In Maine, a mother—Emily Bickford—now finds herself living inside a constitutional nightmare. A lower-court custody ruling prohibits her from taking her 12-year-old daughter to church, from reading her the Bible, and from letting her interact with members of the congregation the mother attends. This is not a case of abuse. Not neglect. Not danger or harm. The mother is considered fit and capable by the court’s own standards—except, it would seem, when it comes to the audacity of wanting to raise her child in her Christian faith.
The court’s order effectively sidesteps and nullifies one of the most established rights in American jurisprudence: a parent’s fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their child. The Supreme Court recognized this generations ago in Troxel v. Granville, affirming that parents have a constitutional liberty interest “in the care, custody, and control of their children.” But the judge in this case decided that the father has unilateral veto power over the daughter’s religious life—granting him the sole authority to decide whether she may set foot inside a church. That is not merely a custody stipulation. That is the government inserting itself between a mother and her child in the most intimate of spaces: the forming of faith.
And faith is not a leisure activity. It is not a hobby subject to cancellation. It is a protected right. The First Amendment guarantees not just freedom to believe privately, but freedom to live out that belief publicly—and to pass it to the next generation. When a judge suppresses a mother’s ability to worship with her child, read Scripture to her child, or allow her child to build relationships with peers in the congregation, that judge has crossed the bright line separating civil authority from spiritual calling.
The order treats orthodox Christianity like contraband. A judge, armed with hearsay and the father’s objections, labeled the church a “cult,” claimed attendance created psychological distress, and presupposed that Scripture itself is harmful. The panic attack of a pre-teen wrestling with questions about eternity is now considered grounds for banning religious exposure altogether? If that standard were applied broadly, every child who has ever asked what death means, why suffering exists, or whether heaven is real would be deemed endangered by theology. It is absurd on its face. It is unconstitutional in its impact. And it is terrifying in its precedent.
What exactly is the compelling state interest here? Where is the demonstrable harm? There is none. None. Yet the state has rewarded itself sweeping authority—prohibiting Bible reading, forbidding holiday services, eliminating peer fellowship, and silencing spiritual discussion. If the Constitution means anything, it means the government must not weaponize custody disputes to quarantine faith.
But this situation goes beyond constitutional language. It strikes at the core meaning of parenthood itself.
The calling of a parent is not merely to feed, clothe, and shelter a child physically. Parenting is the forming of character, conscience, and conviction. It is preparing the next generation to stand, to discern truth from deception, to know hope from despair, to navigate eternity as well as time. If a mother is a believing Christian, then part of her sacred responsibility before God is to guide her child spiritually—not force, not coerce, but guide, nurture, teach, and love that child toward the truth of Christ.
For the faithful, church isn’t a club—it is the ground of purpose and the gateway to salvation. If Christianity is true, then a believing parent is duty-bound to help lead her child to Christ, to steward her heart, to secure her soul. To obstruct that is not neutrality; it is hostility. It is the state declaring that a child’s spiritual welfare counts for nothing. It is a judge telling a mother that eternity is irrelevant.
And the argument must be made plainly: the court is not equipped to decide what churches are good or bad, which doctrines are legitimate, or which faith practices are emotionally acceptable. That authority does not belong to any judge, anywhere, under any system worthy of liberty.
There is one more dimension left unexplored: the living testimony of parenting in faith. In my own life as a father, I watched with quiet pride as each of my children—over time, and of their own accord—came to me when they felt conviction stirring inside them and asked to publicly profess their faith in Jesus. I did not script the moment. I did not schedule it. I did not manipulate it. I simply opened the scriptures, prayed with them, walked with them into the community of believers, and let God do what only God can do.
Faith is a gift a parent gives to a child. But when it becomes their belief, when their voice trembles with sincerity and they step forward unprompted—God gives a gift back to the parent. Joy. Gratitude. Awe. A glimpse of eternity unfolding in real time.
The courts have zero business interfering with that sacred process. None.
This ruling must be overturned—not for one mother and one daughter alone, but for every parent who believes that raising a child includes preparing them for more than just the next 70 years. It means preparing them for forever.
And no court on earth has jurisdiction over forever.
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