The 11 CRAZIEST Things Mormons Are Taught

The 11 CRAZIEST Things Mormons Are Taught

New episode of ‘We Dissent’ podcast discusses government attack on nonprofits

A guest from a leading public policy institute joins the hosts of “We Dissent” to tackle a scary topic: the recent assault of the U.S. government on nonprofit organizations.

On Episode 54, Brennan Center for Justice’s Rachel Levinson-Waldman speaks with FFRF Deputy Legal Director Liz Cavell, Americans United for Separation of Church and State Legal Director Rebecca Markert and National Women’s Law Center Director of Nominations & Democracy Alison Gill about the Trump administration and Congress’ weaponization of the government to attack nonprofits and punish speech and viewpoints they don’t like. Then, the speakers explore how executive orders and anti-terrorism statutes are being abused to investigate, defund and intimidate civil society — and how this strategy is essential to the broader project of transforming the United States from a democracy to an autocracy.

“We Dissent,” which first aired in May 2022, is a legal affairs show offering legal wisdom from the secular viewpoint of women lawyers. The show is a collaboration of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Americans United and the National Women’s Law Center.

Find previous episodes here, which examine developments affecting the separation of church and state, particularly in the U.S. Supreme Court and lower federal courts. Past episodes include discussions about court reform, religion behind bars and abortion and also feature a range of expert guests.
      
Episodes are available at the “We Dissent” website, on YouTube, Spotify or wherever your podcasts are found. Be sure to stay up to date with the “We Dissent” podcast on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Bluesky.

Tune in regularly at “We Dissent” for compelling legal discussion and insights!

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Freethought Radio – June 18, 2026

Neurosurgeon Dr. Vivekanand Palavali joins us to examine how science unravels near-death and out-of-body experiences. Then, we hear from members of the Congressional Freethought Caucus who are pushing back against Christian nationalism and the false claim that America was founded as a Christian nation.

The post Freethought Radio – June 18, 2026 appeared first on Freedom From Religion Foundation.

September 20, 2026 – Freethinkers Weekend Gathering (Albany, NY)

Make it a Weekend Getaway: Autumn in New York

Capitalize on beautiful autumn in Upstate New York! Late September is prime travel season in the historic Hudson Valley region, offering the perfect, scenic backdrop for this premier national gathering. Because this is a high-demand season for regional tourism and weddings, attendees are strongly encouraged to secure their lodging immediately:

• Optional Saturday Welcome Dinner (Sept. 19): Arrive a day early to mingle and network! Join a large group of fellow attendees for a casual kickoff dinner at 5:30 PM at the Charter Restaurant inside the Hilton Albany (at participant’s expense).
• Discounted Hotel Block: Stay right in the heart of downtown Albany at the Hilton Albany (40 Lodge Street, Albany, NY 12207) for a special rate of $149/night. Rooms must be booked by August 28, 2026. Reserve your room online at unyft.org/hotel or call 1-800-445-8667 using group code 4UNYFT.  

Please remember to also obtain your Sunday tickets at unyft.org/go

Event Description

Open to the general public and FFRF members nationwide, hosted by Upstate New York Freethinkers–a chapter of FFRF, this special gathering combines deep American freethought expertise with top-tier cultural history.

The morning kicks off with an immersive musical welcome featuring secular compositions by FFRF Co-President Dan Barker, followed by an urgent mid-term election year dispatch from FFRF Washington D.C. Governmental Affairs Director Mark Dann on grassroots activism and combating Christian nationalism. Acclaimed author Kate Cohen (We of Little Faith) will introduce the day’s featured keynotes, including David Hoffman, PhD, author of American Freethought, and Jeff Ingersoll, presenting an exclusive spotlight on the historic Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum.

Registration & Tickets

Your registration features a hot buffet luncheon, coffee/tea service, and full afternoon access to the magnificent collections of the Albany Institute of History & Art—providing the perfect backdrop for open mingling, and collaborating on national secular developments.

Tickets are $85 and limited by venue capacity. Secure your spot, view the full lunch menu, and preview the weekend agenda today at unyft.org/go

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Latest episode of ‘Secular Spotlight’ focuses on religious social media influencers

FFRF’s “Secular Spotlight” welcomes back YouTuber Taylor Leigh (The Antibot) for a new episode tracking the rising trend of religious influencers — and how they enrich themselves.

Can Christian influencers run ministries, monetize YouTube channels, sell products and still claim nonprofit, tax-exempt status? FFRF Deputy Legal Director Liz Cavell and FFRF Staff Attorney Sammi Lawrence join The Antibot to unpack the legal questions surrounding the rise of faith-based influencer businesses.

“The temptation is great for these self-employed missionary types to just say, ‘Hey, I’m a religious entity, I can just not pay taxes and take my chances,’” Cavell begins. “That risk calculus has gotten, I think, a lot friendlier to the exploiters because we have an administration and IRS that’s signaling they’re not interested in enforcing a lot of requirements against religious organizations.”

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 recent episodes include a guest appearance by YouTube content creator Tim Whitaker to examine the religious and political rally “Rededicate 250”, and three FFRF staff members discussing their work to counter a religious organization that is devouring public school students’ education hours. 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 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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The 11 CRAZIEST Things Mormons Are Taught

Florida’s $15 million gift to Catholic schools comes with a bigger agenda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

FFRF blasts Education Department’s weakening of civil rights office

The Freedom From Religion Foundation assails the Trump administration’s latest assault on public education.

In an attempt to further dismantle our educational system, the Trump administration has announced plans to transfer oversight of special education and the Office for Civil Rights out of the Department of Education. This is not an inconsequential reorganization, but a deliberate dismantling of the civil rights infrastructure designed to protect every student in America’s public schools.

For decades, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has acted as a check on discrimination in education. It is tasked with enforcing vital laws such as Title VI, Title IX and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. These laws exist precisely because Congress recognized that vulnerable students get ostracized and left behind without federal oversight. The Trump administration had vowed to cut 90 percent of the office’s staff, but a federal court struck down that plan and required the reinstatement of all previously fired Department of Education employees. As a result, the administration has shifted its focus to impeding agencies within the department, leaving them without power to protect students.

This dismantling is not happening in a vacuum. It coincides perfectly with an aggressive push to undermine public education and reroute funding to private, often religious schools. One way the Trump administration seeks to accomplish that goal is through promoting private school voucher schemes. In peddling vouchers as “school choice,” the Trump administration has rebranded the defunding of public education as parental empowerment.

The dire consequences of voucher programs cannot be overstated. In addition to siphoning funds dedicated to public schools, private schools are permitted to discriminate on the basis of religion, exclude students with disabilities, and reject families who don’t share their faith. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has traditionally enforced the anti-discrimination laws that private schools must follow.

The Trump Administration has vowed to “return education to the states.” However, states do not enforce federal civil rights law; this is the federal government’s job. Stripping the Office for Civil Rights of its enforcement authority does not empower local communities; it abandons the students those laws were written to protect, including students of color, students with disabilities and students whose religious identity makes them targets in schools that receive public money but answer to no public authority.

FFRF has long warned that the systematic defunding of public education and the simultaneous expansion of taxpayer-funded religious schooling represent twin threats to public, secular education. Vouchers are at the forefront of eroding the wall of separation between state and church. By methodically dismantling the Department of Education, the Trump administration is accelerating that erosion.

“The latest effort by the Trump administration to dismantle our nation’s public education system is simply abhorrent,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Stripping civil rights protections from millions of students while calling for public dollars to be funneled to religious schools is nothing more than the systematic dismantling of constitutional protections.”

Public schools are secular, open and accountable to all. FFRF will not stand by while that is broken.

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 questions Auburn University coach-led prayers and ‘Jesus’ uniforms

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is demanding that Auburn University stop suffusing its men’s baseball program with religion. 

A concerned Auburn University family member has informed the state/church watchdog that the Auburn men’s baseball team has Latin crosses on the backs of their new uniforms and “Jesus Won” written on the front. Additionally, both the Auburn baseball team Facebook page and the official Auburn Tigers fan group have posted a video and a photo, respectively, of the Auburn men’s baseball team being led in prayer by what appears to be the coach.

The family member who brought the situation to FFRF’s attention expressed concerns about the coercive pressure the players may be under to participate in team prayers and wear religious uniforms. They observed that non-Christian students would likely feel out of place and unable to refuse the coach’s expectations for players to kneel and pray or wear team gear with the cross and “Jesus” written on it. 

Notably, this is not FFRF’s first time contacting Auburn University over unconstitutional entanglement of religion and sports, and this is not the first time Auburn University has prioritized religious practice over students’ rights. In 2015, FFRF published its “Pray to Play” report, which heavily features abuses at Auburn. The report details how universities like Auburn have allowed their football coaches to impose their personal religious beliefs on players via the hiring of Christian chaplains. FFRF wrote to Auburn again in 2018 regarding football Chaplain Chette Williams, a university-employed chaplain who has proselytized and prayed with the football team. Finally, in 2023, FFRF wrote to the university after learning that multiple coaches had promoted a religious event where the head football coach had baptized a player. 

FFRF is once again asking that Auburn University respect students’ First Amendment rights — by ceasing the usage of religious symbols and messaging on uniforms, and by the baseball team coach refraining from leading players in prayer.

These actions amount to official university favoritism toward religion over nonreligion, and Christianity over all other faiths. The religious uniforms and coach-led prayer also risk unconstitutionally coercing players into wearing religious symbols and participating in prayer. Men’s baseball team players who wish to maintain their standing on the team and continue to have access to scholarships and other benefits of playing college sports will no doubt feel that going along with what the coaching staff wants is essential to being viewed favorably by their coaches and team. Players will not feel free to refuse to wear religious uniforms or to refuse to participate in prayer, for fear of retaliation or of losing their place on the team.

University employees are free to pray privately or to worship on their own time in their own way. Entangling the university’s sports teams with Christianity needlessly marginalizes students and players part of the nearly one in three Americans who now identify as religiously unaffiliated. In addition, more than half of Generation Z (those born after 1996) are not Christian, with a recent survey revealing that almost half of Gen Z identify as religiously unaffiliated.

“Auburn University continues an upsetting and concerning trend of allowing athletics coaches to proselytize student-athletes with seemingly no real consequences,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “There are undoubtedly students who are too afraid to speak up about representing a religion that they are actually not a part of. They are owed an explanation as to why their rights are consistently being sidelined.”

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, 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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