Maine Weighed the Gospel and Called It Neutral

On September 1, 2026, the Supreme Judicial Court of Maine affirmed a custody order in Bickford v. Bradeen, 2026 ME 94. The order gives Matthew Bradeen sole authority over his daughter’s involvement with Calvary Chapel Greater Portland, the church her mother, Emily Bickford, attends. For any other church or religious body the parents must research it together, and when they disagree the father decides. The six justices who heard the appeal were unanimous. Liberty Counsel, which represents the mother, has announced that it will petition the Supreme Court of the United States.

Much of what has circulated about the case goes beyond the record. The order does not forbid the Bible, and the trial court found “no showing of harm to [the child] associated with a belief system that is rooted in the Bible.” The case is grave enough as the record states it, and it should be judged from the opinion.

What the court weighed

The daughter was born in January 2013. That year her parents, who never married according to Joshua Arnold’s reporting in The Washington Stand, agreed to an order that shared parental rights and required major decisions to be reached “jointly, whenever possible.” In May 2021 the mother began attending Calvary Chapel, having come to faith by her own account, and brought the girl to multiple services a week. That September the father asked the court for sole authority over the child’s religious upbringing.

The trial court found that the girl asked her father why he and his other child “would not be in Heaven with her,” that she left notes around his house “because she fears that the Second Coming is approaching and that Bradeen will be left behind,” and that she “has experienced panic attacks related to these topics.” The pastor testified to sermons on hell, “wailing and gnashing of teeth” and “burning and torment,” and on “seven years of … pure hell on earth under the persecution of … the Antichrist.” At the opening of an evening service on the first day of the hearing, he prayed over the family, naming them almost thirty times. He prayed for the father’s salvation, spoke of “the level of persecution that [the child] is dealing with,” and asked God to “bring to nothing the plans and the snares and the tricks of the enemy.”

The court found that the mother had exposed the child to messaging “that her father is going to burn and suffer for eternity,” and to messaging that cast her father as persecuting her, as seeking to dismantle her faith, and as an enemy whose tricks and snares she must avoid. It found the mother “unwilling to recognize, much less mitigate,” the risk those messages posed to the child’s bond with her father. It found that she had kept parts of the child’s church life from him, including a political rally with church members during a school day and an overnight church retreat he learned of from the church’s Facebook page. He learned of his daughter’s scheduled baptism from a third party, and when he called about it, she put him on speakerphone in front of the child.

The high court affirmed. It held that a court may allocate authority between two parents by the child’s best interest, without the strict scrutiny that governs the state’s own burdens on religion. It quoted the rule that the Constitution mandates “governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.” It said the trial court had found “that it is harmful for a child to hear negative and frightening messages about one parent from the other parent,” and that the findings behind the order did not depend on the substance of the mother’s religious views.

The warning the court counted as harm

The court rested its order on the harm of a child hearing frightening messages about one parent from the other. Christ warned that a father will deliver up his child and that a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household (Matthew 10:21, 36), so a father can become his child’s persecutor, and a church that says so may be telling the truth. Whether this father has become one, the record does not settle. He went to court after his daughter’s panic attacks, and the report that he has kept her from every church remains unconfirmed. The court’s list of harmful messages begins with the warning “that her father is going to burn and suffer for eternity,” and the high court adopted that list when it affirmed. A belief system rooted in the Bible did the child no harm, by the trial court’s own finding. The Bible’s warning, applied to her father, was counted among the harms.

That is a theological judgment, whatever else was bundled with it. A court that counts the warning as harm has decided that it is false, or that a child ought not to believe it about her own father. If the warning is true, a church that tells a girl her father needs salvation has told her the truest thing that can be said about him. God set Ezekiel as a watchman over Israel and told him that a watchman who keeps silent while the wicked man walks toward death will answer for that man’s blood (Ezekiel 33:7-9). Paul wrote of his kinsmen who rejected Christ, “I have great sorrow and unceasing grief in my heart” (Romans 9:2 LSB), and again, “my heart’s desire and my prayer to God for them is for their salvation” (Romans 10:1 LSB). A girl who sorrows for a father she believes is lost sorrows as the apostle sorrowed. What the court recorded was panic, and the notes she left spoke of a Second Coming that would leave her father behind. Sorrow for the lost is the fruit of the gospel. Panic over a sudden disappearance is the fruit of a particular eschatology, and the two must be kept apart.

Christ said, “He who is not with Me is against Me” (Matthew 12:30 LSB). A judge who counts among a child’s harms the warning that her father stands under God’s judgment has ruled on what the gospel may say to a child about her own father, and he has ruled with the power of the state. I have written before on the lie of secular neutrality, and Maine has supplied a case of it. The court claimed to stand between religion and nonreligion, and its list of harms took a side.

What the church and the mother gave the court

The record shows a church and a mother who handed the court much of its evidence, and the case cannot be argued honestly without saying so.

The prayer’s own words aim “enemy” at the one who seeks to “crush and quench and strangle the church,” which in the speech of the church is the devil, and Paul locates the struggle there:

“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12 LSB).

The trial judge, who heard the pastor testify, found that he consistently characterizes those who challenge the church, the father among them, as the enemy, and the finding stood on appeal. Whatever the pastor meant, he said it over the family by name while the court was sitting, and he spoke of the girl’s “persecution” while her father’s motion was being heard. A church may pray for such a man by name, and it must tell his daughter that he needs Christ. Whether or not the word persecution fit, speaking it over the family by name on the first day of the hearing failed to walk in wisdom toward outsiders (Colossians 4:5), and the court turned it against the mother.

The trial court complained that the church’s messaging “divides [the child] from her father,” and Christ’s own words press against that complaint. He said that He came to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother, and that a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household (Matthew 10:34-36). Division that the gospel causes belongs to Christ, and no court may count it as an injury. Division that a pulpit adds, by naming a father an enemy before his case is decided, belongs to the pulpit.

The child also needed to hear that she owes her father honor. The commandment says, “Honor your father and your mother” (Exodus 20:12 LSB), and it names no exception for a father outside the faith. A daughter taught both the warning of the gospel and the fifth commandment prays for her father and honors him, and a court can find nothing in her to call alienation.

The sermon on the Antichrist’s seven years and the fear that her father would be left behind belong to dispensationalism and its pretribulational rapture, which teaches that the church will be taken from the world before seven years of tribulation and that the age will darken until she is gone. The system postpones to a future millennium the reign Christ claimed when He rose, and so it disbelieves His promise in its present tense. The risen Christ said, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28:18 LSB). The Father said to the Son, “Sit at My right hand / Until I put Your enemies as a footstool for Your feet” (Psalm 110:1 LSB), and Paul wrote, “For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet” (1 Corinthians 15:25 LSB). A child taught that Christ reigns now and that His gospel will fill the earth fears hell as she should and prays for her father in hope. A child taught that she may vanish any day and leave her father behind leaves notes around his house. The doctrine of hell stands in either case. The panic the court recorded came in large part from a false eschatology, and the churches that teach it bear that part.

The mother bears her own part. The record charges her with keeping parts of the child’s church life from the father and with putting him on speakerphone in front of the child when he called about the baptism. Her daughter is holy as the child of a believing parent (1 Corinthians 7:14), and on the Reformed confession such a child is to receive the sign of the covenant (Westminster Confession 28.4), so the father had no standing before God to deny her baptism. He did have standing to be told, and he could lawfully refuse a particular church. The mother had agreed to reach major decisions with him “jointly, whenever possible.” The man who may dwell on God’s holy mountain “swears to his own hurt and does not change” (Psalm 15:4 LSB), and he keeps his word unless keeping it would require sin. Telling a father before his daughter’s baptism requires none.

She also testified that she would not do anything “contrary to what God wants [her] to do,” even if a court order required it, and her pastor testified that “the Word of God supersedes the law of the land and of the courts.” Both statements are true as they stand, and the apostles said the same before the Sanhedrin. The high court recast them as a declaration that the mother and the pastor “would simply disobey any court order with which they disagreed,” and it used that reading to call the order narrowly tailored. The recasting is the court’s error. A Christian’s conscience is bound by what God commands, and disagreement alone binds it to nothing. The apostles’ answer covers an order that requires sin, and the mother and her church needed to make that limit plain before a court that was listening for defiance.

What God’s law settles

The court asked whose authority governs the child’s religion and answered with its own judgment of her best interest. God’s law answers it otherwise.

A father holds real authority over a daughter in his house, including authority over her religious undertakings. Under the law, a father who heard his daughter’s vow could annul it on the day he heard it, and Yahweh would pardon her (Numbers 30:3-5). That authority stops at God’s command. A vow is voluntary, and Moses says that a man who refrains from vowing commits no sin (Deuteronomy 23:22). The worship of God and instruction in His Word are commanded. To fathers Paul writes, “bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4 LSB). To the household Moses says, “You shall teach them diligently to your sons” (Deuteronomy 6:7 LSB). The son in Proverbs is told, “Hear, my son, your father’s discipline / And do not abandon your mother’s instruction” (Proverbs 1:8 LSB), and his mother’s teaching carries an authority of its own. The Westminster Larger Catechism requires of inferiors “willing obedience to their lawful commands and counsels” (Q. 127), and it counts among the sins of superiors “dissuading, discouraging, or discountenancing them in that which is good” (Q. 130). Where men forbid what God commands, the apostles’ answer stands: “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29 LSB).

A father may lawfully choose which church his child attends, and a father who kept his daughter from a dispensational pulpit would use his authority well. A father who uses his authority to keep his daughter from the worship of God altogether sins against her and against God. Arnold, in a column republished by The Daily Signal, reported that the girl has not been allowed to gather with any church since December 2024. The opinion does not say so, and I cannot confirm it. If it is true, the father’s sin is plain.

The mother’s duty survives the order. The order’s text reaches one congregation and the joint decision about other churches and their teachings. It says nothing of the home, and the opinion does not address it. On its face it leaves her free to pray with her daughter and to open the Scriptures with her, and she must keep teaching her daughter. Acts 5:29 governs the day a court forbids that teaching, as it governed Enoch Burke’s refusal in Ireland. Maine’s record shows no such order, and the case must be judged by the order that exists.

The limits of the church and the magistrate

Neither the church nor the state may cure this by punishing the father. Paul asks, “For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Are you not to judge those who are within the church?” and answers, “But those who are outside, God will judge” (1 Corinthians 5:12-13 LSB). The church owes a man outside her walls the gospel and her prayers. Her discipline reaches her own members, and in this case it reaches the counsel she gives a mother and the conduct of her own pulpit.

Paul calls the governing authority “a minister of God to you for good” (Romans 13:4 LSB), and God defines the good it serves. God’s law sets no civil penalty on a father who fails to bring his children to worship, and that command carries a sanction God keeps for Himself. Maine had no warrant to punish this father. The father’s authority is God’s gift and runs no further than God’s command. Maine claimed to confer it, which it cannot do, and conferred it without the bound God set on it, which it may not do. A magistrate who places the power of the state in one parent’s hand, where it can be used to keep a child from the worship of God, has made himself the judge of that child’s religion, and a neutral state claims never to hold that office.

Caesar’s law and God’s law

Liberty Counsel argues that the order violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments and the right of a fit parent to raise her child in her faith. A Christian may plead the law of the land. Paul invoked his Roman citizenship against the magistrates at Philippi (Acts 16:37) and appealed to Caesar (Acts 25:11). A brief before a court argues the law its judges have sworn to apply.

The argument from rights carries a weakness, and the Maine court found it. If each parent holds an equal right and the state stands neutral between them, two equal sovereigns disagree and nothing breaks the tie except the state. The court reasoned that way, holding that a court may allocate authority between two parents by the best-interest standard alone. Liberty Counsel and the court share the premise of neutrality, and on that premise the mother lost.

God’s law supplies what the language of rights lacks. A parent’s duty to teach a child the Word is a command of God, and no court can release a parent from it. A father’s authority is real and bounded by God’s command. A magistrate’s authority is delegated and answers to the God who gave it. The state may recognize a right or withdraw its recognition, and it has no power over a duty. Paul pleaded his citizenship, and he also reasoned before Felix about “righteousness, self-control, and the judgment to come” until “Felix became frightened” (Acts 24:25 LSB). The petition to Washington will carry the First Amendment. The men who carry it owe the judges of Maine, and the justices who read it, the word Paul gave Felix. The neutrality they claim does not exist, and they will answer to the Son.

The office of the head

God’s law binds a man who lies with an unbetrothed virgin to the covenant of marriage:

“If a man seduces a virgin who is not engaged and lies with her, he must pay a dowry for her to be his wife. If her father absolutely refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equal to the dowry for virgins” (Exodus 22:16-17 LSB).

The law lays the cost on the man, and it places the household under a head before there is a child to contend over. The woman’s father guards the gate, and the man pays whether the gate opens or stays shut. Wherever men take the privileges of marriage and refuse its covenant, households form without heads, and family courts come to sit where fathers should have stood. Whatever sins lie behind any household before conversion, the blood of Christ washes them (1 Corinthians 6:11), and the charge of this law falls on men. If the reporting is right that these parents never married, Maine’s tiebreak is one more case of the state holding an office God gave to a husband and father.

Kiss the Son

The psalm that records the rage of the nations against the Lord’s Anointed ends with a command to their rulers:

“So now, O kings, show insight;

Take warning, O judges of the earth.

Serve Yahweh with fear

And rejoice with trembling.

Kiss the Son, lest He become angry, and you perish in the way,

For His wrath may soon be kindled. How blessed are all who take refuge in Him!” (Psalm 2:10-12 LSB)

The judges of Maine weighed the gospel and recorded its warning as an injury to a child. The same gospel stands over those judges, over the father they armed, and over every church that taught a girl to dread a rapture Christ never promised, and it calls each of them to the Son while it is still called today.