FFRF stops school-organized religious club at Ala. elementary school
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The Freedom From Religion Foundation has successfully stymied a proposed school-organized religious club in the Madison City Schools (Ala.) system that aimed to indoctrinate elementary school students.
A concerned district parent reported that the principal of Madison Elementary School, near Huntsville, advertised the Fellowship of Christian Athletes club using an official school communication sent to parents. The May 12 communication from the principal told parents that the coach was starting a fellowship club at the elementary school next year, and the message invited parents to attend a “planning kickoff.” According to a flyer for the club, students would unite their “passions, faith and athletics to impact the world for Jesus Christ” if they joined the club.
Additionally, on May 13, the coach sent a communication to parents via what appeared to be an official district platform to again advertise the club and encourage parents to send their children to the “first FCA huddle” in the elementary school’s gym. The coach’s communication made it clear that he was the one starting the club at Madison Elementary School, not students. The parent expressed concern that elementary-age students were likely to view the Fellowship of Christian Athletes club as a “school-endorsed religious activity.”
FFRF pointed out how the club would have been a direct violation of students’ rights.
“It is inappropriate and unconstitutional for an elementary school to organize, lead or encourage student participation in a religious club like the FCA, especially when that club is clearly run by an adult staff member and not students,” FFRF Staff Attorney Sammi Lawrence wrote to the district.
Elementary students cannot realistically initiate and operate a religious club independent of adult involvement. Because the club was organized and promoted by school employees through official district communications, it constituted unconstitutional government endorsement of religion rather than protected student religious expression. Madison Elementary School should strive to be welcoming and inclusive of all students, not just those who subscribe to a particular brand of Christianity, FFRF emphasized.
Following FFRF’s letter, the district confirmed that the proposed club would not move forward.
“We have discussed this matter with the interim superintendent and with the principal of Madison Elementary School,” the district’s legal officer responded. “Madison Elementary School has not implemented the FCA club that was considered in the spring and will not do so.”
FFRF is once again pleased to champion students’ rights.
“FFRF firmly believes in students’ right to be free from religious indoctrination,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor says. “Young children are especially susceptible to viewing school-sponsored religious activities as official endorsements of faith. We’re pleased the district chose to uphold its constitutional obligations and ensure all students are equally welcome.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With more than 41,000 members across the country, including hundreds of members in Alabama, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
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2026 – Dahlia Richter
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
A student who organized a secular revolt against unconstitutional graduation prayer at El Capitan High School in Colorado City, Ariz., has received a $2,000 Freedom From Religion Foundation Student Activist Award scholarship. The award has been endowed for many years by a generous West Coast couple who prefer anonymity, and is given for significant activism to promote FFRF’s aims.
Dahlia Richter says she was “scared to file the report at first.” She explains: “Standing up to the school board was intimidating. I am very relieved that the FFRF legal team has been kind and supportive throughout this whole process. Just knowing that my report helps protect future students means a lot to me.”
El Capitan High School has long included official invocations and benedictions at graduation ceremonies, with students selected in advance to lead the audience in prayer. This year’s graduation program was set to feature scheduled prayers led by two designated students, despite clear Supreme Court precedent ruling such practices unconstitutional. That is, until Dahlia objected and organized other students to join her.
District officials reportedly initially altered the program so that the prayer would occur before the ceremony officially begins and described participation as “optional.” But in the end, the Constitution was followed.
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Speaker Johnson worrisomely says Christian legal ministry guides House leadership
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is expressing concern after House Speaker Mike Johnson declared at a highly influential Christian legal organization’s annual summit that it shapes his governance.
Johnson, speaking recently to hundreds of Alliance Defending Freedom supporters in San Diego, repeatedly described the group as “home,” praised its mission of advancing conservative Christianity through the legal system, and credited his years working there with molding his leadership as speaker.
“ADF really is like home to us,” Johnson told attendees. “You’re like family.” He added that his years at the organization were “formative to us,” explaining that “so much of what we do, we learned on the front lines of the culture war, keeping the door open for the spread of the gospel, and it informs still how we do our job today.”
Such statements are extremely concerning to FFRF.
“Speaker Johnson has made explicit what many Americans have long suspected: He does not view himself simply as an elected official who happens to be religious,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “He views his leadership of the House as an extension of the mission of Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization dedicated to advancing conservative Christian ideology through the courts and government.”
Founded in 1994 by leaders in the Christian right, Alliance Defending Freedom has become one of the country’s most powerful Christian nationalist legal organizations. The group has played a central role in many Supreme Court cases that have expanded religious exemptions while restricting reproductive rights and LGBTQ equality, including Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission and 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated the entity as an anti-LGBTQ hate group because of its long record of attacking LGBTQ rights, a move that has prompted members of Congress to ironically go after the renowned civil rights organization.
At the Alliance Defending Freedom gathering, Johnson continued his longstanding effort to recast America’s founding in explicitly Christian terms. Discussing the Declaration of Independence, he argued that the rights of Americans “don’t come from the government” but “come from the King of Kings,” replacing the Declaration’s more inclusive reference to a “Creator” with a specifically Christian theological claim.
Johnson also warned that rejecting belief in God inevitably leads to “Marxism, socialism [and] communism,” telling the audience that denying God means people lose their inherent dignity and ultimately their freedom. He described universities as places where students have been “indoctrinated” to reject America’s Christian foundations.
“Speaker Johnson is using his constitutional office to promote an explicitly sectarian worldview,” remarks Gaylor. “The House speaker represents Americans of every religion and of none. He should not be telling the country that our rights come from Christianity or suggesting that secular Americans are on the road to tyranny.”
Johnson repeatedly framed political engagement at the summit as a religious struggle, describing Alliance Defending Freedom supporters as “fellow warriors” and praising the organization for standing on the “front lines” and the “tip of the spear” defending “God’s truth.” He urged supporters to pledge themselves to the cause just as the Founders supposedly had and predicted that the group’s next chapter would be “the greatest season of this ministry since its inception.”
The gathering underscored the Alliance Defending Freedom’s extraordinary access to Republican leadership. Johnson was introduced not merely as the House speaker but as “one of us,” with organizers highlighting his years as an attorney with the group and its spokesman before entering politics.
The event also featured Trump administration Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir, who argued that transgender health care contradicts “the deeper moral order that is woven into creation itself,” citing Genesis 1:27 and asserting that “male and female” reflect God’s design. He encouraged pastors, rather than medical professionals, to play a central role in caring for youth experiencing gender dysphoria.
Alliance Defending Freedom President Kristen Waggoner, who has defended conversion therapy and has repeatedly misgendered transgender people, also interviewed West Virginia and Idaho’s Republican attorneys general, reinforcing the organization’s close ties to elected officials shaping national legal policy on one end of the political spectrum.
“The American people elected a speaker of the House, not a missionary-in-chief,” Gaylor adds. “Mike Johnson is free to practice his religion, but he is not free to govern as though Congress exists to carry out the mission of Alliance Defending Freedom or any other religious organization. His oath is to the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion by keeping religion and government separate.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 41,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
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FFRF urges Ky. school district to end pastor access to middle school students
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is demanding that the Fayette County Public Schools system immediately stop allowing pastors from a local church to proselytize middle school students through school-sponsored activities.
A concerned community member has informed the state/church watchdog that pastors from the Southern Heights Baptist Church have been proselytizing students at Jessie Clark Middle School by allegedly allowing two pastors from the church to lead the school Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter. An official post from the Southern Heights Baptist Church Facebook page shared that on April 16, the pastors led an FCA meeting for students at the middle school and that “three students gave their lives to Christ.” Additionally, the middle school named one of the pastors a “character coach” for the middle school lacrosse team, apparently to encourage “growth in character, leadership and faith as they develop as athletes and individuals.”
FFRF is urging the district to investigate these reports and, if confirmed, immediately end the unconstitutional arrangement.
“Students in secondary schools may organize religious clubs, but these must be entirely student-initiated and student-led and take place during noninstructional time,” FFRF Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Charlotte R. Gude has written to the school district’s chief legal officer.
It is inappropriate and unconstitutional for the district to allow staff members or an outside adult to lead a religious club for students, FFRF emphasizes. Public schools may not show favoritism toward, or coerce, belief in or participation in religion. Here, it appears that Fellowship for Christian Athletes meetings are led by the pastors, violating both the First Amendment and the Equal Access Act.
Student-athletes are especially susceptible to unconstitutional coercion. Students know their coaches control their playing time and positions, directly affecting opportunities for scholarships and recruitment. When coaches and the school allow an outside adult to serve as a “character coach” to the lacrosse team as part of official team activities, student-athletes will no doubt feel that going along with religious activities, interacting with the “character coach,” and at least appearing to agree with the person’s religious beliefs is essential to pleasing their coaches and being viewed as a team player. It is unrealistic and unconstitutional to put student-athletes in the position of choosing between allowing their school to violate their constitutional rights to maintain good standing in the eyes of their coach and peers, or openly dissenting at the risk of retaliation or isolation.
And by allowing this proselytization, Jessie Clark Middle School needlessly marginalizes students, families and community members who are nonreligious or who belong to minority religions that do not follow Christianity. As much as 38 percent of the American population is non-Christian, including the almost 30 percent who are nonreligious. More than half of Generation Z (those born after 1996) is non-Christian, including 43 percent who are nonreligious. The school district should strive to be welcoming and inclusive of all students, not just those who subscribe to a particular brand of Christianity.
The school district must investigate the situation and ensure that Jessie Clark Middle School ceases granting religious representatives access to students for the purpose of proselytizing them.
“Public schools are not recruiting grounds for local churches,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor says. “Students have the constitutional right to decide for themselves what religious beliefs, if any, they will embrace. School officials should never use their positions to give pastors privileged access to impressionable students.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With more than 41,000 members and chapters across the country, including hundreds of members and a chapter in Kentucky, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
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A Trump judge redefined “diversity” to excuse an almost entirely Christian “religious liberty” panel
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Another attempt to force the Trump administration to follow the law has been rejected by (you guessed it) a Trump-nominated judge, handing another undeserved win to Christian Nationalists.
This time, it involved a lawsuit arguing that Trump’s “Religious Liberty Commission,” which was required by law to be religiously diverse, had virtually no religious diversity on it.
When Trump formed the group in May of 2025, the executive order said that the group was formed to “offer diverse perspectives on how the Federal Government can defend religious liberty for all Americans” and they really only had two jobs:
The Commission shall produce a comprehensive report on the foundations of religious liberty in America, the impact of religious liberty on American society, current threats to domestic religious liberty, strategies to preserve and enhance religious liberty protections for future generations, and programs to increase awareness of and celebrate America’s peaceful religious pluralism…
…
The Commission shall advise the White House Faith Office and the Domestic Policy Council on religious liberty policies of the United States…
Was it all symbolic? Sure. But it could have been useful if experts on the subject were coming together to offer the administration a guide on how to overcome serious obstacles to religious liberty.
More importantly, the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) of 1972—passed to counter corruption—said that any commission like this one had to be transparent, balanced in terms of ideological makeup, and structured to avoid inappropriate influence by special interests.
But according to the lawsuit filed in February by a coalition of religious organizations, the Religious Liberty Commission violated FACA many times over.
That was the main allegation from the Interfaith Alliance, Muslims For Progressive Values, Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Hindus For Human Rights, all represented by lawyers working with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
For example, when it comes to ideological balance, the commission consisted of 13 conservative Christians—including former beauty pageant contestant Carrie Prejean Boller, evangelist Franklin Graham, Dr. Phil (for some reason), and evangelical conspiracy theorist Eric Metaxas—and a token orthodox Jew.
The Commission’s membership is far from fairly balanced because it does not represent religious communities aside from Christianity and Judaism. In remarks made to the Commission, Defendant Trump has articulated a commitment to protect what he describes as “the Judeo-Christian principles of our founding.”16 The Commission’s imbalanced membership reflects a narrow conception of which religious principles, and whose rights, are worth protecting…
…
Of the Commission’s members, none are members of a religion that does not fit within Defendant Trump’s “Judeo-Christian” framework. For example, the Commission includes no adherents or representatives of Islam, Hinduism, or Sikhism, several of the most common religions in the United States behind Christianity and Judaism.
Those members, the lawsuit said, were also not ideologically different. They’re all basically Christian Nationalists who support “maximal protection for the exercise of Judeo-Christian religious beliefs without consideration for the rights and beliefs of others” and who oppose the principle of church/state separation.
One way to counter this argument would have been to show that various perspectives had been considered at the commission’s meetings. But the meetings were held at the right-wing Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. and all they ever seemed to talk about was how amazing Christianity is.
During the first meeting, the Commission focused on the historical tradition of Christianity in the United States. Members of the Commission discussed how Christian faith shaped the nation’s understanding of “freedom, law and human dignity” and quoted a statement that the nation should “prefer Christians for [our] rulers.”
The Commission opened the September 8 meeting with a Christian prayer and closed the September 29 hearing with a specifically Christian prayer “in Jesus’ name.”
The lawsuit said the group hadn’t been transparent either. Sure, they’ve posted their meetings on YouTube, but that’s about it.
FACA requires Defendants to make available, in advance of the public meetings where their content will be relevant, “the records, reports, transcripts, minutes, appendixes, working papers, drafts, studies, agenda, [and] other documents . . . made available to or prepared for or by” the Commission…
Defendants did not provide advance notice of witness lists or other documents made available to the Commission in advance of these meetings.
Defendants did not provide agendas for the meetings in advance.
Defendants have also not produced complete transcripts for the September 8, September 29, or December 10, 2025 meetings. Defendants also appear to have edited the videos for at least one meeting and posted incomplete video on their website.
None of the witness statements made to the Commission have been made publicly available in written form.
Detailed meeting minutes for the meetings have not been made publicly available.
The Plaintiffs said all of this made their own work harder because they couldn’t “divert resources” to push back against what’s being done when they didn’t know what was being done. And given the opaqueness of the group, it seemed likely that the eventual report this commission would release would ”inflict further harm on Plaintiffs.” (Turns out they were right!)
The lawsuit specifically asked the court for a few things. They wanted the judge to declare that the commission had violated FACA, force the commission “to employ good faith efforts” to balance their ideological makeup, include a disclaimer on any report that it was produced in violation of the law, and make them release the information they were required to produce but had refused to up to this point.
“Religious freedom for some is religious freedom for none,” said Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, president and CEO of Interfaith Alliance. “The government has no right to pick and choose which religious beliefs to promote, and which to marginalize. The Trump administration has failed to uphold our country’s proud religious freedom tradition, and we will hold them accountable. Today’s lawsuit is our recommitment to fight for religious liberty for all with every tool available to us.”
…
“The Religious Liberty Commission isn’t about protecting religious liberty for all; it’s about rejecting our nation’s religious diversity and prioritizing one narrow set of conservative ‘Judeo-Christian’ beliefs,” said Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United. “The commission’s public meetings – most of which have been held at the Museum of the Bible and have been dominated by a very specific brand of Christian faith, Christian prayers, and predominantly Christian speakers – are a vivid example of this favoritism. The commission’s true purpose and operations can’t be squared with America’s constitutional promise of church-state separation.”
And now, unfortunately, a judge has rejected that request.
On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge John P. Cronan—a Trump nominee—tossed out the case by basically redefining the meaning of diversity.
Judge John P. Cronan said that although a federal law requires that advisory commissions have a balance of viewpoints, it didn’t specify how this should be done. The New York judge said Trump has wide discretion in picking members.
….
He also wrote that the commission is diverse in other ways, such as including both clergy and lay people. And he said the commission has “adherents of at least five different religions” — by citing the one Jewish member and then members of various Christian denominations and identities.
That’s not diversity… That’s the Republican Caucus. That’s like saying the Supreme Court’s conservative super-majority can’t be racist because Clarence Thomas is on it. Just because you have a lay person or a Jewish person or different shades of Christians doesn’t mean you have any intellectual diversity in the bunch. Those people were selected for the committee because everyone knew what they would push for in the final report.
And while some of the missing transcripts, minutes, and testimonies were eventually posted, they came far too late to be useful to critics.
The coalition released a brief joint statement about the results, focusing on the positive:
“Even before this decision, our litigation helped uncover the information the Trump-Vance administration attempted to hide from the public about this biased and unlawful body. Religious liberty and pluralism are foundational American values, and we remain committed to fighting for a democracy that does not promote a single religious belief and ignores others. We are grateful that this case achieved a major goal by forcing greater transparency, and we will continue our work.”
I don’t blame them for taking what they can get. It doesn’t sound like they plan to appeal.
That said, it’s really incredible how badly the Trump administration botched this. They could easily have put together a diverse group to advise the president—allowing people to think they respect religious diversity—then just ignore their recommendations entirely. But this administration isn’t even politically strategic like that. They invited their friends to the club and ignored even the bare minimum list of things they legally need to do, as if to show how no one can stop them from breaking the law. If you’re a conservative Christian, they let you do it.
This wasn’t just some technical failure of process on the Trump administration’s part. It was a moral and constitutional failure by Chair Dan Patrick and everyone else involved in this sham commission. The goal was never to protect religious freedom but to promote one specific brand of religion. Their final report was predictable from Day One.
By stacking the commission with conservative Christians and one ideologically aligned Orthodox Jew, the administration took a mandate for pluralism and turned it into a vehicle for exclusion. The imbalance wasn’t an accident. It was created by design. By effectively shunning non-Christians and even progressive Christians from the group, they could pretend that the government’s position matches their own.
But a Trump judge saw those facts and decided to redefine what “diversity” means in a way that allowed a bunch of clones to pretend they pass the test.
The bottom line is that whoever has access to power apparently gets to redefine religious liberty however they want to advance their beliefs while screwing over everyone else’s. But if religious freedom doesn’t belong to everyone, it belongs to no one.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
