependent on the state to spread their faith. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized that the separation between religion and government is particularly crucial in our public schools, which, by design, freely serve all students equally regardless of religious background or preference.

Such a legal fight over religious charter schools became inevitable with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Carson v. Makin. In that 2022 case, the court ruled 6-3 that Maine’s school voucher program could not exclude religious schools from the program simply because they are religious than nature. Backers of religious charter schools are trying use the logic of Carson to support their cause, although there are substantial differences between vouchers and charters. Most significantly, in a voucher program, government funds go to parents, who then have discretion about how they are used. If they are used for religious schools, those schools remain privately owned and operated.

But in charter programs, the funds go straight to the schools, raising issues, in the case of religious schools, about government hiring of persons based on their religious beliefs. The charter schools remain privately owned but are operated as a sort of government/private hybrid. Also, voucher programs generally do not pay 100 percent of students’ tuition, while parents who send their children to charter schools pay no tuition.

Like other charter schools in Kentucky, the proposed Union Academy would be required to admit students regardless of their religious beliefs or practices. But, according to its charter application, it would hire only teachers which agree with the school’s statement of faith — which consists of typical evangelical belief statements including one on sexuality: “God created only two genders and He fashioned each one of us as either male or female. Sexual relationships are designed by God to be expressed solely within a marriage between a man and a woman.”

Union Academy’s application describes its purpose in part like this:

Union Academy will be a Christ-centered, academically rigorous public charter school designed to serve families in Jackson, Tennessee and the surrounding communities who are seeking a high-quality, tuition-free education grounded in Christian values. The school’s mission is to provide Christ-centered education that promotes excellence and character development in service to Church and society.

Union Academy will deliver a strong academic program to K-12 students with an emphasis on literacy, mathematics, science, critical thinking, and great texts of the Western tradition interconnected with Biblical worldview.

The school is projected to have 320 students in its first year and 530 in its fifth year with a total potential enrollment of 780. It would start as a K-5 elementary school and ultimately include students through high school.

At least for the time being, the U.S. Supreme Court isn’t going to get involved in a class action lawsuit involving allegations that the Catholic Church did not spend money donated to an annual collection known as Peter’s Pence in the way promised.

The high court said in an unsigned brief order yesterday that it would not hear an appeal from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in United States Conference of Catholic Bishops v. O’Connell. The appeals court had agreed with a trial judge court that the plaintiff, David O’Connell, could use the discovery process to seek information about how the church used money donated to the fund and how it conveyed information about it to parishioners nationwide. The USCBB appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing, among other things, that a legal principle known as the church autonomy doctrine prevents such an inquiry.

To hear an appeal, four Supreme Court justices must agree to take the case; there was no indication in the order to indicate whether any of them did. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did not participate in deliberations due to unstated circumstances that might call her neutrality into question.

A decision by the Supreme Court to not hear a dispute has no value as precedent, and the ruling does not necessarily indicate disagreement with the Catholic Church’s position. It also does not preclude further litigation of legal questions that could be raised as the case proceeds.

The Catholic Church had received the legal support of a wide variety of churches and other religious organizations who wanted the top court to dismiss O’Connell’s lawsuit. They generally claimed that court inquiries as to how a church manages or talks about its funds can get courts entangled in internal church decisions in a way that would violate churches’ First Amendment rights to freedom of religion.

O’Connell, a Catholic parishioner from Rhode Island, had filed his lawsuit in 2020, claiming that had been misled in church about how donations to Peter’s Pence would be used. In seeking dismissal of the suit, the bishops’ organization had taken the position that courts do not have the constitutional ability to second-guess churches about how they spend their money. But in disagreeing with the church, the trial and appeals courts had said that the lawsuit could proceed as long as the church was treated the same as secular organizations without the discovery process intruding into matters of church doctrine or religious practice.

The appeals courts had said that “district courts have ample tools at their disposal to limit discovery, tailor jury instructions, and dismiss claims as necessary to safeguard against infringements of the church autonomy doctrine.”

Yesterday’s ruling means that O’Connell’s lawsuit can proceed under terms set by the trial court.

Obviously alarmed by a world that seems to see armed conflict as a normal fact of life, Pope Leo XIV today issued an encyclical calling on world leaders as well as ordinary citizens to build a “civilization of love” and “peace through justice.” Without ever mentioning the military policies of the United States nor any other country by name, the encyclical offers a sharp contrast to the “peace through strength” American mindset and other attitudes that seek to justify continual wars and other types of violence.

Although the document, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, was designed primarily to call attention to the moral questions raised by the use of AI, at the heart of its philosophy is a view of humankind that sees the human person as “created in the image of God” and worthy of being treated with dignity. Although the document doesn’t reject a right to self-defense, it offers an alternative to the long-standing Catholic view of “just war,” calling it outdated, partly because of the way in “which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war.”

The encyclical was the first for Pope Leo, the first pope from the United States. An encyclical is a type of pastoral letter to the entire Catholic church. While an encyclical is sometimes considered to be a source of doctrine and seen as having apostolic authority, it is not treated as infallible.

Part of the problem, the encyclical says, is that military might has become part of the economic core of many countries:

The growth of the military-industrial complex has become a defining feature of the current political landscape and has become a key sector in the economy of various countries. The close link between economic interests, the military apparatus and political decisions produces an “armed nation,” in which war appears as a natural extension of politics, and the arms market becomes an autonomous driving force behind military decisions. Nor can we ignore the enormous economic interests behind war. The armaments industry, and countries that supply weapons, profit from a market that thrives precisely on conflicts. In this sense, there are also financial interests that contribute to fueling tensions in various regions of the world.1

In contrast, the document calls for “building the civilization of love,” and the pope sees that as beginning with individuals:

The first contribution we can make toward a more humane civilization is to be mindful of our words. “Let us disarm words and we will help to disarm the world.” 2 Words have enormous power, something we experience in our daily interactions; for example, spoken words can change our mood for better or for worse. “Peace begins with each one of us: in the way we look at others, listen to others and speak about others. In this sense, the way we communicate is of fundamental importance: we must say ‘no’ to the war of words and images, we must reject the paradigm of war.” 3 We must all, therefore, examine our conscience regarding the words we use, the prejudices we have and the explicit or implicit aggression that lies within them. We have a real opportunity to contribute to the common good each time we speak the truth, offer wise advice, support those in need of comfort, denounce injustice and give a voice to the voiceless.

The document suggests different ways in which that civilization of love can be built:

🟪 Following the counsel of the late Pope Francis to “‘touch the wounded flesh’ of those who suffer, look at their faces, listen to their stories and acknowledge their wounds.”

🟪 Adopting an attitude of “healthy realism” that avoids the type of idealism that distorts the facts and also avoids the type of cynicism that gives up on changing the world.

🟪 At the individual level, engaging in a dialogue that “involves acquiring an attitude that seeks to forge bonds of fraternity built on listening, an open demeanor, making time for each other and even wasting time together. For if we experience authentic encounters with others, with those who are different, strangers and migrants, it becomes much more difficult even to imagine war.”

🟪 At the political level, shifting “from the ‘culture of power’ to a genuine ‘culture of negotiation,’ in which dialogue and diplomacy become the standard means of resolving conflicts.”

🟪 Recognizing that “international organizations, particularly the United Nations, are essential instruments for promoting a civilization of love, for they can foster dialogue among nations and promote the peaceful resolution of conflicts, the integral development of peoples, the protection of the most vulnerable, disarmament and the care of creation.”

The document calls on the world’s Christians to elevate human dignity in the way they lift the marginalized:

For the Christian community, social justice is a concrete way of following Jesus and remaining faithful to the Gospel. In the New Testament, Jesus proclaims the “good news to the poor” and identifies himself with the lowly, the sick, the imprisoned and strangers. He thus teaches us that justice is born from, and fulfilled in, fraternity, because the way we approach and relate to the least among us becomes, in concrete terms, the measure of our relationship with God and with our brothers and sisters. Justice, however, concerns not only the behavior of individuals, but also the way in which the structures of society are conceived and organized. In this regard, the Second Vatican Council reminds us that every institution is called to serve the human person and his or her dignity. Social justice is, therefore, characterized by the capacity of a social, economic and political order to allow everyone — particularly the weakest — to live a truly dignified life, without leaving anyone behind.

Lobbyists for the country’s leading atheist public-interest group, American Atheists, haven’t exactly been enamored with legislators and other political figures in Oklahoma during recent years: Oklahoma has been a state that has had a school superintendent attempt to infuse the Bible into the statewide curriculum, a state House that has passed a resolution honoring Christ as King, a statewide school board approve the creation of a state-funded religious school, and lawmakers who considered requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools. Arguably, at least, Oklahoma has been the state most ready to breach the wall traditionally separating church and state.

So it came as a surprise a few days ago when the the news page of Americans Atheists led with this headline: Atheists Praise Passage of Child Marriage Ban in Oklahoma.

In the annals of church-state conflict, the development isn’t all that big of a deal. After all, in order for the ban to become law, which will take effect Nov. 1, it needed the approval of the state’s Christian supermajority, and the legislation wasn’t fought primarily on religious grounds. All that is noteworthy is that the American Atheists found something to applaud lawmakers for.

For the record, the law is Senate Bill 504, which enacted the removal of all exceptions to the state law setting 18 as the minimum marriage age. The bill earlier this year passed the state House unanimously, although it did receive opposition from some conservative Republicans in the Senate, where it passed 51-36. The main argument made by opponents is that it would interfere with parental rights, and they argued that in some situations, such as when a child pregnancy is involved, parents should be allowed to authorize marriage for their children.

The Oklahoma governor, Kevin Stitt, had taken no position on the bill. Because he neither signed nor vetoed it by the deadline, it became law (with delayed implementation) last Wednesday.

Here’s what Nick Fish, the president of American Atheists, had to say about the development:

This is not only a tremendous victory for the committed advocates who have worked tirelessly to advance this issue in Oklahoma and throughout the United States, it is a victory for the countless minors who, until today, were at risk of being forced into these abusive, exploitative marriages.

The devastating effects of child marriage on these young people are crystal clear, and the stories of survivors are heart-wrenching. This law come too late for the 3,500 minors, mostly girls wed to adult men, who were married in Oklahoma between 2000 and 2021, but it is a vital step toward ending child marriage in all 50 states.

I am grateful for the partnership of the team at Unchained at Last and the National Coalition to End Child Marriage and to the hard work of our members and volunteers in Oklahoma who fought so hard to get it done.

According to Fish, Oklahoma has become the 17th state to outlaw all child marriages. The states that allow minors to marry require court and/or parental approval for a license to be issued.

Slightly more than half of American adults, 52 percent, agree that conservative Christians have gone too far in trying to push their religious values in government and the public schools. And a similar number, 48 percent, say that liberal nonbelievers have gone too far in keeping religious values out of the government and the public square.

So says the most recent survey from the Pew Research Center, which also found that Americans are sharply divided on a variety of issues related to religion and the public square.

Although they are far from unanimous, Americans do reach a consensus of sorts on a few key issues. Only a small minority, 17 percent, for example, say that Christianity should be declared the official religion of the United States. And strong majorities among both Democrats and Republicans don’t want to see churches endorse political candidates.

But on some more general issues related to the role of religion in the country, U.S. adults are more narrowly divided:

🟪 A bit more than half of Americans, 55 percent, see religion has having a general positive view regarding the influence on American life. Almost a fourth, 22 percent, see the influence as negative, with the reminder having divided or undecided views.

🟪 A bit more than half, 51 percent, say that the Bible should have at least some influence on U.S. laws. Nearly all of the remainder, 48 percent, say the Bible should have no or not much influence on laws.

For both of those two questions, there is a strong partisan divide, with Republicans having the far stronger pro-Bible view.

Pew’s numbers are based on a nationally representative survey conducted April 6-12 among 3,592 U.S. adults.

In its report on the survey, Pew highlighted that there is growing familiarity with the term “Christian nationalism,” and that for the first time a majority say they have read or heard about the movement at least a little. Only 40 percent said they had heard nothing at all about the ideology, compared with 54 percent for surveys done in 2022 and 2024.

As more people have become familiar with the term, the numbers of people expressing both positive and negative views of Christian nationalism have grown, Pew noted:

On balance, sentiment toward Christian nationalism remains more negative than positive. Today, 31% of U.S. adults say they have an unfavorable view of Christian nationalism (up 6 percentage points since 2024), while 10% view it favorably (up 5 points).

Pew also highlighted that there is a growing number of Americans, although still a minority, who believe that the role of religion in American life is on the upswing. The survey found that 37 percent see a gaining influence, a figure that ties and is the highest since a survey in 2002 asked a similar question. A majority, 61 percent, see religion losing influence.

For months various Texas Republican officeholders — including its governor, attorney general and some members of Congress — have made it clear that Muslim influence isn’t wanted in their state. Although most of their actions had little effect on the day-to-day lives of the state’s Muslim population, they did have some real-life consequences last week as Gov. Greg Abbott forced a Dallas suburb to cancel a private Eid celebration whose organizers had scheduled the rental of a municipal water park for five hours of family-oriented fun and food — with spaces set aside for prayers.

The disappointing and probably unconstitutional decision by the city of Grand Prairie to cancel the June 1 event came after the city received a letter from Andrew Friedrich, the director of Abbott’s Public Safety Office. The letter, seizing on a statement on a flyer for the DFW Epic Eid event that it was for Muslims only, claimed that the celebration was a “discriminatory event” that should not be allowed to take place and threatened to withhold some $530,000 in state grants to the city, even though the grants were not related to the event.

Despite the implication of Friedrich and other opponents of the event that allowing such an event on city property would be unconstitutional, their legal case is a weak one. The water park’s website says that the facility can be rented out to church groups, and the city would be hard-pressed to offer a legal rationale for allowing Christian-oriented rentals but not Muslim ones. Furthermore, in recent decisions involving education, the Supreme Court has indicated that it is fine with local governments providing resources to religious groups even if the use of the resources is linked to people of a particular faith or religious practice.

Before cancelation, non-Muslims were invited

As it turned out, however, it didn’t matter that an earlier flyer said the celebration was specifically for Muslims. Before the city canceled the event, organizer Aminah Knight made it clear that non-Muslims were perfectly welcome to attend. The flyer had been distributed primarily within the area’s Muslim community, but Knight said in a written statement on the event’s website that all who were willing to comply with the dress and behavioral standards for the Muslim family event could come. Those requirements included the wearing of burkinis for women and a shirt with swim trunks for men; the burkinis shown in the flyer as examples of what could be worn by girls and women were swimwear that covered all but the face, hands and feet. Participants also were asked maintain a “respectful” distance between men and women.

“So if you are a friend of a different faith who wants to celebrate the Eid holiday with us and adhere to the modest dress code .... this event is FOR YOU TOO!” Knight wrote.

Knight’s clarification wasn’t enough to persuade city officials fearful of losing over half a million dollars in state funding, however. “After further review and in the best interest of the city of Grand Prairie, the June 1 Eid event at Epic Waters Indoor Waterpark has been canceled,” a city spokesperson told news media last Thursday.

In a written statement made after the cancelation, Knight said the Muslim community would pursue the goals of the event in other ways. She said one of celebration’s main purposes was to serve as an inspiration for girls facing personal challenges in meeting Muslim dress requirements:

This event was born out of love, for our community, and especially for our daughters. Being a young Muslim girl in America is layered in ways many people never see. There is the love of God, the guidance of family, and then there is the world: school hallways, social media, the constant message that beauty means showing skin. For a girl trying to hold onto her faith and her sense of self in the middle of all of that, the weight can be enormous.

... The flyer was originally shared within private Muslim community spaces. It was circulated more broadly by people who were not interested in attending, but in creating division. While hateful messages came, so did something unexpected: important conversations about Muslims in America and how our community is seen.

Islam teaches that within every difficulty there is ease. And I believe something beautiful can still come from this.

To our community, and especially to our daughters and our mothers:

You are beautiful. Your modesty is not a burden. You deserve spaces where that is celebrated. And we will create them.

Islam has been target of Texas politicians

Last week’s developments are the latest in a continuing effort by Abbott and some other politicians to limit whatever influence Muslims may have on Texas culture. Here are some of the incidents that have occurred during the past year:

🟪 Last summer, Abbott signed House Bill 4211 into law, claiming that it was needed to prevent the development of housing where Sharia law would be imposed. The law says that residential purchase agreements cannot require that “a dispute concerning the arrangement or interest be brought before a tribunal other than a court established under the laws of this state or the United States.”

🟪 In November, Abbott signed a proclamation designating the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations as “foreign terrorist organizations” under Texas law.

🟪 With support from Abbott, the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, late last year sued the East Plano Islamic Center, which has proposed the development of about 402 acres of property near Dallas. Paxton claimed that the plans violate securities laws. Plans call for the building of mosque and hundreds of homes.

🟪 In December, two Texas Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Keith Self and Chip Roy, launched what they call the Sharia Free America Caucus. They called Sharia, the body of Muslim religious law, “a dominating force that is not compatible with the U.S. Constitution.” Self claimed that through Sharia law, “countries like France and England are on the verge of losing their identity and sovereignty. The same forces are at play here in America today, and if we don’t stop them, they will conquer our country too.”

🟪 Earlier this year, several Muslim schools were ruled ineligible to receive Texas school voucher funds under the terms of a law that was written specifically to provide public funding for religious schools. However, that decision was reversed after a federal court determined that the state excluded the Muslim schools because of connections the schools had with entities that also had connections with Christian schools that were approved.

🟪 Last week, under Abbot’s direction, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board ordered the closure of Texas American Muslim University, which, according to its website, “offers specialized programs combining modern technology with Islamic services, equipping students with skills in digital innovation while preserving Islamic values.”

A patriotic event that will almost certainly be the largest government-cosponsored religious gathering in U.S. history promises to bring together “Americans of every background” and a “broad assembly of voices” to a May 17 celebration billed as a “rededication of our country as One Nation to God.”

But, in fact, there is nothing in the lineup to suggest anything close to a diverse background of Americans.

Maybe it’s too much to suggest that something that is so clearly religious in nature would bring together atheists, “nones” or others who aren’t religious to have any visible role, even though the National Mall event is partially sponsored by federal government agencies. But the “faith leaders” slated to speak also do not include any minority religious groups such as Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists.

And they barely include any non-Protestants: Of the 19 speakers described as “faith leaders” there is only one Jew and one Catholic — and each of them is at the far conservative end of his faith tradition rather than being more representative of his faith. All the rest are evangelical Protestants, most of them clearly of a Christian nationalist persuasion. And while the Southern Baptist Convention is represented, there are no mainline Protestants (think mainstream Presbyterians and Methodists) nor other major denominations such as the Assemblies of God or the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While the group is racially diverse, there also are no representatives of the country’s leading historically black Christian denominations.

What the speakers appear to have in common more than leadership in faith communities is a commitment to President Donald Trump’s leadership. Most have been been supporters of him to varying degrees since his 2016 campaign, and most of them have continued to defend his leadership even as part of his MAGA base has become disaffected over the Iran war and increasingly unhinged and even blasphemous pronouncements on social media1.

The Rededication event will be held on Sunday, May 17, for a full day beginning at 8 a.m. at the National Mall with a sunrise worship service that will be livestreamed online and in participating evangelical churches across the country.

The event is organized by Freedom 250, Trump’s entity tied to government and private sponsorships to organize celebrations of the country’s 250th anniversary. Although the partial government funding of the event raises constitutional questions about separation of church and state, there have to date been no serious efforts to prevent the celebration. Freedom 250 has, however, come under fire from numerous organizations, many of them politically liberal, for using this year’s celebratory events to present a distorted version of American history and to provide a way for sometimes anonymous donors to curry favor with Trump.

To get a flavor of the religious tone that the event will have, here’s a quick look at the 19 speakers described as faith leaders who will be participating in the event2:

🟪 Reverend Franklin Graham is the president and CEO of Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. He has been a longtime supporter of Trump.

🟪 Cardinal Timothy Dolan is a former Catholic archbishop of New York. He has been a controversial figure; among his more recent statements that have come under fire is one he made in an interview comparing the late Charlie Kirk with St. Paul, calling Kirk “a modern-day St. Paul. He was a missionary, he’s an evangelist, he’s a hero. He’s one I think that knew what Jesus meant when he said, ‘The truth will set you free.’”

🟪 Pastor Jack Graham is the senior pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church, one of country’s largest churches, based in Plano, Texas.

🟪 Pastor Jentezen Franklin is the senior pastor of the Free Chapel evangelical megachurch based in Gainesville, Fla. He is known in part for his strong advocacy for Israel.

🟪 Rabbi Meir Soloveichik is the senior rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City and the only non-Christian founding member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission. In August 2012 he gave opening prayer at Republican Convention.

🟪 Pastor Jonathan Falwell is the chancellor of Liberty University and senior pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va.

🟪 Pastor Jonathan Pokluda is the lead pastor of Harris Creek Baptist Church, a megachurch in Waco, Texas. He was heavily criticized in 2023 for statements he made that were seen as objectifying women’s bodies, and again this year for stating on Instagram: “Why do I have a desire to sleep with beautiful women while I’m a married man?”

🟪 Pastor Lorenzo Sewell has been an outspokenTrump supporter and pastor of the 180 Church, a Detroit-based megachurch.

🟪 Pastor Gary Hamrick is the founding and senior pastor of Cornerstone Chapel, an evangelical megachurch in Loudoun County, Va.

🟪 Pastor Andy Frank, who is relatively unknown, is described by organizers as a faith leader and national ministry voice focused on discipleship and leadership development.

🟪 Reverend Samuel Rodriguez is the lead pastor of New Season Church in Sacramento, Calif., and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. He also has been a producer of faith-based films such as Dream, Breakthrough and Flamin’ Hot.

🟪 Lou Engles is a co-founder of TheCall and an apostle in the New Apostolic Reformation movement. He has organized numerous large prayer rallies with right-wing political overtones.

🟪 Pastor Dr. Robert Jeffress is one of the best-known speakers as the senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas. He has been an outspoken supporter of conservative political candidates and has been a Fox News commentator,

🟪 Gordon P. Robertson is the chancellor of Regent University and president of Christian Broadcasting Network.

🟪 Bishop Kelvin Cobaris is the lead Pastor of New Life Church International in Plant City, Fla. On his church website he says he “is a child prodigy preacher and started preaching at the age of five.”

🟪 Pastor Paula White is the senior adviser to the White House Faith Office.

🟪 Alveda King has been a longtime anti-abortion activist. She is a niece of the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King as well as an author and former member of the Georgia House of Representatives.

🟪 Pastor Andy Deane is the lead pastor of another megachurch, Cornerstone Community Church in Wildomar, Calif.

Among the other speakers scheduled for the event are Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Speaker Mike Johnson and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

When the Supreme Court nearly a year ago refused to hear the appeal of a coalition of Indian tribes over plans to dig a huge open-pit copper mine at Oak Flat, Ariz., it looked like legal hopes for the tribes had been vanquished.

But that appears no longer to be the case.

The tribes, united for litigation purposes as the Apache Stronghold, claim that indigenous peoples have been using the site since time immemorial for “prayer, gathering medicine, and holding religious ceremonies.” As they note, they have been using the land since long before the land had become Spanish territory or part of the United States.

Indian use of the land is threatened by Resolution Copper’s plans for a multibillion-dollar project that would destroy the surface of the region in order to mine copper and other minerals more than a mile below the surface. The federal government is involved because the site has been owned by the federal government, which had approved a land swap to allow for the mining construction.

The Apache Stronghold — whose legal supporters have included a coalition of Christians, Sikhs, Jews and other religious adherents and the one of the nation’s leading law firms, Becket, involved in religious-freedom litigation — first filed suit to stop the project in 2021. The dispute has had a complicated legal history that includes lawsuits by other organizations, has been litigated as far as the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled 6-5 in 2024 against Apache Stronghold, saying that the planned land swap would not deny Native Americans an “equal share of the rights, benefits, and privileges enjoyed by other citizens.”

The tribes claimed that the land swap violates, among other things, the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act. They also claim that they have treaty rights to continue using the land for worship. According to the Becket law firm, Oak Flat is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and was formally protected from mining and other harmful practices for 70 years until a controversial last-minute provision was slipped into a must-pass defense bill in December 2014.

The tribes also claim that the project would violate environmental laws and the National Historic Preservation Act.

The Ninth Circuit ruling was immediately appealed to the Supreme Court, which last year refused to hear the case. As is typical, the Supreme Court did not state why it decided not to hear the case, nor how many of the four justices needed to sign on to hear a case had done so. But in an unusual move, Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined by a colleague, Clarence Thomas, wrote a dissent saying that the high court had made a “grievous mistake” in refusing to consider the appeal. “Faced with the government’s plan to destroy an ancient site of tribal worship, we owe the Apaches no less,” Gorsuch wrote.

What has changed since that Supreme Court rejection is that land was formally transferred to Resolution Copper in March — in a way that an amended version of the Apache Stronghold v. United States lawsuit says is illegal.

“The feds rushed the Oak Flat transfer through under cover of darkness because they wanted to dodge meaningful judicial review,” Becket senior counsel said in press statement. “That was as illegal as it was brazen. The court should rescind the illegal transfer and protect the freedom of Western Apaches to continue worshiping at Oak Flat for generations to come.”

The federal government has yet to formally responded to the amended lawsuit.

Without a vote to spare, a federal appeals court has determined that a 2025 Texas law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms is constitutional.

By a 9-8 vote today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found that the law does not violate the clause of the First Amendment prohibiting the establishment of religion. It also found that the law does not interfere with the rights of parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children.

The court’s majority opinion, written by Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, who was appointed to the court in 2017 by President Donald Trump, said of the Texas law, known as Senate Bill 10:

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

Last year, Texas became the third state to require the posting of the Ten Commandments in public classrooms, following Louisiana and Arkansas. Federal courts have found the Louisiana and Arkansas laws unconstitutional, and the Texas law was found unconstitutional in two federal rulings before today’s decision.

According to news reports, attorneys for the parents who had filed the lawsuit against Texas said they plan to appeal today’s ruling immediately. Because the ruling conflicts with those in Louisiana and Arkansas, it is likely that the Supreme Court will agree to hear the case in older to resolve the conflicting opinions.

If the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, it won’t be the first time that the top court has considered the issue. The court ruled 5-4 in 1980 in Stone v. Graham that a similar Kentucky law was unconstitutional. During the past decade, however, the high court has demonstrated a willingness to expand the circumstances under which religion can be a presence in public schools.

Earlier version (Nov. 20, 2025): Ten Commandments law in Texas found unconstitutional by another judge

Some school districts in Texas are complying with a new law that requires them to post a copy of the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms. But wherever the law has been challenged, courts have struck it down, saying it conflicts with First Amendment guarantees of freedom of religion and freedom from the government establishment of religion.

The most recent such decision came this week in a ruling by Judge Orlando L. Garcia of U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. The ruling applies to 14 school districts, including some of the state’s largest such as those in Fort Worth and Arlington.

Earlier this year, Judge Fred Biery of the same court issued a similar ruling that applied to 11 school districts. Similar laws in Louisiana and Arkansas have also been invalidated by federal courts.

Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas are the three states that have passed Ten Commandments school legislation in recent years. Although the laws have been challenged in all three states, no court yet has upheld one.

Among other things, Garcia said in his ruling that Texas law violates the First Amendment because “it is impracticable, if not impossible, to prevent plaintiffs from being subjected to unwelcome religious displays” when the Ten Commandments are conspicuously posted in the way the law requires.

The Texas law, which had overwhelming Republican support and Democratic opposition, was signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in June.

Texas is expected to appeal the ruling to a federal appeals court, which could make a ruling binding on more school districts.

Although it is unknown how today’s U.S. Supreme Court would look on such a case, the court invalidated a similar law in 1980. In Stone v. Graham, the court decided 5-4 that a similar Kentucky law “had no secular legislative purpose” and was “plainly religious in nature.”

Original article (May 29, 2025): Texas to become third state to require Ten Commandments be posted in classrooms

The Texas House yesterday approved the final amended version of Senate Bill 10 on an 82-46 vote, sending it to Gov. Greg Abbott for his signature. Abbott has said he would sign the bill. “Let’s get this bill to my desk. I’ll make it law,” Abbott wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on May 1.

Although its implementation is likely to be delayed by court challenges, the Texas law is scheduled to go in effect Sept. 1, roughly the start of the upcoming school year.

The bill is similar to legislation passed earlier in Louisiana and Arkansas. Louisiana’s legislation has been successfully challenged in federal court and is awaiting judicial action on an appeal. The Arkansas legislation, scheduled to go in effect next Jan. 1, has not been challenged in court, although a lawsuit is likely.

Opponents of the Texas bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, have promised to bring a court challenge soon.

The Texas bill requires that a “durable poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments” be posted in “a conspicuous place” in every public elementary or secondary school classroom. The sign is not to include any text other than the specified version of the Ten Commandments and be “legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom in which the poster or framed copy is displayed.”

The text specified in the legislation is a highly abridged version of the Ten Commandments from the book of Exodus in the King James Version of the Bible. It begins with “I AM the LORD they God.” The numbering scheme used in this version is one commonly used by Protestants; although Catholics and Jews also have the Ten Commandments as part of their scriptures, they divide the text into commandments differently.

As was the case in Louisiana and Arkansas, the Texas legislation had strong Republican support and strong Democratic opposition.

Most likely, implementation of the Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana laws would require the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse a 1980 decision, Stone v. Graham, it which it found a similar Kentucky law unconstitutional. The 5-4 ruling found that the Kentucky law “had no secular legislative purpose” and was “plainly religious in nature” — one argument that the ACLU and other opponents have been making with the current round of legislation.

Obviously, supporters of the new laws are hopeful that the current Supreme Court will be more amenable to this type of legislation than is was 45 years ago. In the past decade, the court has generally been friendly to efforts by various states and local school boards to have public-school students exposed to religious instruction.

Voters in at least seven states will be voting in November on matters that have been important to conservative evangelical Christians in recent years. The issues have been placed on state ballots either by petition or legislative referral.

Five of the states will be voting on ballot measures related to transgender students or minors, in most cases by petition efforts organized by evangelicals and conservative Catholics. Other states will vote on issues as varied as prayer in schools and mandatory closure of churches during public emergencies.

Here’s a quick look at the ballot measures1:

Alabama: Student-led prayer

The Require Pledge of Allegiance and Allow Student-Led Prayer in Public Schools Amendment is a proposed change to the state Constitution that would require public schools to have a daily Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. flag each day as well as a student-led prayer. Students would be allowed to opt out of either the pledge or the prayer “based on their own beliefs.”

The proposed amendment does not specify how the student-led prayer would be conducted, leaving such details up to local school boards.

The proposal was placed on the ballot via unanimous Republican support and divided Democratic support. The Alabama House approved the amendment on a 94-3 vote, while the Senate did so on a 24-6 vote.

Colorado: Transgender surgeries and athletics

Petition efforts led by Catholic and evangelical Protestant interests led to two transgender-related issues being placed on the ballot. They are the proposed Protect Children from Irreversible Sex Change Surgery Act and the Sex Requirement for School and College Sports Initiative.

The first measure would prohibit health care professionals from performing or providing surgeries to persons under age 18 for the purpose of altering biological sex characteristics, and the second would require student athletes at the K-12 and collegiate levels to play on teams that match their sex, defined as biological reproductive systems. The main groups behind the measures were the Colorado Catholic Conference and Focus on the Family.

A coalition called Families Not Politics is opposing the two measures. Members of that coalition include Planned Parenthood, the Interfaith Alliance and Rocky Mountain Equality.

Maine: Transgender athletics

The Birth Certificate Sex Requirement for Public School Sports Initiative was placed on the ballot by petition. It would require that public school sports teams designated for girls or boys be limited to students of the corresponding sex, as recorded on their original birth certificate.

Leaders of the campaign for the initiative include the Maine Republican Party and various Republican public officials.

The initiative is opposed by individual Democrats that include the governor, Janet Mills. Groups in opposition include the American Academy of Pediatrics (Maine chapter), Equality Maine, the Maine Council on Aging and the Maine Women’s Lobby.

As of January, the initiative’s supporters had raised $800,000 in campaign funding. There were no groups in opposition that had filed a report.

Missouri: Abortion and gender transition

Amendment 3 was placed on the ballot by the Missouri Legislature on close to party-line votes, with Republicans supporting it and Democrats in opposition. (One Republican in each the House and Senate voted with Democrats.) The votes in favor were 103-51 in the House and 21-11 in the Senate.

Amendment 3 would:

🟪 Repeal the constitutional right to reproductive freedom approved by voters in 2024.

🟪 Prohibit abortions except in cases of “medical emergency, fetal anomaly, rape, or incest,” and permit abortions in cases of rape or incest only through 12 weeks of gestation.

🟪 Prohibit gender transition surgeries for minors, as well as the prescription or administration of cross-sex hormones or puberty-blocking drugs to minors for the purposes of gender transition.

Opponents of the amendment appear to have an overwhelming campaign financing advantage. At last report they had raised $2.2 million compared with about $322,000 for the supporters.

Virginia: Same-sex marriage and reproductive freedom

Measures placed on the ballot by the Virginia Legislature are the Remove Constitutional Same-Sex Marriage Ban Amendment and the Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment.

The first would eliminate an unenforceable provision of the state Constitution limiting a marriage contract to one woman and one man. The second would recognize a “fundamental right to reproductive freedom.”

Reproductive freedom is defined as “including the ability to make and carry out decisions relating to one’s own prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, abortion care, miscarriage management, and fertility care.” It would allow state lawmakers to regulate third-trimester abortions except in cases of fetal inviability or when “in the professional judgment of a physician is medically indicated to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual.”

Both measures cleared the Legislature with unanimous Democratic support. Republicans opposed both measures, although a small number of them voted with Democrats on the marriage amendment.

Washington: Transgender sports and parental rights

Two ballot measures on the Washington state ballot were put there by initiative signatures: the Sex Verification Requirements for Female School Sports Initiative; and the Parental Right to Review Education Materials, Receive Notifications, and Opt Out of Sexual-Health Education Initiative.

The first would require school districts and nonprofit organizations that regulate interscholastic activities to “prohibit biologically male students from competing with and against female students” in sports with separate team or individual competitions for male and female students. Students wanting to participate on female teams would be required to provide documentation of their sex from a health care provider.

The second measure would reinstate the Washington Declaration of Parental and Legal Guardian Rights (Initiative 2081), which was passed by the Legislature in 2024 but then amended in 2025.

In doing so, the initiative would re-enact these parental rights:

🟪 To receive prior notification about medical services being offered to their child, except in medical emergencies.

🟪 To receive prior notification about medical services or medications provided that could affect the parent’s or guardian’s health insurance costs.

🟪 To receive prior notification when the school arranges medical treatment that requires follow-up care after school hours.

Among other changes, the initiative also would repeal or modify various other rights that lawmakers enacted in 2025.

Both initiatives have been promoted by a coalition of Christian conservatives that includes Catholics and evangelical Protestants.

Opponents include the state’s Democratic Party and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Wisconsin: Emergency church closures

Wisconsin’s Prohibit Government Closure of Places of Worship During Emergencies Amendment comes in the aftermath of the covid epidemic. It would prohibit the state or any political subdivision from ordering the closure of or forbidding gatherings in places of worship in response to a state of emergency, including public health emergencies.

The proposed amendment was placed on the ballot by the Legislature with unanimous backing from Republicans and nearly unanimous backing from Democrats.

Although the data is far from conclusive regarding long-term trends, there appears to be increasing support for the belief that a decades-long decline in religious affiliation or interest may be leveling off or possibly reversing. And the reversal, to the extent it exists, may be especially pronounced among young men.

Such are the conclusions that might be drawn from two recent batches of data: a Barna report from its State of the Church inititive last month and an analysis released today by the Gallup polling organization of polls conducted in 2024-25.

Long-term trends about religious beliefs and practices can be difficult to determine because of the variety of definitions used in the various studies and that changes, when they occur, may fall within the range of the margin of error in a given year. However, data accumulated since the days of the covid epidemic seem to show that the rate of disaffiliation from organized religious in the United States has leveled off and possibly reversed, and that during an even more recent period that men have started showing more interest than women do in religion, a reversal from the situation during many decades.

Here's a quick look at the two surveys:

Barna: Gen Z most likely to expect spiritual revival

Although a Barna survey of 1,073 Americans in February didn't directly measure interest in matters of faith, it did so indirectly by finding that young adults are more likelier than their older peers expect spiritual revival. This may reflect that generation's attitudes toward spirituality in general.

While the survey found 29 percent of adults believe a spiritual revival probably or definitely will happen in the next 12 months, among Gen Z adults (those born since 1999) that number rises to 38 percent. Among boomers, the oldest adults in the survey, those born between 1946 and 1964, only 28 percent have such an expectation.

That isn't a lot of data, as the survey did not include a definition of spiritual revival, but it's enough for Barna's CEO, David Kinnaman, to say something is stirring. “The research doesn't predict a revival,” he said. “… Yet it reveals something worth paying attention to: a large number of Americans believe one is possible, and for younger adults especially, that belief is being forged in some of the most difficult circumstances of their lives.”

Of the Gen Z surveyed, 42 percent of those expecting a revival gave mental health challenges as the top reason. Among boomers expecting a revival, 60 percent said one would occur because of younger generations turning to God.

Gallup: Men increasingly find religion ‘very important’

The Gallup study, based on data from 2024-25, shows a sharp increase of young men (ages 18-29) who say that religion is “very important” in their lives. The number is up from 28 percent in 2022-23 to 42 percent in the most recent report.

During the same period, young women's attachment to religion stayed steady at about 30 percent.

Gallup noted in the study:

With the recent surge in their attachment to religion, young men have returned to the high point of their expressed religiosity of the past 25 years, roughly tying the 43 percent found in 2000-2001. By contrast, women of all age groups and older men are at or near their historical lows.

Gallup also noted that the percentage of young men reporting they attended religious services at least once a month has also risen. The number is now at 40 percent, contrasted with around 33 percent from 2016 to 2023.

In contrast, religious attendance for older adults is at or near its lowest during this century.

Gallup also found a partisan divide: From the 2022-23 study until the most recent report, attendance has risen 7 percentage points among young Republican men, 8 points among young Republican women and 3 points among young Democratic men. Attendance rates among young Democratic women were essentially unchanged.

Gallup summarized the results of its study like this:

The religiosity of Americans as a whole remains at a low ebb, with the importance of religion to people, their self-reported attendance and their identification with a religion all holding at or near the lowest levels in Gallup's long-term trends. Yet young men appear to be the emerging exception to the rule.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s frustration with Pope Leo XIV couldn’t have been clearer: Responding to questions in an interview with Fox News on Sunday related to the pope’s admonitions against the war with Iran, the vice president said “that in some cases it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality.”

But there’s a glaringly obvious problem with Vance’s comment: Questions of war are inherently questions of morality, and they have been such in Christianity since its earliest days, when most Christians were pacifists even while facing severe persecution from the Roman Empire.

And more than any other Christian tradition, the Catholic church has literally spent centuries refining its official perspectives on war, developing what has become known as the just war doctrine. Development of the doctrine probably begin in the fourth century with St. Ambrose and arrived at something similar to its current form with St. Thomas Aquinas nearly a millennium later. A codification of the current understanding of the morality of war can be found in the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church.

It is not a pacifist approach. It finds that war can be justified when certain conditions be met, such as that better options aren’t available and that the damage caused by the war doesn’t cause more evil than the war is intended to eliminate.

Many other Christian bodies that have taken a stance on the morality of war have followed the Catholic approach. Much of the international law related to the waging of war, such as the required protection of civilians, correlates to Catholic teaching.

In other words, as much as Vance may think that Pope Leo has gone outside of his lane in addressing the U.S./Israeli/Iranian war’s morality, in criticizing the war Leo has been talking about what popes have talked about for centuries.

It’s understandable why Vance may find this fact inconvenient. The just war doctrine was never meant to justify wars of choice, wars such as the current war that are launched when the initiating belligerent faces no imminent threat, situations where the possibility of a negotiated settlement hasn’t been exhausted.

The frustrations of Vance, himself a Catholic with imminent plans to release a book detailing his conversion to the faith, are certainly heightened by the repeated criticism of Pope Leo and his predecessor, Pope Francis, to the two Trump administrations’ anti-immigration policies. But in neither case have the popes directly addressed strictly policy issues, such as how many immigrants should be legally admitted to the United States nor whether Iran should be permitted to develop nuclear energy source for civilian use. Doing so would indeed put a pope outside of his lane.

But calling attention to the suffering that war produces, to questioning the motives of those who may profit politically or financially, those are not merely the prerogative of the pope, they are among his duties.

And in this particular case, the world, and certainly the U.S. political system, would do well to heed Pope Leo’s counsel:

Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war! True strength is shown in serving life.

It isn’t surprising that American Jews have a mostly positive views toward Israel — in fact, according to a Pew Research Center report just published, almost two-thirds do. The same is true of an almost identical number of white evangelicals.

What might be surprising is that no other religious groups included in the survey results do. As would be expected, American Muslims are the least receptive to Israel: Only 4 percent say they have a favorable view of Israel. For most other religious groups, Israel’s favorability rating is in the 30-some percent range.

The survey results come from a responses by 3,507 U.S. adults1 from Pew’s American Trends Panel during March 23-29 — a period when news was dominated by the current U.S.-Israeli war against Iran before a ceasefire had been announced.

Here’s the precise breakdown of positive feelings toward Israel by religious group:

🟪 White evangelical Protestants: 65%
🟪 Jews: 64%
🟪 White nonevangelical Protestants: 39%
🟪 Catholics: 35%
🟪 Black Protestants: 33%
🟪 Religiously unaffiliated: 22%
🟪 Muslims: 4%

Overall, 37 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Israel; the views of 60 percent are unfavorable.

According to Pew, the overall views toward Israel have grown more negative during the past year: The 60 percent unfavorable rating is up from last year’s 53 percent.

In addition to the religious divisions, the poll also found sharp divisions by age and party affiliation:

🟪 About half of Americans 50 and over, 49 percent, said they have an unfavorable view of Israel. For Americans 18 to 49, the total was 70 percent.
🟪 Among Republicans, 41 percent were unfavorable toward Israel; for Democrats the total was 80 percent.

Nothing says more about the moral collapse of Christianity in the United States than the recent lack of public reaction — and even occasional praise — as President Donald Trump and his inner circle applaud the morally reprehensible and engage in blasphemy, all in the name of Christ.

To be fair, we’re not talking about all of Christianity here. Catholic bishops, following the lead of the American Pope Leo, have consistently placed themselves at odds with Trump on issues such as immigration and the war against Iran. So have the most prominent voices of mainline Protestantism. Even the National Association of Evangelicals has consistently challenged aspects of Trumpism, such as by advocating for immigrants.

But none of those, with the exception of the pope, are widely known as Christian leaders.

For many Americans these days, it is not the voices of reason that are linked to the word “Christian.” It is the loud voices of the MAGA wing of Christian nationalism.

And they seem to be indifferent at best as Trump and his secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, take the name of the Lord in vain by proclaiming divine support for their policies:

• Trump was asked by a reporter during a press conference yesterday if God supports his policies on Iran, policies that include war crimes. “I do,” said Trump when asked the question, “because God is good.”

• Pete Hegseth, the secretary of Defense, who has pictured the United States as a Christian force against the evils of Islam, has said much the same thing. Yesterday, he even compared the rescue of a U.S. pilot over the weekend with the Resurrection of Jesus. “Flown out of Iran as the sun was rising on Easter Sunday, a pilot reborn,” he said.

The response of silence from MAGA-supporting Christian leaders to Trump’s vulgar social media post on Easter morning — the one in which he used the f-word, threatened to commit war crimes and ended with “Praise be to Allah” — has been telling.

One of the very few who has publicly said anything is Franklin Graham, the son of the late evangelist Billy Graham and the closest thing we have to an unofficial spokesperson for American evangelism. But Graham, who in normal times posts frequently on social media, commented only because he was queried by his local newspaper, and then he declined to criticize Trump. His most harsh comment was that Trump “sometimes chooses words to express himself that I do not agree with.” Then Graham defended the policies of a president who today threatened genocide, saying that Trump is “trying to protect the world from a very serious nuclear threat and give the people of Iran a chance at freedom.”

It’s hard to see how Iranians could be free if Trump were to carry out his threat that a “civilization will die tonight” if the Iranian leaders don’t succumb to his demands later today.

As morally lacking as Graham’s comments were, the words of evangelical political thinker Eric Mataxas, as quoted by the Christian Post, were worse: “We need more of this, not less” he said.

And then there was Christian apologist Dinesh D'Souza, who favorably compared Trump to the Old Testament prophet Elijah.

And after that, comments from the most consistently outspoken evangelical leaders are nowhere to be found. If they’re bothered by the sacrilege of linking the Prince of Peace to a potentially genocidal military action, they don’t appear to care to let anyone know.

More than a decade after the Arkansas Legislature first passed a law authorizing the establishing a Ten Commandments monument on the Arkansas Capitol grounds, a federal court judge has found the display of the three-ton sculpture unconstitutional.

In her ruling last week, Judge Kristine Baker of the U.S. District Court of the Central Division of the Eastern District of Arkansas invalidated the law authorizing the monument and ordered it to be removed. The part of her order involving the removal does not go in effect until either any appeals of her ruling are resolved or the deadline for filing an appeal has passed.

The monument has a convoluted history: The Legislature first passed the law authorizing a Ten Commandments monument in 2015, claiming that the Commandments “are an important component of the moral foundation of the laws and legal system of the United States of America and of the State of Arkansas.” The Satanic Temple then sought permission to install a monument of the pagan deity Baphomet, resulting in a 2017 law that set up a process for approval of monuments on state lands near the Capitol, a process that rejected the Satanists’ plan.

A Ten Commandments monument was installed in 2017, but it was almost immediately destroyed by a vandal using an automobile. A new monument, the one that was the subject of the lawsuit, was put up in 2018, this time protected by four concrete bollards.

In ruling against the monument, Baker found:

🟪 That the “primary purpose” of the 2017 law was to promote the Ten Commandments.

🟪 That “historical tradition or practice does not support” the law, a finding that was used in part to distinguish the case from Van Orden V. Perry, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision from 2005 that allowed a very similar Ten Commandments monument in Texas to remain on display.

🟪 That the law favored Christianity and deprived the Satanist group from promoting its beliefs on an equal footing.

🟪 That a discriminatory intent was a motivating factor behind the law.

Baker was appointed to her post by President Barack Obama.

As would be expected, Baker’s ruling received both praise and acclaim.

Among those happy with the ruling was Amitai Heller, the legal director of the American Humanist Association, which, among other things, promotes church-state separation. He said on his group’s website:

State capitols should be welcoming to all citizens, and this ruling rightfully rejects this effort to promote one specific set of religious beliefs above all others — including the right to not believe at all. This decision affirms the First Amendment’s bedrock constitutional principle of church-state separation, which ensures these very freedoms.

Meanwhile, Jason Rapert, a former state senator who had sponsored the monument legislation, condemned the ruling in a video on Facebook, saying:

The judge, Kristine Baker, has released this decision on the eighth anniversary [of the monument’s placement] ..., which I think is very, very interesting that she released a decision against the Ten Commandments during Holy Week, which is really just a slap in the face of Jews and Christians. ... This is Mosaic law. This is literally as much a Jewish symbol as a Christian symbol to some people.

Rapert promised that Baker’s ruling would be appealed.

When parties to a lawsuit come to an out-of-court settlement, it is routine for courts to approve them. But that isn’t what happened this week as Judge J. Campbell Barker of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas rejected a settlement that would have allowed churches to endorse candidates without losing their 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.

The ban on political contributions by nonprofit organizations has long been a fixture of American tax law; the prohibition is known as the Johnson Amendment and was passed by Congress in 1954. But the ban has drawn the ire of religious conservatives in recent years, and abolishing or modifying it as it applies to churches has been a goal of President Trump since his first term of office.

Churches opposing the ban seemed to have reach their goal last year when the Internal Revenue Service came to an out-of-court agreement in a lawsuit filed by the National Religious Broadcasters and two Texas churches. That settlement said that the Johnson Amendment had long been interpreted incorrectly and would have allowed the NRB and the churches to make endorsements as long as they did so through their “customary channels of communication.”

Not so fast, said Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which intervened to keep the settlement from going in effect.

Barker, who had been appointed to the bench by Trump, made his ruling on procedural grounds, saying he didn’t have the authority to approve the settlement because of two laws known as the Tax Anti-Injunction Act and the Declaratory Judgment Act.

Barker pointed out that his ruling doesn’t leave the NRB and churches without recourse if they were to be taxed for violating the Johnson Amendment. “A refund suit could be brought if a tax were ultimately collected,” he said in his written opinion. “… A dispute in that posture would also have the benefit of a specific set of facts upon which the IRS made a determination.”

Reaction to ruling

As expected, the NRB denounced the reasoning and Americans United applauded it.

The NRB said in a press statement that it would appeal the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The organization said it should not have to put itself in legal jeopardy get a legal determination on the Johnson Amendment:

The plaintiffs here have no other forum to challenge the free speech restrictions imposed by the Johnson Amendment’s limitation on the right of nonprofits to speak about candidates, unless they first violate the law and then become subject to IRS enforcement action. No person should be forced to place themselves in legal jeopardy to protect their constitutional rights. And the Supreme Court has backed this conclusion on numerous occasions.

Americans United stood by its position that the proposed settlement was unconstitutional by treating churches differently than other nonprofit organizations. AU’s CEO Rachel Laser said in a press statement:

We’re glad that the Johnson Amendment will remain a strong bulwark to stop religious extremists from exploiting houses of worship. Tax-free giving to charities should fund charitable work, not partisan politics. The proposed settlement agreement to exempt only houses of worship and not secular nonprofits would have been unfair and a violation of church-state separation. It also would have been unhealthy for our democracy because it would allow churches to become unaccountable political action committees. The court was right to reject the administration’s attempt to use the courts to rewrite our laws.

Original article (July 8, 2025): Group fights IRS determination that churches can endorse candidates

Since 1954, churches and other nonprofit organizations that fall under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Service code have been prohibited from participating in elections for public office. Because of the law, ever since then, with a few defiant exceptions, churches have refrained from endorsing candidates for U.S. president and other elective offices.1

But now, suddenly the IRS says, in effect, that the law has been misinterpreted all this time. In papers filed yesterday in a federal Texas court, the IRS said that when “properly interpreted,” churches are in no danger of losing their tax-exempt status if they endorse candidates as long as they make their endorsements through their “customary channels of communication on matters of faith in connection with religious services.”

When a church communicates its endorsement in that manner, it is not participating in the election, the IRS claimed in the court document.

The proposed settlement does not address related issues such as whether a church could contribute financially to a campaign.

Not so quick, says Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a major church-state interest group that frequently opposes the political agenda of the religious right. Americans United said in a press statement:

The Trump administration’s radical reinterpretation of the Johnson Amendment is a brazen attack on church-state separation that threatens our democracy by favoring houses of worship over other nonprofits and inserting them into partisan politics.

The law affecting nonprofit election participation is known as the Johnson Amendment, as it was introduced by then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson as part of an overhaul of the IRS code. It wasn’t controversial at the time, and the provision later became part of the 1986 overhaul of the IRS code during the Ronald Reagan administration.

Controversy over the provision began about a dozen years ago when various churches of a Christian nationalist or religious-right bent began advocating for its repeal, claiming that it violated their First Amendment rights. Donald Trump made repeal of the Johnson Amendment part of his platform during his 2016 campaign as he successfully sought support from evangelical pastors and parishioners.

Since then, a small number of evangelical pastors have endorsed Trump from the pulpit, and some evangelical churches have distributed voter information material that offered reasons for supporting Trump without explicitly endorsing him. And others have skirted the law in various ways, most blatantly in 2024 when Trump held a campaign rally at a Phoenix, Ariz., church.

Skirting of the law hasn’t been limited to evangelicals. It has become a tradition at some historically black Protestant churches for Democratic candidates to speak during worship services held during campaign season, and at one Philadelphia church last year a pastor praised then-President Joe Biden as the “man we need” without formally endorsing him.

Both Biden and candidate Kamala Harris spoke to worshipers during Sunday services in 2024. Although Trump apparently did not speak during any worship services, he frequently addressed religious organizations, including some with nonprofit status.

The IRS position, explained

The IRS explained its new position in the form of a proposed settlement submitted to the Tyler Division of the U.S. District Court if Eastern Texas the in the National Religious Broadcasts v. Long2 case in which the plaintiffs, which included two churches, sought a judgment allowing all nonprofits to endorse candidates. The settlement, outlining when the Johnson Amendment wouldn’t be enforced, applies only to churches and other houses of worship.

The key part of the IRS rationale for the proposed settlement states:

When a house of worship in good faith speaks to its congregation, through its customary channels of communication on matters of faith in connection with religious services, concerning electoral politics viewed through the lens of religious faith, it neither “participate[s]” nor “intervene[s]” in a “political campaign,” within the ordinary meaning of those words. To “participate” in a political campaign is “to take part” in the political campaign, and to “intervene” in a political campaign is “to interfere with the outcome or course” of the political campaign. ... Bona fide communications internal to a house of worship, between the house of worship and its congregation, in connection with religious services, do neither of those things, any more than does a family discussion concerning candidates. Thus, communications from a house of worship to its congregation in connection with religious services through its usual channels of communication on matters of faith do not run afoul of the Johnson Amendment as properly interpreted.

The court filing also noted that for many houses of worship, “the exercise of their religious beliefs includes teaching or instructing their congregations regarding all aspects of life, including guidance concerning the impact of faith on the choices inherent in electoral politics.”

Update: Americans United files motion to intervene as defendant

The settlement reached by the plaintiffs with the IRS is subject to approval by the district court. Americans United recently filed a motion seeking to intervene as a defendant, meaning in effect that it would argue in court in the position of the federal government if the federal government were interpreting the law as it had before the Trump administration took over.

The motion asks the court to let AU submit what is known as an amicus brief if it can’t formally intervene. Both the plaintiffs and the federal government have indicated they wouldn’t oppose letting the AU submit such a brief, according to the AU document.

The AU said in its filing that the proposed settlement “contains sweeping legal analysis and language that Americans United rejects as procedurally improper, legally unsound, and deeply harmful to the interests it seeks to protect.”

It is not clear which judge would hold a hearing if there is one on whether to accept the proposed settlement. The court’s chief judge is Amos Mazzant III, a Barack Obama appointee.

Chalk up another win for an evangelical Christian using First Amendment free-speech protections in ways opposed by LGBTQ activists.

In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 303 Creative v. Elenis that an evangelical website designer had the constitutional right to deny services related to same-sex weddings. Today, the court said in Chiles v. Salazar that Colorado could not enforce a ban on conversion therapy for minors. But there was a key difference in the two cases: In 303 Creative, the court was split 6-3 along ideological lines. In today’s ruling, however, two of the court’s three liberal members went along with the conservative majority, handing mental-health counselor Kaley Chiles an 8-1 victory.

Chiles, basing her concerns on her beliefs as an evangelical Christian, had fought Colorado’s 2019 law, which prevented licensed counselors1 from offering “any practice or treatment ... that attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.” The law, Chiles’s attorneys argued, restricted Chiles’s free-speech rights in part because the only therapy she was offering was speech-based, not involving discredited approaches such as medicinal treatment or shock therapy. They also argued that the law was broadly written in a way that it discriminated against viewpoints disfavored by the state.

All the justices other than Ketanji Brown Jackson agreed. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, based the ruling on First Amendment free-speech grounds2:

Start with the most obvious point. While the First Amendment protects many and varied forms of expression, the spoken word is perhaps the quintessential form of protected speech. And that is exactly the kind of expression in which Ms. Chiles seeks to engage. As a talk therapist, all Ms. Chiles does is speak with clients; she does not prescribe medication, use medical devices, or employ any physical methods.

Next, and nearly as clear to our eyes, Colorado seeks to regulate the content of Ms. Chiles’s speech. When it comes to issues of human sexuality, some of her clients “are content with” their sexual identity and orientation and want help only “with social issues [or] family relationships.” But other clients seek her counsel on how to “reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors, or grow in the experience of harmony with [their] bod[ies].” And in those cases, Colorado regulates how Ms. Chiles may respond. Under its law, she may not speak in any way that attempts to change a client’s “sexual orientation or gender identity” — including a client’s “behaviors or gender expressions” — or in any way that seeks to “eliminate or reduce” a client’s “sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”3

The majority opinion several times referred to the contentious nature of arguments over LGTBQ issues. But it emphasized that the right to free speech has as one of its chief purposes protecting the right to convey unpopular or controversial opinions:

We do not doubt that the question “how best to help minors” struggling with issues of gender identity or sexual orientation is presently a subject of “fierce public debate.” But Colorado’s law addressing conversion therapy does not just ban physical interventions. In cases like this, it censors speech based on viewpoint. Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety. Certainly, censorious governments throughout history have believed the same.

But the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country. It reflects instead a judgment that every American possesses an inalienable right to think and speak freely, and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for discovering truth. However well-intentioned, any law that suppresses speech based on viewpoint represents an “egregious” assault on both of those commitments.

A concurring opinion, and a dissent

About 30 states have laws similar to Colorado’s. Today’s decision raises questions about those other laws, although it is possible that laws in some states, if they are structured differently, might withstand Supreme Court scrutiny. At least that is what a concurring opinion written by one of the court’s more liberal justices, Elena Kagan, and signed by Sonia Sotomayor, suggested:

I write only to note that if Colorado had instead enacted a content-based but viewpoint-neutral law, it would raise a different and more difficult question. … Fuller consideration of that question, though, can wait for another day. We need not here decide how to assess viewpoint-neutral laws regulating health providers’ expression because, as the Court holds, Colorado’s is not one.

Meanwhile, in her dissent, Jackson pointed to the harm that conversion therapy can cause:

Not only is conversion therapy ineffective, former participants of conversion therapy report that it causes lasting psychological harm. Gay and transgender children who underwent nonaversive conversion therapy say they were taught to feel shame and self-hatred.

Calling the majority opinion “puzzling,” Jackson wrote that states have the right to prohibit such therapy and that any infringement on speech is only incidental.