Court Tries to Give God a Restraining Order

We usually muddle through with our First Amendment and our legislatures, but occasionally there is a reminder that our system was built on the ruins of Christian civilization — the painful and fratricidal breakup of the Western Church, the series of compromises that emerged from it, and the controversies those compromises would entail. Inadvertently, the courts remind us that, in fact, the law cannot quite corral religion into its neat categories.

Look no further than the Maine Supreme Court’s recent ruling upholding a custody order that prohibits Emily Bickford from taking her 13-year-old daughter to Calvary Church in Portland, Maine, or to any religious organization or event, or to “expose her” to any “religious philosophy or the Bible in general.” The father argued that the church was a “dangerous and harmful environment” that had caused his daughter to suffer anxiety after she heard the church’s teachings on the Rapture. The lower court ruled that the church’s language was in fact “psychologically damaging the child” because of how it characterized the father’s own nonbelief. While the court held that both parents must “share parental rights and responsibilities,” only the girl’s father, it decreed, would be allowed to decide questions of whether she could interact with any church members other than her mother.

About the Author

Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

Featured Tags

We usually muddle through with our First Amendment and our legislatures, but occasionally there is a reminder that our system was built on the ruins of Christian civilization — the painful and fratricidal breakup of the Western Church, the series of compromises that emerged from it, and the controversies those compromises would entail. Inadvertently, the courts remind us that, in fact, the law cannot quite corral religion into its neat categories.

Look no further than the Maine Supreme Court’s recent ruling upholding a custody order that prohibits Emily Bickford from taking her 13-year-old daughter to Calvary Church in Portland, Maine, or to any religious organization or event, or to “expose her” to any “religious philosophy or the Bible in general.” The father argued that the church was a “dangerous and harmful environment” that had caused his daughter to suffer anxiety after she heard the church’s teachings on the Rapture. The lower court ruled that the church’s language was in fact “psychologically damaging the child” because of how it characterized the father’s own nonbelief. While the court held that both parents must “share parental rights and responsibilities,” only the girl’s father, it decreed, would be allowed to decide questions of whether she could interact with any church members other than her mother.