A December hearing date has been set for the first religion-related case that will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court during its term that begins Oct. 5.

The court has announced that a Dec. 9 hearing will be held in the case of Daniel Grand, an Orthodox Jew living in University Heights, Ohio, who claims that he has been harassed by city officials responding to his attempts to organize regular small meetings of other Jewish men in his home.

Grand has gained support from various Christian churches and organizations that point to a long tradition within Christianity for home worship, and they also cite traditions in other religions.

The case is Grand v. City of University Heights. It is one of two-religion cases already on the agenda for the court’s 2026-27 term; the other is St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, in which a Catholic preschool is trying to get admitted to Colorado’s state-funded universal preschool program. No date as been set for a hearing in that case. There are also several other religion-related cases, including challenges to laws requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools, that could end up the agenda for the coming year.

According to Grand’s account, he emailed a dozen male friends in January 2021 asking them to join him in prayer as a minyan, a group of at least 10 Jewish men, on a Saturday. Before the minyan could convene, however, city officials got wind of the planned meeting and sent a cease-and-desist letter telling him he couldn’t use his home in a residential zone as a place of religious assembly. Grand decided to apply for a special-use permit and now claims that he faced “unprecedented procedural burdens” causing him to withdraw his permit application.

Technically, the legal dispute is over whether the city’s actions have had enough finality for Grand to be able to sue under the First Amendment and the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act; the city claims that without any enforcement action against him since he first sought a permit, Grant has not been legally harmed.

Since the high court agreed to consider the case, Grand has received “friend of the court” briefs of support from the NC Values Institute and the Pacific Legal Foundation, both of which focus largely on technical issues involving land-use law. He has also received the support of a small group of religious organizations that point to some of the religious issues involved in the case.

The groups that filed that latter brief include The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod), the National Association of Evangelicals and the Seventh-day Adventist Church, all of which have traditionally been actively involved in promoting religious liberty. The Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty and the Anglican Reformed Catholic Church also joined in filing that brief.

The brief cited non-Jewish religious traditions involving home religious gatherings:

🟪 Christians were holding home gatherings as early as the New Testament times.

🟪 The LDS church encourages members to study scripture ‘with your family, or with friends.’”

🟪 “Southern Baptists routinely open their homes for Bible studies and small groups, prayer meetings, church planting, youth gatherings, discipleship groups, missionary gatherings, hymn singing and worship, and the potluck meals and fellowship that have long been a hallmark of Baptist community.”

🟪 Various “large Protestant congregations also encourage believers to meet as small groups in private homes for prayer and Bible study.”

🟪 Millions of Americans participate in a “house church” movement that eschews dedicated worship spaces and formal church organizations.

🟪 Some of the most important Muslim rituals take place in homes, especially during Ramadan.

🟪 The vast majority of American Hindus “say they use an altar, shrine, or religious symbol for worship in their home.”

🟪 Some religious minorities, such as Baha’is and Sikhs, worship in their homes because they are too small to have dedicated facilities.

The city has until mid-October to file its formal arguments. Third parties supporting the city have yet to file friend-of-the-court briefs.

For centuries, Saint Florian has been seen as the patron saint of firefighters and chimney sweeps, while Saint Michael has been the patron saint of police officers and military personnel. And so it was that the mayor and staff of the city of Quincy, Mass., decided a few years ago to commission a pair of bronze statues of the two saints to adorn the city’s new public-safety building.

But the city’s plans to place the statues of the saints, a move that has the support of national firefighting and police associations, hit a roadblock recently as the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the city’s plans violate the state Constitution. The court unanimously found that the city’s plans would probably be “perceived as government endorsement of a particular religion.”

The Massachusetts Supreme Court is the highest court in the state, so any appeals of the ruling would have to be taken to a federal court, possibly the U.S. Supreme Court. Although its appears that an appeal is likely, the city could face legal difficulties in an appeal because the ruling was based primarily on state rather than federal law. The state Constitution is more limiting than the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, providing that:

... all religious sects and denominations, demeaning1 themselves peaceably, and as good citizens of the commonwealth, shall be equally under the protection of the law; and no subordination of any one sect or denomination to another shall ever be established by law.

Technically, the court’s decision sent the dispute back to a state superior court, which had issued a preliminary injunction as result of a lawsuit by opponents of the statue to halt the city’s plans, so any appealable resolution of the matter is at least a few months away. That lower court had found it “likely” that the statutes were a constitutional violation.

That a city would consider using representations of Florian and Michael in connection with public safety isn’t particularly surprising. Firefighters in many parts of the country, including Massachusetts, use the “Florian cross,” a symbol that looks something like a four-petaled flower, for badges or emblems, and International Firefighters Day is celebrated on May 4, the Saint Florian feast day. And it isn’t unusual for police officers who have tattoos related to their profession to use one of Michael as a symbol of valor.2

The city staff had approved plans for the statues and spent about $761,000 on them before details on them became widely known. After a newspaper published details of the plans in February 2025, opponents started collecting signatures against them and packed a City Council meeting to urge members to reject the plans. The Interfaith Network also told the city it had “grave concerns” about the statue part of the project. After the council declined to change the plans, opponents filed a lawsuit three months later with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups known for their advocacy of church-state separation.

In making their case to the Supreme Judicial Court, the city had the support in the form of 13 amicus curiae or “friend of the court” briefs from a wide range of organizations including the Massachusetts Family Institute, the International Association of Firefighters and Professional Firefighters of Massachusetts, the National Fraternal Order of Police and Mass Fraternal Order of Police and various religious organizations such as the The Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team, the Jewish Coalition for Religious Liberty, and the Knights of Columbus. Many of the briefs argued that the lower court’s rejection of the statues represented an impermissible hostility to religion.

Opponents of the statues were represented by an amicus curiae brief filed by the American Humanist Association with the support of various Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Unitarian and Christian groups. It argued that placement of the statues would represent government favoritism toward a single religious tradition and harm religious minorities and nonreligious people.

No decision will be made on a possible appeal until the lower court has made a final ruling to implement the top court’s decision.

Lawyers representing a theologically diverse set of parents and their children went to the Supreme Court earlier this week in their effort to strike down a law passed by Texas lawmakers in 2025 that requires a conspicuous copy of an abridged version of the Ten Commandments to be posted in public-school classrooms.

Their appeal of a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruling says that the law violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment because it imposes religious messages on a captive audience, and that it violates the free-exercise clause because it poses a “very real threat” of undermining the religious beliefs and practices that parents wish to instill in their children.

The cases are Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District and Ringer v. Comal Independent School District. The petitioners in the two cases are all parents and their children from more than two dozen families who have sued a similar number of Texas school districts. The parents are affiliated with religions that include Baha’ism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Unitarian Universalism and nonreligious traditions. At least two rabbis and a parent using the title of “Rev.” are among the petitioners.

Lawyers representing the families are receiving support from the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

In their petition to the Supreme Court, the lawyers point out the court has faced this issue before — its 1980 ruling in Stone v. Graham invalidated a Kentucky similar similar to Texas’s:

The Court should grant the petition because the court of appeals, in upholding S.B. 10, flouted this Court’s binding precedents and gutted the religious freedom rights of public-school children and parents.

The lawyers also argued that the appeals court’s ruling destabilizes the laws on free exercise of religion:

If the permanent, unavoidable imposition of biblical scripture in public-school classrooms does not interfere with, or threaten to undermine, parents’ ability to direct their children’s religious education and to instill particular religious beliefs and practices, it is difficult to imagine what would. [Emphasis in original.]

If the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, oral arguments would probably be heard during the term that begins in October or the term that begins in October 2027. The court faces no deadline in deciding whether to accept the case, although it probably will do so in the next few months. At least four of the nine justices must agree to take the case before a hearing can be held.

If the court decides not to hear the case, the appeals court’s ruling would remain in effect in areas included in its jurisdiction, so that the Ten Commandments would be posted in some Texas schools. But court decisions striking similar laws in Louisiana and Arkansas would also remain in effect. The current situation, then, is that constitutional law is being applied differently in different states, giving a motivation for the Supreme Court to hear the case.

Earlier version (April 21, 2026): Appeals court agrees with Texas that Ten Commandments law is constitutional

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.

The American Civil Liberties Union and a leading advocate for Internet freedom of speech, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, are helping one of the best-known critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints fight the church in a trademark infringement lawsuit it has filed against him.

The ACLU and the EFF filed amicus curiae or “friend of the court” briefs to support John Dehlin and his Open Stories Foundation, defendants in a copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit that the church filed in April. The church claims, among other things, that having a podcast called Mormon Stories creates confusion among listeners about whether it is a product of the church or some other entity, and that various visual elements in materials used by the podcast and foundation also create confusion in part because of their similarities with the visual elements of the church’s branding. The church also claims that Dehlin and/or the foundation have used images copyrighted by the church in their promotion.

In its lawsuit, the church claims that it has the legal right to use “Mormon” as a trademarked term, and in materials submitted to the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, the church submitted the copy of its trademark registration, which says “Mormon” has been used as a trademark since 1833 for genealogy services and since the 1920s for educational services. The church also submitted copies of its registration for terms such as “Book of Mormon,” “Book of Mormon Stories,” “Mormon Messages,” “Mormon Tabernacle Choir” and “Mormon Channel.”

The lawsuit is Intellectual Reserve v. Open Stories Foundation. Intellectual Reserve Inc. is the arm of the church in charge of its intellectual property such as its publications, website, broadcasts, hymns and educational materials. The legal basis of the lawsuit is derived from copyright and trademark law; the church makes no additional legal claims pertaining to freedom of religion.

According to the lawsuit, Dehlin, an excommunicated member of the church, began his podcast in 20051 and created the foundation in 2010 to support the podcast. These days, the foundation also supports several other podcasts and organizes conferences and other activities to support its mission.

The church filed its lawsuit in April. The lawsuit asks the federal court to issue a permanent injunction to prevent the defendants “from using Defendants’ Marks, and any other mark, name, domain name, social media handle, or design that is confusingly similar to Plaintiffs’ Marks, and from any attempt to retain any part of the goodwill misappropriated from Plaintiffs.” The lawsuit does not explicitly seek economic damages.

In explaining the lawsuit, the church said it tried negotiating with the Open Stories Foundation late in 2025 in an effort to resolve its concerns “privately and amicably” but was unable to reach an agreement. In its own explanation of its side of the controversy, the Open Stories Foundation said it had agreed to make numerous changes in its practices, such has changing the colors of some of the logos it used so they were orange rather than a blue similar to what the church uses. It also added disclaimers to its website to make it clear that its work wasn’t a church product, but it declined to put such disclaimers at the beginning of its videos.

In its amicus brief, the ACLU said that a decision by the court to side with the church would infringe on Dehlin’s right to free speech. Persons wanting to speak about an organization need to be able the name of the organization, the ACLU said:

Congress, courts, and the United States Constitution have all recognized that this kind of chokehold on language is an inappropriate weaponization of intellectual property law beyond its intended purpose. Trademark law does not override the public right to mention, criticize, or discuss.

The ACLU also said that the term “Mormon” can’t controlled just by the LDS church because it applies not just to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but to “an entire ethnoreligious tradition, culture, and people that extends beyond any one institution.” It pointed out that authoritative reference works use “Mormon” to refer not only to the LDS church, but also to various other churches that accept the Book of Mormon as scripture, such as the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the Apostolic United Brethren.

In its explanation of why it was helping the Mormon Stories Foundation, the EFF pointed out that it has previously assisted groups such as the Mormon Mental Health Association and a dating service called Mormon Match when they faced legal disputes. The EFF also said:

... First Amendment safeguards are especially important in cases like this one, where a plaintiff is seeking to control the use of a common term for its common meaning. Trademark law isn’t even supposed to extend to generic terms, and for good reason. Otherwise, we risk giving trademark owners power to control discussion and debate over entire topics.

It’s about time that a court shut down the LDS Church’s trademark bullying. We hope the court will do so here.

It is unclear why the church has chosen to file its lawsuit against the Mormon Stories podcast when there are other podcasts that have used “Mormon” in their names. In a recent podcast called Mormon Land, a product of the Salt Lake Tribune, managing editor David Noyce told listeners that the church has never asked the Tribune to change that podcast’s name. He said, however, that many church members have registered their disapproval over the podcast’s name.

Ironically, the legal wrangling is coming at a time when the church itself has disavowed use of the nickname for the church. The church’s then-president, Russell Nelson, considered a prophet, used a 2018 sermon to denounce use of the “Mormon” nickname for the church, saying that to “remove the Lord’s name from the Lord’s church is a major victory for Satan.” The church immediately began removing a wide variety of Mormon branding from church entities, including changing the name of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square.

Half a dozen current and former pastors have received major-party nominations for U.S. Congressional races this year, and collectively they are divided as much as the country is: Three are Democrats and three are Republicans.

You might say, however, that Democrats have a slight edge: A Presbyterian seminarian, James Talarico, is also in the running, drawing plenty of attention as a Democratic candidate from Texas who could who could take away what was once seen as a reliably Republican seat in the Senate.

The most recent minister to get on November’s ballot was Adam Hamilton, head pastor of the Church of the Resurrection, a United Methodist congregation in Kansas City, Kan. He topped a field of 11 candidates earlier this month with about 35 percent of the vote to earn the Democratic nomination.

The seven candidates are true to the stereotypes of their branches of Christianity: The four Democrats come from mainline Protestantism, while the three Republicans come from evangelicalism.

Three of the candidates are already members of Congress: Missouri’s U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat and a former United Methodist pastor, chairs the the Congressional Black Caucus. Republicans Reps. Mark Harris and Tim Walberg represent districts in North Carolina and Michigan, respectively.

Two of the Democrats running, Sarah Trone Garriott and Lindsay James, are seeking to represent districts in Iowa. John Elleson is seeking an Illinois seat.

Here are quick looks at the candidates and races:

Talarico aims to flip Senate seat to Democrats

Go to a James Talarico rally and you’re likely to hear portions of a sermon embedded in the candidate’s speech. Talarico, a divinity student at the Presbyterian-affiliated Austin (Texas) Seminary, frequently quotes from the Bible as he emphasizes its teachings to love one’s neighbors and care for the needy. As someone who has denounced Christian nationalism in no uncertain terms, Talarico clearly has been aiming a part of his campaign at those disturbed by seeing the Christian faith used as a weapon against immigrants and LGTBQ persons, among others.

Talarico faces the scandal-ridden Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, who got on the ballot by handily defeating the incumbent, John Cornyn, in a runoff election in May. Talarico earned his spot in the general election with a 6-percentage-point win over U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett. Four minor-party candidates are also in the race.

At 37, Talarico is one of the youngest U.S. Senate candidates in this election cycle. A former teacher and a representative in the Texas Legislature, Talarico earned a master of arts in theological studies at Austin Seminary last year and is on track to earn a master of divinity degree at the school. He has long been a member of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin.

Talarico entered the race as an underdog: Despite Democratic strength in parts of the state, the last time a Democrat was elected to represent Texas in the U.S. Senate was in 1988 with the election of Lloyd Bentsen. Talarico’s task was made easier when Paxton won the Republican primary, as Paxton has had a stormy history in Texas politics. Most notably, he was impeached in 2023 by the Texas House of Representatives on allegations that he had abused the powers of his office to help a political donor. He was acquitted of the charges by the Texas Senate, however.

Politically in the mainstream of the Democratic Party, Talarico has been running a populist campaign against both Paxton and the Trump administration, saying it is time to begin “flipping tables,” an allusion to an incident in the life of Jesus. Most of his views are within the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

One of the most recent polls, conducted by Texas Southern University, shows a tight race, within the margin of error. It showed Talarico leading with 47 percent compared with 45 percent for Paxton. The remainder were undecided or supported a Libertarian candidate.

Hamilton also hopes to turn a red seat blue

Adam Hamilton, who heads the largest United Methodist congregation in the country, is running a centrist campaign in which he is emphasizing affordability and the need to bring civility and cooperation back to politics. The race, in which he is pitted against the incumbent, Roger Marshall, is, like the Talarico-Paxton matchup, expected to be one of the most expensive in the country, with as much as $50 million projected to be spent in total by the two candidates.

Hamilton’s Church of the Resurrection, which he founded in 1990 with some of its earliest worship services held in a funeral home, and thus its name, has followed the trajectory of many evangelical megachurches. It is reported to have more than 20,000 members spread across several campuses, and its sanctuary holds more than 3,000. Because of the campaign, Hamilton has temporarily separated himself from his ministry to avoid raising ethical concerns.

Hamilton had originally planned to run as an independent, he has told news media, but decided to join a crowded Democratic field in the primary as supporters told him he would have a better chance of victory as a Democrat.

Marshall entered the Senate in 2021 after having served in the House for two terms. An obstetrician, Marshall has run using the moniker of Doc Marshall. He has been running largely on his record of supporting Kansas agriculture and industry.

A glance at the House races

Incumbent parties appear to have an edge in the House races involving a minister, but at least in the first two races listed below there is a chance for an upset:

🟪 Sarah Trone Garriott, a former pastor affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is the Democratic nominee in Missouri’s 5th Congressional District. She is hoping to unseat the Republican incumbent, Zach Nunn, who is in his second term. Nunn was elected by fairly narrow margins in both of his races, earning 50.3 percent of the vote in 2022 and 51.8 percent in 2024.

🟪 The Democratic nominee in Iowa’s Republican-leaning 2nd District is Lindsay James, a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary who has been a Presbyterian Church (USA) pastor as well as a college chaplain. The seat is open because the incumbent, Republican Ashley Hinson, decided to run for the U.S. Senate. James’s Republican opponent is Joe Mitchell, a businessman and a former member of the Iowa house and at one time its youngest-ever member at the age of 21.

🟪 Democrat Emanuel Cleaver appears to have a safe seat in the 5th Congressional District seat of Missouri, having held that post since 2005. He served as pastor of a United Methodist Church in Kansas, Mo., until 2009. He currently is the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. His Republican opponent is state Sen. Rick Bratten.

🟪 Mark Harris, the lead pastor at Trinity Baptist Church in Mooresville, N.C., is no stranger to political campaigns: He ran for the U.S. Senate in 2014, placing third in the Republican primary, and followed that up with stronger results in 2016, losing a race for North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District seat in a recount. Two years later, he appeared to have won the 9th District seat, but the election was invalidated after allegations of election fraud. State officials reran the election, but Harris did not run that time. In 2024, he successfully ran in the 8th District and won with nearly 60 percent of the vote. That is the seat he currently holds and is favored to win this year. His Democratic opponent is businessman Colby Watson.

🟪 John Elleson, a pastor at Lakewood Chapel located in Arlington Heights, Ill., has an uphill fight for an open seat in his state’s strongly Democratic 9th Congressional District. His Democratic opponent is Daniel Biss, a former member of the Illinois House. The incumbent is Jan Schakowsky, who decided not to seek re-election after having served since 1999, last won re-election with 68 percent of the vote.

🟪 U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg, a former pastor now in Michigan’s 5th Congressional District, is seeking his third term. He was pastor of Grace Fellowship Church in New Haven, Ind., during the 1970s. He is strongly favored to win, as he earned more than 60 percent of the vote in his two earlier House elections. His Democratic opponent is Christian Vukasovich, a teacher who, according to his website, descended from a long line of Michigan ministers on his mother’s side of the family.

A Muslim has never served in the U.S. Senate, but that could change next year if Abdul El-Sayed has his way: The son of Egyptian immigrants, El-Sayed on Tuesday narrowly won the Democratic primary in Michigan’s U.S. Senate race, becoming the country’s first major-party Muslim nominee for the legislative body. He narrowly defeated U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens.

El-Sayed is expected to face an uphill challenge for the November contest: He’ll be running against Mike Rogers1, a Republican who is well known in Michigan politics. Rogers served seven terms in the U.S. House beginning in 2001 and ran as the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in 2024, losing to Elissa Slotkin by less than half a percentage point. And pundits say that Al-Sayed’s progressive politics — he was endorsed by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — could make it difficult for him to attract centrist or nonpartisan voters. Supporters of Stevens during the primary had argued that she would be more electable than El-Sayed, but Stevens and her leading supporters united around El-Sayed once it became clear that he won the race.

It is a guessing game for now to predict how much of a role El-Sayed’s religion or ethnicity will play in the race. It may be that a statement on the homepage of Rogers’ campaign website that he “led the House Intelligence Committee to hunt down terrorists and keep Americans safe” is a not-so-subtle attempt to portray El-Sayed as soft on terrorism, although that statement has been prominent on the website since long before El-Sayed secured the nomination.

Four Muslims currently are in Congress as members of the House: André Carson of Indiana’s 7th District, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota’s 5th District, Lateefah Simon of California’s 12th District and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan’s 12th District. Carson is a mainstream Democrat, while the other three are identified with the progressive (or democratic socialist) wing of the Democratic Party. All four are expected to win re-election.

These days, the best-known Muslim in U.S. public office is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who last year became the first Muslim elected to that position. So Muslims elected to high office in the United States end to be aligned with political progressivism.

That Michigan could become the first state to put a Muslim in the Senate shouldn’t be surprising: Rakwa, a leading Arab-American news site, has called Michigan the epicenter of Muslim America, noting that about 3 percent of the state’s population is Muslim, the highest Muslim concentration the country. That’s more than twice the number for the nation as a whole. Michigan is home to the country’s largest mosque, and the city of Dearborn, Mich., has been called the Muslim capital of America. Rakwa said that Islam has played a major role in the state became of historical waves of Arab immigrants coming to work in the automobile industry beginning in the early 20th century2.

El-Sayed, a 41-year-old epidemiologist, has not previously held elective office. But he has been a public official, serving as director of the Detroit Health Department and later as director of the Wayne County Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services. He has been active in Michigan Democratic politics, running for governor in 2018, running a distant second in the primary to Gretchen Whitmer, who became governor.

According to the Religion News Service, El-Sayed has not been shy about discussing his faith. He told the RNS last year:

I believe deeply in the role that faith has played in my life, in, you know, how it orients me to try and be a better person, to give more of myself, to know my fellow creation, to treat people — all people — with dignity and humanity and respect.

El-Sayed’s candidacy has raised concerns among Jews and evangelical Christians who support the Israeli government. He has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and has said more generally, according to The New York Times, that he doesn’t “believe in ethno-states.” A political action committee backed by a pro-Israel lobbying organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, spent millions trying to defeat Al-Sayed in the primary. It is unknown to what extent AIPAC will get involved in the November contest.

Christian conservative activists have long championed religious freedom restoration laws and parental rights laws as way of protecting their religious rights, especially in the way they raise their children. Those same activists were behind a new Texas requirement that an abridged version of the Ten Commandments be posted in public-school classrooms throughout the state.

But Texas opponents of the new Ten Commandments law see a contradiction there: In a lawsuit filed last week challenging the Ten Commandments mandate, three mothers going to a Harris County court hope to use state restoration and parental rights laws to keep the Commandments off the school walls. The three say the new requirements violates their religious freedom and their right to raise their children as they see fit.

At issue is Senate Bill 10, approved by the Legislature in 2025, which 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 is to be “legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom in which the poster or framed copy is displayed.”

The law was challenged in federal courts in Texas almost immediately. Two federal district courts struck down the law, saying it violates the First Amendment provision prohibiting the establishment of religion. But on appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit disagreed by the narrowest of margins: A 9-8 vote in April restored the law. The constitutionality of the law, along with similar laws in Arkansas and Louisiana, could ultimately be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court, but the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit don’t want to wait until that can happen.

The federal Supreme Court has settled the issue once before: In a 1980 case from Kentucky, Stone v. Graham, the court decided 5-4 that a law similar to the new one in Texas “had no secular legislative purpose” and was “plainly religious in nature.” But backers of the new law are hopeful that the court as it is constituted today would be willing to reverse that earlier decision as rulings in recent years have generally expanded the exposure of students in public schools to religious influences.

A key difference between the new lawsuit and the earlier ones against SB 10 is that it is making its claims under state law rather than the U.S. Constitution. The laws the plaintiffs say support their position are:

🟪 The state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed in 1999 and modeled after a federal law going by the same name. It states that “a government agency may not substantially burden a person’s free exercise of religion” unless the government action is “in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest” and “is the least restrictive means of furthering that interest.”

🟪 The state’s Parental Rights Amendment, also known as Proposition 15, which was approved by almost 70 percent of the voters in an election last November. It states that parents have the “fundamental right to exercise care, custody, and control of the parent’s child, including the right to make decisions concerning the child’s upbringing.”

The Ten Commandments law violates those parental rights in the way it exposes students to religious dogma contrary to parental wishes, the lawsuit claims.

None of the three mothers identifies with Christianity. According to a press release from the plaintiffs, Emily Roth raises her children without a religious emphasis; Audrey Rosa Nath raises her children following several religions that include Jainism, Hinduism, Judaism and Quakerism; and Sanjam Kaur Sohal is Sikh. All of them are from the Houston area.

Since the lawsuit was filed just last week, lawyers representing Texas have yet to submit their arguments.

The first legal brief has been field in the federal appeals court case that will determine whether a Ten Commandments monument can continue to be on display on the Arkansas Capitol grounds.

Attorneys for the First Liberty Institute, which often represents conservative Christian causes in religious freedom cases, and the Arkansas attorney general’s office filed the brief last week in the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. The argue, among other things, that displays of the Ten Commandments are part of the national heritage of the United States and have “historical and secular significance.” They claim that the lower-level ruling against the monument, written by Judge Kristine Baker of the U.S. District Court of the Central Division of the Eastern District of Arkansas, was based in part on U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have become outdated in recent years.

The brief called the district court’s decision “flawed throughout,” saying in part that it misapplied the Lemon test, named for Lemon v. Kurtzman, the landmark 1971 Supreme Court decision that set up a framework1 for determining when the government is violating the constitutional prohibition against establishment of religion. Cases before the Supreme Court in recent years have tended to weaken the Lemon test, making it easier for the government to get involved in religion.

In summarizing the legal arguments, the brief said:

Permanent Ten Commandments monuments are part of a longstanding national tradition of acknowledging the Commandments’ historical influence on American law. The Supreme Court and this Court have held materially similar monuments are constitutional, and the Display Act drew from those precedents. Yet the district court improperly distinguished those cases based on matters such as the monument’s age, the identity of donors who contributed to the monument, and cherrypicked statements by one legislator.

The case is Cave v. Jester. Donna Cave is the lead plaintiff in the case, which began in 2018 when the state erected the monument, one made to replace another than had been vandalized. Cole Jester is the secretary of state for Arkansas. The Satanic Temple is also involved in the case as an intervenor, as its attempts to set up a monument on state grounds led to the law that authorized the current monument. The plaintiffs and the Satanic Temple have not had time to respond to the defendants’ brief of last week.

Original article (April 6, 2026): Judge rejects placing of Ten Commandments monument on Arkansas Capitol grounds

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.

Leaders of a Native American religious organization have gone to the U.S. Supreme Court in their effort to prevent the city of San Antonio, Texas, from continuing with park developments that the group says would irrevocably damage a sacred site that has been used by Native Americans for centuries.

At issue are plans by the city to refurbish a part of Brackenridge Park on a bend of the San Antonio River using funds from an $8 million bond measure that local voters approved in 2017. The plan would involve the removal of some trees that are part of an area where large white cormorants, a type of aquatic migratory bird, annually nest.

Petitioners Gary Perez and Matilde Torres, ceremonial leaders of the Lipan Native American Church, filed suit against the city in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas in 2023 when they and other worshipers were barred from an area of the park due to development work. They claimed that the city’s actions, particularly its removal of trees and efforts to deter the nesting of cormorants, infringed on their religious freedoms. They sought an injunction that would provide them access to the site, preserve the “spiritual ecology” of the site by limiting tree removal and allowing cormorants to nest, and order the city to develop alternative plans that would accommodate the Native Americans’ religious beliefs.

Perez and Torres so far have been unsuccessful in their legal actions. The district court sided with the city, finding, among other things, that the plaintiffs had not established that their religious rights were substantially burdened in light of the city’s compelling government interest in carrying out the park project.

The plaintiffs lost their appeal to a panel of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and in February the full appeals court voted 11-6 not to have the entire court rehear the case.

In their petition to the Supreme Court, the plaintiffs, represented by the Liberty Institute with support from the University of Texas Law and Religion Clinic, is asking for consideration of two legal issues:

🟪 Whether the First Amendment allows courts to override the sincere judgment of a claimant’s sincere theological judgment about what religious exercise is required by the religion.

🟪 Whether a government that has the obligation to show that its actions are the “least religiously restrictive means available” has done so if it “failed to consider any workable alternatives prior to litigation.”

Steven Collis, director of the Law and Religion Clinic, said in a prepared statement about the legal action:

Both the courts and the city are aware that our clients can worship nowhere else but this site, yet both have told them they are mistaken in their religious beliefs and can just go somewhere else. That violates the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment, as does refusing to do available, less-destructive alternatives.

Meanwhile, the city attorney’s office earlier said of a ruling favoring the city:

This ruling affirms the City’s ability to responsibly preserve and manage public lands — including the voter-approved 2017 bond project to improve Brackenridge Park — while continuing to respect and accommodate religious practices. We are hopeful that work can begin soon on the long-delayed, voter-approved improvements to Brackenridge Park.

The lawsuit is referred to as Perez v. San Antonio. If the Supreme Court agrees to consider the case, a hearing would probably be held during the term that begins in October.

Lipan religious beliefs explained

As part of the proceedings, the federal appeals court had asked the Texas Supreme Court for its understanding of whether a provision of the state Constitution applied in this case. As part of its ruling, the court gave this explanation of the Lipan religious beliefs:

The Church believes that life on earth began at a spring along the Yanaguana, which is now known as the San Antonio River. A particular bend in the river, which resembles the shape of the constellation Eridanus, serves in the Church’s faith as a sacred connection between the physical and spiritual worlds.

According to the Church’s teaching, the spring created the Blue Hole, in which a spirit in the form of a blue panther resided. Another spirit, taking the form of a cormorant, appeared at the Blue Hole, but the panther spirit startled the bird spirit and caused it to flee, dropping water from its tail that produced life throughout the San Antonio River Valley.

Church members believe that at certain times throughout the year they must participate in certain religious services in the “Sacred Area” — a twenty-by-thirty-foot space among cypress trees on the south shore of the river bend — facing north so they can observe the trees and the cormorants nesting and flying within the “spiritual ecology.”

Evidence exists that indigenous peoples have conducted similar religious services in and around the Sacred Area for thousands of years.1

The Texas Supreme Court said that the city’s project in this case wasn’t a type of government action covered by a religious-freedom provision in Texas Constitution.

As most deadlines have passed for lawmakers and petitioners to place measures on state ballots for November’s elections, conservative Christian voters and their allies have succeeded in sending to voters in five states measures that would restrict the ability of transsexuals to express their self-identified gender in various ways.

Specifically, at issue in November elections would be plans to limit the ability of trans females1 to participate in school sports for girls or college-age women, prohibit certain transition treatments for minors, and/or restrict the use of restrooms and locker rooms based on sex.

The state that most recently was added to the list of those with a trans-related measure on the November ballot was Nebraska, where a record-setting 211,000 signatures were turned in at the end of June for the proposed Nebraska Sex Requirement for School and College Sports Amendment, which would amend the state’s Constitution. Although state officials have yet to certify that sufficient signatures were turned in, it is a virtual certainty that the requirements were met: Under state law, about valid 126,000 signatures were needed, meaning that organizers approached getting double the requirement. An unprecedented number of signatures would have to be invalidated to keep the proposal off the ballot.

Most of the measures in the five states have advanced to the ballot with support from Catholic organizations and/or evangelical groups such as Focus on the Family. Nearly all are facing opposition from the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood and/or LGTBQ groups.

A closer look at the Nebraska proposal

The Nebraska amendment would apply to public schools through the university level. Schools would be required to designate all athletic teams or sports “based on biological sex” as being for males, men or boys; females, women or girls; or coed or mixed. Essentially, the female teams would not be open to biological males, although both male and mixed-gender sports would be open to females.

The amendment does not define “biological sex.”

The campaign for signatures was organized by Fairness for Girls under the auspices of the Nebraska Family Alliance. The alliance describes itself as a nonprofit policy research and educational organization “advocating for Biblical values, marriage, families, life, parental rights, and religious freedom.” The organization says its vision is that Nebraska be a state “where God is honored, marriages and families thrive, life is cherished, parental rights are protected, and religious liberty flourishes.”

At last report, Fairness for Girls had received $3.1 million in cash contributions for its campaign, all of it from Restore the Good Life Inc. Little is known about Restore the Good Life, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that does not maintain an online presence. As a “dark money” organization, it is not required to publicize its sources of income and has more flexibility to be involved in political campaigns than do the better-known 501(c)(3) nonprofits.

According to Nebraska Public Media, the group’s treasurer, Tanner Lockhorn, did not respond to repeated questions about the organization. Nebraska Public Media also said that in the 2022 election cycle, Restore the Good Life was the sole source of income for the Say No to RINOs PAC, which spent money opposing moderate Republican gubernatorial candidate running in the primary against Gov. Jim Pillen,

As of the most recent campaign-filing reporting deadline, there was no organized opposition to the amendment. Organized opposition could develop now that the amendment appears to have qualified for the ballot.

Measures on ballots in other states

The other states with trans-related measures on the ballot this fall are Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and Washington. Colorado voters will face two measures.

Here’s a quick look at the proposals:

Arizona: Protect Girls’ Sports in Arizona Act

A proposed law that would make changes designed to require trans students in athletic activities to compete with members of their biological sex was approved by the Arizona Legislature earlier this year and sent to voters for adoption. The proposed law, which covers both K-12 public schools and the college system, would make these two changes to state law:

🟪 Prohibit schools and athletic associations (private sports-related organizations that work with schools) from authorizing students and others of a particular sex to use a restroom, locker room, shower room, or other private space that is not designated for their sex. Current law is silent on that issue.

🟪 Provide that only males could participate on sports designated for males. Current law allows females to participate in male sports. The existing ban on males in female sports would continue.

The law defines defines a student’s sex as “biological status as male or female as recorded at birth on the individual’s original birth certificate.”

Groups that have formally endorsed the measure include the Center for Arizona Policy and Liberty Counsel Action. Opponents include the Arizona Education Association (a teachers union), the ACLU and several LGTBQ-oriented organizations.

To date, no campaign expenditures have been reported for either side2.

Colorado: Protect Women and Girls Sports Act

Colorado Initiative 109 is designed primarily to keep biological men and boys from participating in girls’ and women’s athletics. It also would prevent females playing on male teams except when a school or athletic program doesn’t provide the same sport for females. The proposal applies to public K-12 schools as well as the state’s college and university system.

The proposal was placed on the ballot by petition.

The initiative defines a female (a term including women and girls) as someone “whose biological reproductive system is organized around the production of ova.” A male is defined as someone “whose biological reproductive system is organized around the production of sperm.”

The main organizations supporting the campaign so far are the Colorado Catholic Conference and Focus on the Family. The main opponents are the Interfaith Alliance, Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, and several LGTBQ-oriented groups.

At last report, opponents had raised nearly $600,000 to campaign against the measure, much more than the $116,000 raised by supporters.

Colorado: Protect Children from Irreversible Sex Change Surgery Act

Colorado Initiative 110 is the result of a petition drive that was organized in 2025 in response to the Colorado Legislature’s adoption that year of the Protect Access to Gender-Affirming Health Care Act, which prevented insurance companies from denying coverage for certain types of gender-affirming care. The initiative is aimed at that law as it applies to children, prohibiting most surgical gender-affirming care for minors.

Specifically, the proposed law would provide that health care professionals could not “perform, prescribe, administer, or provide any surgery to a minor for the purpose of altering biological sex characteristics.” It also would prevent health insurance or public health programs from paying for such surgeries.

The initiative makes exceptions for male circumcision and for children “born with a medically verifiable disorder of sex development or treatment for acquired physical or chemical abnormalities.”

The campaign-finance reports for Initiative 110 mirror those for Initiative 109, which opponents far outpacing supporters.

Missouri: Prohibit Abortion and Gender Transition Procedures for Minors Amendment

Missouri Amendment 3, which would change the state Constitution, tackles both abortion and medical or surgical gender transition treatments for minors. It was placed on the ballot by the Missouri Legislature last year on a 103-51 vote in the House followed by a 21-11 vote in the Senate. Only a simple majority was required in each chamber.

Specifically, Amendment 3 would make these changes:

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

🟪 Prohibit most abortions except in cases of medical emergency, fetal anomaly, rape or incest. Abortions in cases of rape and incest would be permitted only through the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

🟪 Prohibit gender transition surgeries for minors as well as the use of cross-sex hormones or puberty-blocking drugs for the purpose of gender transition.

Major supporters of the measure include the Missouri Catholic Conference and Missouri Right to Life. Opponents include the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and the League of Women Voters.

With about $5.2 million in contributions as of the last report, opponents are far outpacing supporters in building a campaign war chest. Supporters have raised about $1.6 million.

Washington: Defending Equity in Interscholastic Sports Act

Initiative Measure No. IL26-638 is designed to prohibit students it defines as biologically male from competing in school athletic activities intended for female students only. It would enforce the provision in part by requiring students wishing to participating in female athletics to provide a statement from a healthcare provider verifying that the athlete is biologically female.

The proposed law provides that the statement of biological eligibility could be based only on one or more of the following: “The student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.”

An organization known as Let’s Go Washington has been organizing the campaign with support from groups such as Moms for Liberty, the Washington State Catholic Conference and XX-XY Athletics. Let’s Go Washington had raised nearly $7 million at last report.

Opponents have raised nearly $1.7 million through an entity called No Hate in WA State. Opponents include the ACLU, the Washington Education Association and several LGTBQ interest groups.

The vast majority of American Protestant pastors are using artificial intelligence in their work — but only about a fourth of them are using it in the writing or editing of sermons.

These details on the pastoral use of AI comes from the Barna Group, a for-profit nonpartisan organization that follows trends related to faith and culture. Barna’s study of pastoral AI use comes from its ongoing State of the Church initiative along with Gloo, which provides services to churches and other faith-based organizations such as schools. Numbers on AI use and perspectives come from surveys conducted among 1,514 U.S. adults last November and 442 pastors in December.

Only 13 percent of the pastors interviewed said they don’t use AI at all. The most common AI use by pastors is for brainstorming and generation of ideas: An even 50 percent use it for that purpose.

Other common uses for AI by pastors include:

🟪 Graphic design or visual creation, 37 percent.
🟪 Research of Biblical or theological topics, 36 percent.
🟪 Generating discussion questions or small-group materials, 34 percent.
🟪 Administrative tasks such as scheduling, email and document preparation, 34 percent.
🟪 Social-media or communications content, 28 percent.

The percentage using it in the editing or writing of sermons was 24 percent — double what it was a year and a half earlier.

Barna’s report did not further provide details about how the pastors use AI for editing and writing sermons. But a strong majority, 71 percent, of pastors said that they were “cautious” about the use of AI in their work. A large minority say they have negative feelings about AI use, as 40 percent said they were “conflicted” and an identical amount said they were “skeptical.” Almost a third, 30 percent, said they were “distrustful” of AI, and a small proportion, 9 percent, said they were fearful.

In general, pastoral attitudes toward AI were were more negative than those of practicing Christians in the survey. About 36 percent of practicing Christians said they were “cautious” of AI, or about half the rate for pastors. Fewer practicing Christians also said they were “conflicted” (18 percent) or “skeptical” (25 percent).

Ironically, more practicing Christians, about 19 percent, double the pastors’ rate, described themselves as “fearful.”

Barna’s analysis of this survey and others about pastoral job satisfaction suggested that pastors are using AI the most for the tasks where they find the least personal satisfaction:

When asked to identify which parts of their work they enjoy most, enjoy least, and find most time-consuming, pastors reveal a persistent mismatch: the tasks they find most meaningful — preaching and teaching, discipling believers, developing leaders — are not the ones consuming the most hours. Organizing church events, volunteer and staff management, and administrative work collectively dominate pastors’ calendars, despite ranking low on their list of what they find fulfilling. AI, as pastors are currently deploying it, maps directly onto that gap.

The use of graphic design reflects a related reality. For many smaller churches that lack the budget or staff to support dedicated communications roles, AI appears to be filling a gap that would otherwise go unfilled. Visual content creation has become an essential part of how churches communicate, and AI has made it accessible to ministry leaders who would otherwise have to go without.

Rulings on birthright citizenship and transgender rights received all the attention Tuesday as the U.S. Supreme Court also announced that it had decided to accept the case of an Orthodox Jew who claims he was harassed in his attempts to organize regular meetings of other Jewish men in his home.

The case is Grand v. City of University Heights, and it becomes the second case related to religious issues that the court has agreed to hear during its 2026-27 term that begins in October. The other is St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, where a Catholic preschool is trying to get admitted to Colorado’s state-funded universal preschool program. The court added that dispute to its 2026-27 roster in April.

No date has been set for either of the cases to be heard.

Here is a quick overview of the two cases:

Grand v. City of University Heights

According to the account of Daniel Grand, an Orthodox Jew living in University Heights, Ohio, he emailed a dozen male friends in January 2021 asking them to join him in prayer as a minyan, a group of at least 10 Jewish men, on a Saturday. Before the minyan could convene, however, city officials got wind of the planned meeting and sent a cease-and-desist letter telling him he couldn’t use his home in a residential zone as a place of religious assembly.

Grand then applied for a special-use permit but was confronted with what his lawyers called “a rugged process using an adversarial ‘quasi-judicial approach.’” He then withdrew the permit application saying he had no desire to operate a house of worship as defined by city ordinance. According to his petition to the Supreme Court, Grand was then threatened with legal action if gatherings “consistent with” religious use were held in his home, and that the mayor asked neighbors to report if there were any such activities. Grand notes in legal papers that Orthodox Jews don’t drive on Saturdays, so the men would have arrived at his home on foot, creating no traffic problems, and that such gatherings would have no more effect on neighbors than someone inviting a similarly sized group over for card games.

Grand then went to federal court seeking legal relief but was denied by the trial court and the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals before filing a petition with the Supreme Court. The main legal issue in the case is whether “a credible government threat that deters the exercise of fundamental rights constitutes a complete and independently actionable constitutional injury.”

The city, however, said in its legal document asking the high court to reject the appeal that it would be premature for the high court to decide in Grand’s favor:

While Grand claims he subjectively felt he could not pray in his house the way he wanted, this record did not support that he was precluded from doing so, as there was no enforcement action against him, he used the house in the manner he wished, and Grand remains free to file a new action if the City applied the ordinance to him in a way that violates his statutory or constitutional rights.

Grand is represented in part by the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the major law firms involved in religious-freedom cases.

St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy

This case involves a lawsuit by two Catholic parishes in Littleton and Lakewood, Colo., and the Archdiocese of Denver, which operate a preschool, against the state of Colorado. Two parents, Daniel and Lisa Sheley, are also plaintiffs. Specifically, the defendants are Lisa Roy, the executive director of the Colorado Department of Early Childhood, and Dawn Odean, director of Colorado’s Universal Preschool Program.

Roy’s department launched the preschool funding program in 2023, providing eligible families with about $6,300 to cover the costs of 15 hours per week of preschool. The program was designed to give families the flexibility to enroll their children at public, private, or faith-based preschools.

According to the Becket law firm, representing the plaintiffs, 1,500 children attending 30-some Catholic preschools were excluded from the program because the schools limit enrollment to Catholics. But, the lawyers say, various secular preschools have also limited who is eligible to attend, calling this a double standard.

The state argued in response to the plaintiffs’ Supreme court petition that it is not applying a double standard, that it is seeking “to ensure, through a neutral and generally applicable program, that preschoolers have equal opportunity to enroll in and receive publicly-funded preschool services regardless of their, or their parents’, protected-class status.” In fact, Colorado described itself as “a national leader in providing universal preschool through a ‘mixed-delivery system’ that affirmatively includes faith-based providers.”

During upcoming arguments, both sides are likely to focus on the applicability of Carson v. Makin, a 2022 ruling that strictly limited how religious groups could be excluded from government programs.

In a pair of cases watched closely by conservative Christian activists, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that Idaho and West Virginia acted constitutionally by enacting bans on transgender females1 in female sports.

The 6-3 ruling was decided on both constitutional grounds and interpretation of Title IX, a federal law designed in part to expand athletic opportunities for female students.

The two cases were Little v. Hecox, in which two athletes, one of them a transgender woman, is fighting Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, which requires competitors in the state’s public K-12 schools, colleges and universities to be biological females; and West Virginia v. B.P.J., in which a mother and her transgender daughter, Becky Pepper-Jackson, challenged a West Virginia law similar to Idaho’s.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion, supported by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas,Amy Coney Barrett, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. They form the conservative majority on the court. The three more liberal members — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented.

Idaho and West Virginia are among the 27 states that have enacted laws that maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females. Most of those states passed the laws with the strong support of evangelicals, many of whom believe that God created humankind in two genders that are immutable, making full acceptance of transgender persons as belonging to their desired gender a rejection of the divinely created order. Some evangelical groups argued against the athletes’ legal positions in friend-of-the-court briefs, claiming that invalidating such state laws would raise concerns about religious liberty. But those arguments were not addressed in today’s ruling.

In essence, the court found that Title IX, which allows schools receiving federal funds to create separate sports teams for males and females, was written with the intention of referring only to biological males and females — a conclusion in which the minority generally concurred with, although Jackson wrote in her dissent that it was “plausible” that the law could be interpreted in a more “capacious” manner.

On the constitutional issue, the court found that while laws making sexual distinctions are subject to scrutiny, the two states did so reasonably because of the undisputed fact that there are inherent physical differences between males and females that affect their ability to compete athletically. The majority also noted that the science remains unsettled over whether medical treatment such as puberty blockers can eliminate the advantage that biological men have:

The Court’s holding today is straightforward. The Equal Protection Clause allows schools to maintain separate teams for female and male athletes. Schools may determine eligibility for women’s and girls’ teams based on biological sex. That policy is constitutionally justified by the vitally important interests in safety and competitive fairness so as to provide equal opportunities for women and girls to participate in sports. And when a sex-based classification is justified as a constitutional matter, as it is here, States need not make case-by-case exceptions — for example, schools need not make individual exceptions to allow certain biological males to compete in women’s and girls’ sports.

Second, we do not accept the dissent’s assumed monopoly on understanding the effects on individuals involved in disputes over transgender athletes. We are acutely aware of the difficulties sometimes faced by boys who identify as girls (and by girls who identify as boys) in middle school, high school, and beyond. And we greatly admire the desire of all students, of all students, including transgender students such as B.P.J., who want to participate in sports.

The court minority would not have handed a win to the transgender athletes outright, but would have sent the case back to lower courts to consider whether the athletes had an unfair advantage in fact. Rather than making the decision with scientific matters unsettled, the court should have sent the cases make to lower courts to consider them, Sotomayor wrote for the minority:

This litigation implicates deeply sensitive, contentious, and evolving issues. These circumstances demand exercising judicial restraint, not rushing to answer conclusively difficult questions without sufficient evidentiary development. In opting otherwise, the majority extends great sympathy to those it favors: the young cisgender girls and women who play sports. I share that sympathy. Playing sports can lead to benefits that are immeasurable, and many are understandably invested in ensuring that competition stays fair and safe. Because the majority, however, inflicts a hardship on those it disfavors without giving them the fair and full opportunity the Constitution requires to litigate their contentions, I respectfully dissent.

Although today’s ruling settles the constitutional and statutory questions of whether female sports in public schools can be restricted to biological females, it leaves unresolved some other key issues, such as how biological sex should be determined.

Does Christianity need government support to thrive — or even to survive? The evangelical right seems to think so.

Politically conservative evangelicals are the most powerful they have been in the history of the United States. They hold enormous sway over the presidency, the House and the Senate. The speaker of the House is one of them. And although the Supreme Court is overwhelmingly Catholic — seven of the nine justices are affiliated with the Vatican-based church — its conservative members have increasingly sided with evangelical activists on matters such as church-state relations, abortion and LGTBQ issues. Although only about a fourth of Americans identify as evangelical, they influence is such that they appear to be acting like a political majority. A recent taxpayer-funded gathering for the celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary was little more than a full-day evangelical Christian concert and pep rally with less than a handful of token non-evangelicals — but still political conservatives — thrown in the leadership mix.

And yet all this isn’t enough for the evangelical activists: 2026 so far has been an extraordinary year in terms of the relationship between church and state, but perhaps no day carries with it as much long-term significance as last Friday:

🟪 The Texas Board of Education added Bible selections to its required reading list for its public school students, starting with a storybook presentation of the story of Noah’s ark for first-graders and the love chapter of 1 Corinthians 13 for graduating seniors1. Although many school systems throughout the country for years have used Bible selections in various types of social-studies and literature classes, Texas appears to be the first state to include Bible excerpts in an overall mandatory reading list that includes the secular classics.

🟪 President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, led by a Southern Baptist who has proclaimed that there’s no such thing as a constitutional separation of church and state, issued a report that aligns with a long list of evangelical grievances, such as certain laws that require fair treatment for LGTBQ persons and even laws requiring vaccinations.

In a technical sense, that chairman, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, is correct: Nowhere does the Constitution use the words “separation of church and state.” But the Constitution, in the First Amendment, does prohibit “an establishment of religion” and demands the “free exercise” of religion. Originally, that amendment applied only to the federal government, but with the passage of the 14th Amendment the restrictions on government power were applied to the states as well.

The First Amendment provides a setup that has largely kept the government out of churches’ (as well as synagogues’ and mosques’) business and kept religious adherents from imposing their will on others not of their faith. Students are free to pray privately before their tests and even schedule gatherings with their fellow believers in the same way that students who share secular interests can do so, and teachers aren’t allowed to dictate what students should pray. And under a federal law known as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and similar laws in various red and blue states, religious adherents can receive protections even beyond those guaranteed by the Constitution.

Also, under various civil rights laws religious protections are extended to even the private sector: Employers are required to make reasonable accommodations to the religious needs of employees and not discriminate against persons of any religion (or no religion) in their hiring.

In short, we have a type of church-state separation that has worked fairly well, even if not perfectly.

An attempt to tilt the balance

But now, the evangelical, often Christian nationalist, right is seeking to tilt the balance that has developed over the past two centuries. It is hard to see the move by the Texas Board of Education as anything other than an attempt to reinforce conservative Christianity as the dominant religion in Texas. The move comes at a time when state officials have been attempting to limit the influence of Islam, and when the Legislature has promulgated the posting of a sectarian version of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

And the concern here doesn’t come from a belief that the Bible has no place in public education: The Constitution has long been understood to provide for teaching about religion, and no education would be complete without a recognition of the role that religion has played in history and even jurisprudence. It does come partly out of a concern the movement interferes with one of the most sacred or rights, that of parents to direct the upbringing of their children. As a Christian parent whose children are now adults, I would not have wanted the government telling me which parts of the Bible are worthier than others, nor would I have wanted my tax dollars being used to pay teachers to tell my children how they should understand various Bible passages.

And if I were a non-Christian, I wouldn’t want my government teaching my children in ways that suggest that the story of Adam and Eve is anything other than mythology, for example, nor the explicitly religious passages such as the 23rd Psalm or the story of Moses and the burning bush. Don’t get me wrong: I find the 23rd Psalm is one of the most beautiful passages of the Bible, but it’s up to me to teach my children about the gracious God of the psalm, not the job of the government.

Conflation of religion and politics

And I can’t help but note how the Texas board decided not to teach some of the Biblical passages that run counter to the conservative political agenda. No study of the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible) is complete without noting its passages calling for hospitality toward foreigners, just as no study of the New Testament is complete without learning of Jesus’s admonitions to care for the least of these. But these passages, constantly violated by the supposed Christians in the Trump administration, are nowhere to be seen in the Texas list.

This conflation of political views with religious ones can be seen as well in recommendations made by Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission. Although the 224-page report does pay lip service to liberties for non-Christians, it relies on a distorted historical narrative and gives credence to misleading claims by evangelical Christians that they have been persecuted mercilessly. No doubt there have been evangelicals subjected to ridicule or otherwise mistreated — but in multiple cases in the report of mistreatment by government, even the report acknowledges that the errors have been corrected by courts.

The commission’s recommendations aren’t necessarily mistaken: Of course, it’s a good idea to make clear to school school districts what the religious rights of their students are, and existing unlawful discrimination, which does occur, should not be tolerated. But by focusing on the particular cases it does and bringing up superfluous grievances, the report gives the impression that religious freedom belongs almost solely to one branch of Christianity.

Although they appear to be trying to help Christianity, both the Texas board and the Trump commission are causing harm to true faith by suggesting that faith can’t bring personal meaning and strength on its own without government mandates. The two panels are actually reducing faith to just another political issue rather than recognizing the moral clarity and courage that it offers.

The U.S. Supreme Court has strengthened religious liberty in recent years, but that trend was at least paused today as the court ruled 6-3 that a Rastafarian whose hair was forcibly cut by Louisiana prison guards in 2020 cannot sue prison officials.

The prisoner, Damon Landor, had filed suit under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, a federal law that requires states to provide, among other things, various religious-liberty protections in prisons that receive federal funds. Because other legal avenues weren’t available to him, Landor filed his suit against prison guards and other prison officials in their personal capacities, but that attempt was rebuffed in lower courts. RLUIPA is a companion law to the more widely known Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Both RLUIPA and RFRA are intended to protect religious rights that are beyond those guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. So today’s ruling focused on technical issues related to how RLUIPA should be interpreted rather than on constitutional issues.

The court ruling was divided along ideological lines, with the six conservative justices siding with prison employees and the liberals siding with Landor. Ironically, Landor had the support of the Donald Trump administration as well as two law firms, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the American Center for Law and Justice, known for their support of Christian conservatives, among others, in religious-freedom cases.

The case was Damon Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety. For details of the incident in which Landor’s hair was cut, see this earlier article.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing the majority opinion, said that well-settled contract law determines the case’s outcome. Because the prison officials weren’t the ones who made an agreement with the federal government, he wrote, there was no contract in which they agreed to assume liability for violation of federal law:

Before us, LDOC [the Louisiana Department of Corrections] does not dispute that it is a recipient of federal funds. It does not question that it has agreed to answer certain RLUIPA suits as a condition of accepting those funds. But as it comes to us, this case does not involve claims against LDOC. It involves only claims against individuals in their personal capacities. And Mr. Landor does not allege that any of those individuals has entered any agreement with the federal government, let alone that any of them has voluntarily and knowingly consented to answer private suits under RLUIPA.

To know that is enough to know the Court of Appeals was correct. Mr. Landor does not have a federal RLUIPA cause of action against the officers.

The ruling drew an unusually strong rebuke from the minority, whose opinion was written by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. She noted that RFRA allows lawsuits against private parties, and the RLIUPA has identical wording. To base a ruling solely on contract law, is akin to “pulling this rabbit out of the hat” and ignoring “decades of precedent,” she wrote. She continued:

In the end, the Court reduces some of Congress’s greatest legislative achievements — federal laws that secure civil rights, environmental stability, healthcare, and more — to nothing more than the wheelings-and-dealings of an especially wealthy private party. Because I would not so trivialize a federal statute or the constitutional powers pursuant to which it was passed, I respectfully dissent.

This case was the last case focusing on religious freedom to be decided by the Supreme Court in its current term, which will probably end next week. Additionally, a pair of cases that have drawn strong interest from Christian conservatives, cases involving transsexual athletes, remain to be decided.

Calling a proposed section of the U.S.-Mexico border wall “offensive to Catholic values and teachings,” a Catholic diocese has gone to court to block the Trump administration from using its power of eminent domain to build the section on diocese-owned property near a popular shrine that features a statue of Jesus overlooking Sunland Park, N.M.

The diocese claims in court papers filed Friday that the proposed property seizure violates both the First Amendment, which provides for freedom of religion, and the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was written to expand religious protections beyond those provided by the Constitution.

The Roman Catholic diocese says in the papers that construction of the border wall there “would profane this holy site” and “deprive the Diocese of its ability to act as a steward of the land.” The diocese also calls the plans “an affront to religious liberty.”

The diocese filed the papers in response to a decision by U.S. District Court of New Mexico Judge Kenneth J. Gonzales, who ruled June 15 that the U.S. Department of Justice could deposit $183,071 into a bank account as compensation for property it intends to seize. The amount is based on the presumed fair-market value of the land, as is normal in eminent domain cases. Although the proposed section of border wall would not close the shrine or block the route to it, there is disagreement between the Trump administration and the diocese about whether the fence would interfere with the experience of the tens of thousands of pilgrims who visit the site each year.

The case is United States of America v. 14.259 Acres of Land.

Gonzales, a Barack Obama appointee, made his ruling on technical grounds involving the Declaration of Taking Act, which regulates the procedures for federal seizure of property for government use. Gonzales said that his ruling is not a final decision on the property’s disposition, that the federal government doesn’t get immediate possession, and that the diocese still has the right to seek judicial relief. Gonzales did not address the religious-freedom concerns that the diocese has raised.

The 29-foot-tall monument portraying Jesus atop the 4,675-foot mountain was completed in 1939 by sculptor Urbici Soler, world-famous at the time. The hike pilgrims take to the top of the mountain is 5-mile round trip. Some pilgrims crawl on their knees to the site as a sign of devotion. As many as 40,000 people in one day have been reported to visit the site on religious festival days.

The Department of Justice has been trying to obtain the site for at least several months, hoping to fill in a gap in the border wall, a gap that has been often used for illegal crossings. The legal fight is new, however, as the government first filed documents May 7 to start the seizure process.

In contesting the judge’s ruling, the diocese disputed claims by the federal government that the visitors to the site would not be affected:

The Government insists in conclusory fashion that its proposed course of conduct “will not impact the Diocese’s access or use of Mount Cristo Rey” and that the mountaintop shrine “will be accessible in the same manner as it had been prior to the taking.” ... There are several reasons to doubt the Government’s representations. First, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem waived compliance with a host of statutes and regulations that safeguard culturally, historically, and environmentally sensitive sites in connection with border-wall construction. ... The Government therefore did not undertake the careful review that ordinarily would accompany a federal construction project of this sort. Without such a review, the harms that the Government’s actions will inflict on the mountaintop shrine, access to the same, and the natural landscape that inspired its creation in the first place are simply unknowable. Accordingly, there is no reason for this Court to credit the Government’s barebones assurances regarding the impact of wall construction on the shrine or access paths.1

The diocese also said that the federal government “has shown little respect for Mount Cristo Rey” during the preparatory work it has done so far in the area. The diocese pointed in particular to a federal promotional video that said the mountain “will undergo a face lift” even though “the only face on Mount Cristo Rey is that of Christ the King.”

The federal government has yet to file a response to the diocese’s papers. A court hearing has been tentatively scheduled for July 23, according to news reports.

Protestant pastors in the United States are split almost down the middle as to whether it is important to include patriotic elements in worship services near the Fourth of July.

According to a survey conducted by Lifeway Research1, 45 percent of Protestant pastors said that such elements are important for the national holiday, and 53 percent disagree. Only 2 percent said they weren’t sure. The survey, published this week, included 1,003 Protestant pastors across both conservative and liberal denominational lines and was conducted by phone last September. Lifeway said the margin of error for the survey was 3.3 percent, although the chance of statistical error is higher for subgroups when pastors are separated by factors such as age and denomination.

Surveys were conducted using the same methodology in 2016 and 2021, and the survey shows a smaller percentage of pastors supporting the use of patriotic elements now than in years past. The level of support was 56 percent a decade ago and 61 percent five years ago.

The survey found for this year that 16 percent of the pastors strongly agreeing that it is important to include patriotic elements for Independence Day with 29 percent strongly disagreeing. About 29 percent somewhat agreed with the patriotic elements, and 24 percent somewhat disagreed.

A slightly higher percentage said their churches “should do something special” this year for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. An even 50 percent agreed with such a plan, with 47 percent disagreeing. Since the survey was made months before publicity about official government celebrations, some of which have emphasized American religious heritage, it is possible that the level of support has changed since then. And, of course, decisions about church services are often made by church ruling boards or someone other than the pastor, so the survey may not accurately indicate how church services related to the holiday will be conducted this year. The Sunday closest to Independence Day this year is July 6, two days after the holiday, although some churches may observe the holiday on June 28.

The survey shows that it is common for churches to make some accommodations for Independence Day as matter of course. A majority of pastors said their churches recognize living veterans (62 percent), those with family members in the armed services (59 percent) or those who have lost loved ones in service to their country (51 percent). A bit more than half, 55 percent, include music honoring the country. About 28 percent said they include “special ceremonies” to honor the country; a small group, 15 percent, said no changes are made at all to services around the holiday.

The survey found some sharp age differences, with pastors 65 years or older most likely to agree that patriotic elements to celebrate America are important (63 percent) and pastors 44 and under the least likely to agree (29 percent). In other words, the oldest group of pastors are more than twice as likely to support such services than the youngest ones.

Pastors with no college degree are also more likely to find patriotic services important (68 percent).

There were also denominational differences: Pentecostals were most likely to support such services (64 percent) with Presbyterian/Reformed churches the least likely (29 percent).

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