New episode of ‘Secular Spotlight’ focuses on freethinking students
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The latest episode of the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s “Secular Spotlight” showcases the positive impact nonreligious students can have on their schools.
Secular Student Alliance Executive Director Kevin Bolling joins FFRF Staff Attorney Sammi Lawrence, Senior Policy Counsel Ryan Jayne and Regional Government Affairs Manager Mickey Dollens to discuss how nonreligious students can organize, advocate for their rights and push back against religious coercion in public schools. They explore real-world examples of student activism and offer practical advice for young people who want to defend church-state separation in their schools and communities.
“More and more of our high school students are becoming more and more active at a time when the administration and principals are actually making it slightly more difficult for nonreligious students and secular groups to be able to get up and started and running,” Bolling says. “Some of our chapters aren’t able to meet at their high school and are going to a coffee shop or a library that is near the school to be able to meet.”
You can catch this episode of “Secular Spotlight” on FFRF’s YouTube channel, as well as by watching on your smart TV after downloading FFRF’s free app, Freethought TV, which also highlights FFRF’s other video programming. Our previous episodes include the story of former Evangelical Pastor Timmy Gibson’s journey to atheism, and a deep dive into the legacy of Robert G. Ingersoll, one of America’s most important freethinkers. Make sure you’re subscribed to FFRF’s YouTube channel for all the latest updates!
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 40,000 members across the country, 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 announces $30,000 in 2026 Forward Freethought scholarship winners
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is pleased to announce the recipients of the First in the Family Humanist Forward Freethought scholarship.
FFRF has awarded $30,000 in total to six students, thanks to the generosity of the late FFRF benefactor Lance Bredvold. Black Skeptics Los Angeles (BSLA), an African American humanist/atheist organization, selected the students. This is the first secular organization to specifically address college pipelining for youth of color and other marginalized students through its ongoing scholarship, college and K-12 youth leadership partnerships. FFRF has proudly partnered with the group for 13 years to provide tuition grants, gradually increasing the funding and number of scholarships.
Both BSLA and FFRF express gratitude to Bredvold, whose generous contributions have helped fund nearly a decade of secular, first-generation-to-attend-college scholars. Thanks to Bredvold’s bequest to FFRF, that help will continue.
The following are the 2026 First in the Family Humanist Forward Freethought scholarship winners and the college they are attending. Each of them was awarded $5,000.
- Heather Buckner, University of California, Berkeley
- Blessings Coly, University of North Carolina-A&T
- Kaylla DaCosta, University of Massachusetts
- Daniel Sierra, University of California, Berkeley
- Mariah Slade, University of North Carolina-A&T
- Kelan Speed, University of Texas-San Antonio
Those who would like to donate toward the Forward Freethought Fund, a needs-based scholarship dedicated to helping freethinking students who might otherwise be unable to attend college, may designate “tuition scholarships” in the ffrf.org/get-involved/donate/ dropdown or earmark checks for “Forward Freethought Fund” or “tuition scholarships.” All donations to FFRF remain deductible for income-tax purposes.
“This initiative helps deserving students who are really in need and are the generational vanguard of freethinkers,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “All the contributions we receive assist a truly worthy cause.”
More detailed bios and short essays by the winning students will appear in the upcoming October issue of Freethought Today, FFRF’s lively (almost) monthly paper: www.freethoughttoday.com/
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 40,000 members across the country, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
The post FFRF announces $30,000 in 2026 Forward Freethought scholarship winners appeared first on Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Christian Nationalist preacher claims his ministry has raised “over 50 people” from the dead
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Christian Nationalist preacher Andrew Wommack wants you to know that if you’re a Bible-believing Christian, you have the power to raise people from the dead. And it’s not just hypothetical. During an interview with “FlashPoint” host Gene Bailey last week, he delivered one lie after another about all the people he’s brought back to life.
Wommack declared that he knew “well over 50 people that have been raised from the dead” through his ministry. In fact, he added, he knew a preacher in Uganda who visited a hospital with roughly 100 patients, and that man “emptied the entire hospital.”
BAILEY: You told me something. We were sitting at lunch one day and… we were talking. I think we were actually talking about this story. And you said, “Well, Gene, we’ve had… there’s been a lot of people here raised from the dead, right here in this campus.” Talk about that.
WOMMACK: We’ve seen… I’m guessing now… I haven’t sat down and counted. But I could say: We probably have seen four or five people raised from the dead right here on our campus. And if you go to all of our schools—we got schools all over the world—and our missions trips—we have, before a person can graduate, they have to go on a foreign missions trip—and if you were to add them all together, we have well over 50 people that have been raised from the dead.
We’ve got one guy in Uganda that—he went in to a hospital in Uganda and emptied the entire hospital. There was a hundred-and-something people in there, and he emptied the entire thing.
And the news of that got out. And so… people contacted him and they were bringing someone for him to pray for. And in the journey—it was about a 4-hour trip—the man died.
And so when they finally reached where he was, they called him and they said, “We’re sorry, but, you know, he’s already died, and so you don’t need to come.” And he says, “No, I’m coming.” And he went over there and he spent four hours praying over that man. And that man came back to life. And 13 members of his family got born again because of that.
BAILEY: I bet they did.
WOMMACK: And so… we see a lot of people raised from the dead. We’ve seen it in Chicago. We’ve seen it in Atlanta through our schools there… One in Grand Rapids—they were having a Bible study and they heard this terrible crash, and then they heard the sirens, and they went out, and a motorcycle… had a wreck and a person was dead, and while they were waiting on the ambulance to come, the Bible study group just got together and prayed over him, and this guy came back to life, raised from the dead. So it’s become a fairly common occurrence for us. Praise God.
BAILEY: That’s wonderful. That’s just amazing.
In true televangelist fashion, not a single follow-up question was asked.
Somehow, Wommack claims the people in his ministry have these incredible powers, and yet they don’t spend all day, every day, in hospitals or in children’s cancer wards. The man from Uganda, as far as we know, has not visited another hospital. There are never any cameras around when these “miracles” happen. No medical professionals ever write about these “miracles” after the fact. No one working in the hospitals ever confirms Wommack’s version of the stories. And at no point do Wommack or these unnamed survivors ever release medical records confirming their deaths and resurrections.
Because of course they haven’t. We just have to take Wommack’s word for it.
At best, these people are sick or injured and get better—but that means they were never “dead” to begin with.
What makes these claims even more ludicrous is that Wommack has been making them for years. In 2021, for example, he told an audience that his own son rose from the dead:
And so [my wife] Jamie and I had just gotten back from Mexico. We went to bed, I think, at 2:15 in the morning, from a trip, and at 4:15, my oldest son called and he said, “Dad, I’m sorry to tell you this, but Peter”—my youngest son, he said—”he’s dead.”
… And when we finally got into Colorado Springs, my oldest son came out and he said, “I don’t know what happened, but 5 or 10 minutes after we called you, Peter just sat up and started talking.”
… When my oldest son called, [Peter] had been dead over four hours. He was already stripped naked—he was a white boy, he turned Black—and he had a toe tag on, stripped naked on a cooler, in a morgue, and he had already been pronounced dead and put in a morgue. And he just sat up and started talking.
Between four and five hours with no oxygen to the brain, and he came back with no brain damage—no more than he had before [laughter].
Amen.
Your brain cannot survive more than a few minutes without oxygen without permanent damage kicking in, but Wommack wants everyone to believe his son made it several hours that way. You can imagine how many doctors might want to figure out how Peter and his brain survived that ordeal… and yet no one’s ever bothered to check any of this out.
You’d think it’d be easy to offer proof of all this when it concerns your own family instead of random strangers, but Wommack never released it.
Wommack delivered a similar lie in 2019 when he spoke about a “healing conference” he hosted at Charis Bible College in Colorado (which he founded).
… It was awesome. We saw a little baby raised from the dead… The baby was dead and the mother just came and put the baby on the stage, and we prayed, and this baby came back to life.
We saw a man that carried his wife up. She was probably 80 [years old], and probably 60 pounds or less, and had a brain disease. Couldn’t talk or move. And after a few minutes praying, she started talking. Then she sat up. Then she stood up. And then she walked.
We saw over a thousand people miraculously healed and saw lots of people saved, born again.
It was a special, special time.
If that story is to be believed, a woman’s baby died, but instead of going to a hospital or police department, she brought the dead corpse to a conference at a Christian college, and the baby came back to life, and not a single reporter was told about this so that the story could travel far and wide.
Wommack also said “over a thousand people” were “miraculously healed” at the conference… even though, according to him, only 2,500 people attended it. Quite the ratio.
And apparently not a single person in attendance had a video camera to document any of this.
When I first heard that story in 2019, I contacted Charis to see if they could provide any proof a baby had come back from the dead. They sent me video of a different session of the conference (not helpful!) before adding, “Unfortunately, the session with the baby being healed was not recorded as the healing occurred when a private panel was taking place at the Conference.”
How inconvenient. And how utterly unsurprising.
All of this might be less disturbing if Wommack was just a standard scamvangelist, lying to Christians to get their money. But he’s not just some charismatic huckster. He’s a power broker who wants Christians to control local governments, not unlike Doug Wilson. There are countless stories, in fact, of how Wommack’s people have tried to take over the town of Woodland Park, just outside Colorado Springs. They won a majority on the public school board in 2021… only to destroy the district. Thankfully, Wommack then failed in his attempt to take over the city council after residents realized what was happening, though that hasn’t prevented further attempts by him to acquire power.
So why does any of this matter? Because Wommack is trying to convince his followers that he (and those who believe what he believes) are supernaturally powerful and that faith involves never asking even basic questions about supposed miracles. Every unnamed patient and missing medical record are just tests of loyalty.
Wommack knows that if his followers are ignorant enough to believe his claims, he can persuade them to accept almost anything, including why they and they alone should take over public school boards and local governments. He wants to build a Christian Nationalist movement where his absurd and exaggerated statements are trusted far more than claims from any doctor, journalist, educator, or scientist.
You would hope that as his lies get bigger—and is there really any lie bigger than bringing someone back from the dead?—his army of sheep would wake up to the fact that they’re being conned. But religion has a way of telling people to ignore common sense.
