Trinity Macarthur

TRINITY MACARTHUR is currently a legal intern with FFRF for the summer of 2026. She is from Colorado and received a BA in history and political science from CU Boulder. She is currently attending Penn State Dickinson Law, University Park and will serve as the Executive Research Editor for the Penn State Dickinson Law Review next year. Trinity enjoys reading, going to see orchestras play, and nice, cool weather.

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Red Pen Logic Called This Atheist Argument Incoherent… He Was Wrong

Lisa Treu

LISA TREU is the Director of First Impressions at FFRF.  She comes to us after working in broadcasting for iHeart Radio in Madison, Wisconsin.  She hosted various radio programs for fifteen years.  Lisa and her husband ran their own Birdhouse/Birdfeeder manufacturing company called Northwoods Mfg., Inc. during the 1990’s where she had her own line of decorative birdhouses that she designed and painted herself.  Lisa is the wife of Harry and is the mother of twin daughters Katrina and Karinthia.  In her spare time she enjoys reading, painting, gardening, feeding the birds, getting silly with her daughters and lounging with her two cats.

Photo by Chris Line. 

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Tira Alvarez

TIRA ALVAREZ is a legal intern at FFRF. She grew up in New Jersey and got her B.A. in political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison in 2024. After taking a year off, Tira returned to Madison to begin law school at the University of Wisconsin. Since starting law school, she has joined Moot Court, the Neighborhood Law Clinic, and serves as Co-President for the First Generation Lawyers student organization.

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Paul Wuller

PAUL WULLER is a junior Pre-law Scholar at SMU in Dallas studying Political Science with minors in Philosophy and Law and Legal Reasoning. He discovered debate in middle school and moot court in high school, which sparked his interest in argumentation and constitutional law. Attending a Catholic college for a year before transferring led him to realize that, within constitutional law, he is most passionate about maintaining the separation of state and church and preventing indoctrination.

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Freethought Radio – May 28, 2026

What to do about religion at graduation ceremonies? FFRF State Policy Manager Ryan Dudley gives a roundup of state legislative actions this past spring. Then, Harvard student Ash Bu talks about her op-ed in The Crimson newspaper asking, “Where Are All the Atheists Hiding?”

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FFRF examining reports of House speaker’s midterm coordination with churches

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is scrutinizing disturbing reports of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s coordinated political activity with pastors ahead of the midterm elections.

As first reported by Right Wing Watch, Christian nationalist evangelist David Herzog revealed during a recent appearance on the “Elijah Streams” program that pastors attending the Trump administration’s “National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving” event on the National Mall were invited to a private briefing with Johnson and MAGA pastor Lorenzo Sewell. According to Herzog, Johnson urged the pastors to politically mobilize their congregations in support of the administration’s agenda and Republican midterm election efforts, stressing that churches and religious leaders were essential to advancing the movement’s goals.

Herzog described Johnson as telling pastors that churches and religious leaders would make the “difference” in determining whether the country “is going to go one way or the other” and emphasized the need for churches to “spread” the Trump administration’s message and mobilize the vote to preserve President Trump’s political power.

If his claims are accurate, this raises profound constitutional and legal concerns.

“The federal government may not use official events, public resources or political access to organize churches as partisan campaign machines,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Herzog describes the man who is third in line to be president as essentially promising select Christian churches the fulfillment of their Christian nationalist dreams if they can deliver in the midterms.”

Also alarming are Herzog’s claims that administration officials promised pastors access to “billions of dollars” in government funding for church-run programs. Those remarks come amid a broader push by the Trump administration to steer taxpayer-funded social services through religious organizations, including recent efforts by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to recruit faith-based groups for federally funded addiction and behavioral health programs.

“Directing taxpayer money to politically aligned churches while encouraging them to function as electoral organizing hubs represents a dangerous fusion of church and state,” says FFRF Legal Director Patrick Elliott. “Americans should be deeply troubled by any effort to transform houses of worship into government-favored political actors.”

Herzog additionally framed the effort as part of a broader campaign to preserve Christian nationalist political control, warning pastors about Democrats taking power and invoking inflammatory rhetoric about Muslims and “Sharia law.” He described the administration as handing churches “the baton” to advance Trump’s agenda.

FFRF is currently evaluating the potential legal and constitutional implications of the reported activities, including possible violations involving partisan political coordination, misuse of government resources, preferential treatment of religious organizations and threats to church-state separation.

The federal government serves and should represent all Americans, not just conservative Christians. Using religion as a political weapon undermines both democracy and religious liberty.

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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Christian Nationalists made a movie about “anti-Christian bias” by the government

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About a month ago, when the White House’s ridiculously named “Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias” released its final report summarizing all the ways Christians are persecuted in America, I wrote about how the whole thing was a joke because there were no serious examples of persecution in it.

But in case you didn’t read that article, don’t worry! Christian Nationalists are already releasing a documentary based on the report’s findings.

It’s called “By Dawn’s Early Light” and it’s yet another attempt to link the founding of the country to the fictional attacks on Christianity today.

On February 6, 2025, Donald J. Trump signed Executive Order 14202, establishing a federal task force to identify and address anti-Christian bias within government agencies. By Dawn’s Early Light examines the origins, findings, and actions of this Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, presenting its work as a modern effort to confront perceived threats to religious liberty. Through interviews, historical context, and investigative storytelling, the film explores both the challenges identified and the measures proposed to strengthen protections—framing the effort as part of an ongoing pursuit to ensure that the freedoms fought for in earlier generations endure into the future.

The trailer alone looks like a grotesque distortion of “God’s Not Dead,” which was already a grotesque distortion of reality. (I’m not even joking. In this version, Kevin Sorbo’s wife makes an appearance.)

That movie was famous for exaggerating something that never happens in a classroom: A professor openly mocking a Christian student for his beliefs until eventually (spoiler!) the professor embraces Jesus. This film takes snippets from the Task Force’s final report and blows them out of proportion the same way.

Here’s how the right-wing ACLJ describes one of those incidents:

One of the featured stories in the film centers on the ACLJ’s landmark federal lawsuit against the Smithsonian Institution after Catholic students attending the March for Life were told they could not enter the National Air and Space Museum while wearing “Rosary PRO-LIFE” hats. Security officers mocked the students, spewed profanity at minors, and informed them that the First Amendment “does not apply here.”

The ACLJ took the case to federal court.

The result was one of the largest publicly reported settlements against the federal government in a First Amendment case.

Let’s suppose all of that is true. That means, at worst, this example of outrageous persecution involved some security guards who didn’t understand that people are allowed to wear clothing that features religious or political speech. When the Smithsonian settled the case, they specifically admitted no fault and said their goal was “avoiding the expenses and risks of further litigation.”

That’s apparently the sort of “anti-Christian bias” that’s strong enough to make it in the film. It’s no different than if Jeff Bezos whined about “anti-billionaire” discrimination because people made fun of his dumb yacht.

If there were serious examples of government bias against Christians, they might have had a compelling movie. But because that’s not a real problem in our society, they don’t. It’s the same reason Christian “victories” in the Supreme Court tend to involve situations like a baker having to sell a cake for a same-sex wedding or a public high school coach demanding a special right to pray in the middle of a football field where everyone can see him because it won’t count if he prays silently or privately.

Imagine watching a documentary about how tough it is to be a white male in America, and you probably have a sense of what this move will be.

There are people who are systemically, repeatedly, and currently persecuted by the government. They’re not the white guys and they’re not Christians. But some Catholic students were told by a couple of misguided cops not to wear their anti-abortion hats at a federal museum this one time… so it’s the same thing, really.

And because Trump’s Cabinet doesn’t have real work to do, nearly all of them sit down for interviews in this piece of propaganda:

The film was screened at the Kennedy Center earlier this month, but it’ll be released online on May 31. And then, because there’s no actual story worth listening to here, it’ll be quickly forgotten by the following week.

Christians in America aren’t going to jail because of their beliefs. They aren’t banned from seeking public office. They dominate Congress, the Supreme Court, state legislatures, local governments, and virtually every major institution of political power. Christians have it so damn good that Trump literally created a federal task force devoted exclusively to protecting the Christian majority from the tyranny of not getting every single thing they ever want (something no genuinely oppressed group would ever receive from the most powerful government on Earth).

And yet these people still want audiences to believe Christians need to huddle together as part of some underground resistance movement because some museum guard made rude comments one day.

There’s a reason movies like this keep getting made. It’s not because Christians are persecuted, but rather because Christian Nationalism requires a permanent sense of victimhood. If you can convince ignorant people they’re always under attack, that makes it much easier to dominate public life. Taking over school boards isn’t an act of aggression; it’s necessary defense against Christian persecution! Posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms isn’t about pushing faith on others; it’s reminding the country about our religious origins! They’re going to keep pretending Christians are victims of persecution until they’ve erased church-state separation entirely.

But if you examine any of this below surface level—something the conservative Christian crowd never does—you realize how thin the premise is.

The people who claim to be persecuted by the government held the film’s premiere at the Kennedy Center, which the government, staffed almost entirely by conservative Christians, took over. That alone should prove they have no basis for the film.

It’s no surprise they’re doing this, though. More Americans are rejecting the idea that Christianity deserves special treatment from the government, and when you think religious neutrality amounts to oppression, you’ll do anything to pretend you’re victims.

FFRF halts teacher-led Christian club at Indiana high school

The Freedom From Religion Foundation has made certain that the Mooresville Schools system in Indiana has ended an instructor-led religious club known as “BetterMan.”

A concerned member of the community informed FFRF that the school’s choir director had started a “BetterMan study” for Mooresville High School students. According to its website, BetterMan is “a Christian organization” that provides “an 11-week group study on the essentials of biblical manhood and how men can live it out at home, at work, with friends and with God.” The group’s guide for leaders makes clear the program is intended to convert participants to Christianity: “True transformation will come from God working in men’s lives. The Gospel will be clearly shared after Session 6 and that is a great opportunity to make sure you know where each guy in your group is with Jesus. Call any man who lacks faith to believe in Him!” 

FFRF communicated with the school district asking for an investigation and to ensure that none of its staff members were unconstitutionally sponsoring religious activities in its schools. “To avoid encouraging or coercing students into participating in a religious club, the district may not allow staff to be involved in student religious clubs beyond a supervisory capacity,” FFRF Staff Attorney Madeline Ziegler wrote to Superintendent Jake Allen.

It is inappropriate and unconstitutional for the district to allow staff-led religious clubs, FFRF emphasized in its letter. Public schools may not show favoritism toward, or coerce belief in or participation in, religion. It is both inappropriate and unconstitutional for public school teachers to promote, lead and organize a religious club for students and use their position at a public school to attempt to convert their students to their personal religion. This not only violates the First Amendment rights of students, but it also needlessly alienates all students and families who do not subscribe to Christianity, including the more than half of Generation Z members (those born after 1996) who are non-Christian, including the 43 percent who are nonreligious.

Allen emailed FFRF back with a positive response after the district conducted a review of the matter to bring itself back into alignment with the First Amendment. 

“As part of that review, district administration met with the staff member referenced in your correspondence and provided clear direction regarding the constitutional and legal limitations applicable to employee involvement in student religious activities,” Allen wrote. “Specifically, staff members were reminded that any student religious organizations or gatherings on school grounds must be student-initiated and student-led, and that employees may only be present in a nonparticipator supervisory capacity consistent with federal law and district expectations.”

FFRF is pleased to see its dedication to students’ rights pay off once again.

“We firmly believe that students do not need biblical teaching to make them ‘better’ people,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor says. “But students who desire such instruction are free to seek it from their families and churches. What students need in our public schools is a learning environment free from preaching and welcoming to all, religious and nonreligious alike.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with over 41,000 members across the country, including more than 600 members in Indiana. Its purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.

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