Judges on the highest court in Maine likely picked a fight with the U.S. Supreme Court when they unanimously granted an atheist father sole authority over the religious upbringing of the daughter he shares with her Christian mother.
A custody battle in Maine has become something much bigger than a disagreement between two parents. It has become a test of what happens when a court decides which parent gets to shape a child’s deepest beliefs about God, morality, eternity, and the meaning of life.
Last week, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court unanimously upheld a lower court ruling granting Matthew Bradeen final decision-making authority over the religious upbringing of the daughter he shares with Emily Bickford.
Bickford, a Christian, has been banned from taking her daughter to church for nearly two years.
Bradeen, an atheist who was never married to Bickford, claimed that his daughter had developed anxiety as a result of the teachings she heard at Calvary Chapel Greater Portland, particularly those regarding the Second Coming and the messages about her father’s eternal destiny.
The Maine Supreme Judicial Court stated that the order was made on the grounds of what was in the child’s “best interests,” concluding that Bradeen “is better able to weigh the child’s participation in religious activities ‘objectively and with her safety and wellbeing in mind’” than Bickford.
They ruled this even though the lower court found that “there has been no showing of harm” associated with a biblical belief system.
According to Liberty Counsel, which represents Bickford, the order also gives Bradeen sole responsibility over whether or not his teenaged daughter, who professes to be a Christian and has been baptized, can even participate in religious activities, including reading the Bible.
“This opinion rejects the First Amendment right of a fit parent to raise her child consistent with her Christian faith,” said Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver. “This opinion goes against other state court decisions involving custody in the context of religious free exercise rights and ignores precedent from the U.S. Supreme Court. We will ask the High Court to take this case and overrule the decision.
Hopefully, the Supreme Court will quickly take up Bickford’s case, but in the meantime, this ruling should be a five-alarm wake-up call for all Christians — and all Americans. And that’s because Christianity is no longer only being banned in the public square; it’s being banned in the home.
Atheism and Secularism Are Not Neutral
At the center of this case is a problem American culture repeatedly refuses to acknowledge: There is no worldview-neutral way to raise a child.
Christianity makes claims about reality. It teaches that God exists, human beings are created in His image, sin exists, there is objective morality, humanity is fallen, Christ died and rose again to redeem sinners, and every person will ultimately stand before God to answer for their actions and decisions.
But rejecting those propositions is not the absence of a worldview. Telling a child there is no God, or that we cannot know whether God exists, is a claim about reality. Teaching that morality can be constructed apart from God is a moral philosophy. Teaching that death is the end of human existence answers an existential question just as surely as teaching about heaven does.
In other words, atheism is not neutral simply because it has no church building or written doctrinal statement.
This matters because courts can easily fall into the trap of treating religion as an addition to an otherwise neutral life. Under that framework, Bible study or church attendance becomes “religious exposure,” while life without any religious belief becomes the default.
But there is no default. Every child is being formed. Every parent passes along beliefs, explicitly or implicitly, about truth, morality, the origin of life, sexuality, human dignity, death, purpose, and God.
The question is not whether children will receive a worldview. The question is which worldview they will receive and who gets to teach it.
The End Game of Religious “Neutrality”
A state court censoring a Christian mother in her own home extends far beyond one custody case. For decades, American institutions have increasingly pushed Christianity out of public life in the name of neutrality. Biblical morality was supposedly being replaced not by another worldview but by a religiously neutral public square.
That notion has proven impossible in reality. As history has shown time and again, when Christianity retreats, something always fills the vacuum; in America, that something has been secular humanism.
Our culture still constantly makes moral judgments. It still declares some behaviors virtuous and other behaviors unacceptable. It still has doctrines about human identity, sexuality, justice, equality, freedom, and the meaning and origin of life.
The difference is that those doctrines are increasingly detached from an objective moral authority transcending the individual or even the state.
The results surround us: confusion about basic human identity, radically different definitions of right and wrong, collapsing trust in institutions, and an increasingly widespread assumption that truth itself is subjective.
Christians should not be surprised. If every person becomes the final authority on truth, there can eventually be no common understanding of truth.
Judges therefore need to be especially cautious when adjudicating religious disputes between parents. The state cannot solve the problem by quietly treating atheism and secularism as the neutral position and religion as the deviation requiring special permission.
A Parental Rights Dilemma
Both Bickford and Bradeen are parents. Both have parental interests. Their daughter cannot simultaneously be raised to believe Christianity is true and that its fundamental claims are false without encountering tension.
Whose beliefs win? In one sense, this is a modern version of Solomon’s dilemma (1 Kings 3:16–28). The state has been asked to divide something that cannot easily be divided: the spiritual formation of a child. That is precisely why the extent of this order is so troubling.
The Maine Supreme Judicial Court concluded that the “best interest of the child” can apply even when religion is involved. But the legal standard of “best interest” is being wielded to take a position on basic religious questions.
Who determines whether belief in hell is psychologically harmful? What about belief in judgment, sin, or the salvation found only in Christ? Jesus Himself spoke about judgment and eternal punishment. Christianity cannot be reduced to only those doctrines that a court finds emotionally comfortable, like love your neighbor and care for the poor.
And when courts start to evaluate religious upbringing by applying a general standard of what is in a child’s best interests without accounting for a parent’s God-given rights and constitutional protections to believe in Christianity and teach those to her children, exactly where is the family and American society going to end up?
Why Christians Cannot Water Down the Bible
There is also an uncomfortable lesson here for the Church. Christians must take Scripture’s commands — and warnings — concerning marriage, sex, and family seriously.
For example, Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 6:14 (NKJV), “Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers.”
That principle has strong practical consequences generally, but especially so when children enter the picture. Bickford and Bradeen were never married. Their dispute is now forcing their daughter to navigate different approaches to life’s most important questions.
Christians should understand that sexual relationships are never only private choices between two adults; children will bear the consequences of their actions.
This issue also extends beyond one family. Americans need clarity about the constitutional limits on a court’s power to restrict a parent’s religious instruction of his or her child. They also need clarity about whether the government may effectively treat atheism as the default when parents disagree about faith.
The First Amendment guarantees the free exercise of religion, but it also prohibits the establishment of a government-mandated religion. As explained earlier, secular humanism is a religion and increasingly state legislatures, schools, and courts are forcing it on all Americans — and especially Christians.
We should also pray for this young girl. The spiritual questions raised by this legal battle will remain part of her life for years.
The Bible teaches, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). That verse does not promise parents an easy road, but it reminds us that spiritual formation matters not just during childhood but for an entire lifetime.
And that is exactly why Christians should pray that the Supreme Court will agree to hear this case and hear it quickly. For if Christian parents can be banned from sharing their beliefs and values with their children in their own home, then America will no longer be America.
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