Belief

For most of his life, Doug Wilson — the 72-year-old pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho — was a fringe figure even on the Religious Right. Wilson's Christian nationalist views were so extreme that he gained a reputation for being to the right of familiar evangelical fundamentalists like Liberty University's Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., the Christian Broadcasting Network's Rev. Pat Robertson, and Pentecostal televangelist Jimmy Swaggart.

But during Donald Trump's second presidency, Wilson has become increasingly visible. Trump's allies, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, openly embrace Christ Church.

Religion News Service (RNS) reporter Tracy Simmons examines Wilson's growing prominence in the MAGA movement in an article published on December 12.

"Critics say that Christ Church's renown has less to do with the Almighty than with Wilson's dedication to Christian nationalism and his ties to like-minded officials in the Trump Administration and among its allies," Simmons explains. "Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has attended a Christ Church-affiliated congregation in Tennessee and has amplified Wilson's most controversial views, including his argument that women should not be allowed to vote. In the space of a month in April 2024, Wilson was interviewed by Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk on their respective podcasts."

Wilson, who believes that Christ Church is now "punching about our weight," started out as a Baptist but later moved to a severe form of Calvinism.

"Wilson came to national attention in 2003, when he organized a conference at the University of Idaho at Moscow about revolutions throughout U.S. history," Simmons explains. "Some in the community picked up on a booklet titled 'Southern Slavery, As It Was' that Wilson had co-authored some years earlier arguing that slavery, besides being allowed for in the Bible, was not as harsh in the antebellum South as is commonly portrayed. Soon, the campus and Downtown Moscow were plastered with flyers referring to Wilson’s university event as a 'slavery conference'…. To maximize his footprint in Washington, Wilson planted a church there this year, introducing what Wilson critic Kevin DeYoung called 'the Moscow mood' — cultural engagement 'with a spirit of … having fun while you’re doing it.'"

Read Tracy Simmons' full Religion News Service (RNS) article at this link.

A Cape Cod artist crafted a Nativity set perfect for New England: Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus and others are depicted by lobsters. It certainly isn't the first time a Nativty has been swapped out with other creatures, but it's causing some debate on so-called "Catholic Twitter."

Leviticus 11:9-12 and Deuteronomy 14:9-10 ban the consumption of sea creatures that lack both fins and scales, granting Old Testament protection to crustaceans like lobsters.

Still, that wasn't the inspiration behind Rosemary Quantick's Lobster Nativity, which has been for sale for a few years but has recently gained notoriety online.

Speaking to the Cape Cod Times last year, Quantick, an English immigrant, explained that her motivation was her adopted home of the Cape and the New England love of lobsters.

The Nativity set is encased in a lobster trap, rather than the manger and baby Jesus rests in a clam shell on a bed of seaweed.

Agnostic Faine Greenwood, a civilian drone mapping technology and GIS/spatial data consultant, said on BlueSky that she bought the Nativity set, prompting both chuckles and questions from followers.

"King of the Crustaceans," celebrated Kenneth Freeman.

One follower called it "Christaceans."

"With all due respect to you and your faith traditions ... what the f——?" asked author Sarah Day.

Greenwood explained she is agnostic, and was raised by other agnostics, "which probably explains a lot."

However, Christopher Roberts, a self-described "Christian raised by (sadly) Christian nationalists," also fell in love with the lobster Nativity.

Assistant Professor Brittany Sutherland, who teaches at George Mason University, wondered how something like that would play in the "deeply Catholic parts of Louisiana."

"On the one hand," she continued, "lobsters are pretty close to crawfish and Cajuns know their edible aquatic bugs. On the other hand, eating Crustacean Jesus seems pretty significant in the sin department."

That said, Transubstantiation is the Catholic belief that during the Eucharist, the bread and wine change into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. Holy communion is a sacrament in most Christian churches and symbolizes the sacrifice Jesus made for the sins of man.

Real estate lawyer Maggie Hooman asked "Catholic Twitter" whether they found the Nativity offensive and got some mixed answers. Most who indicated they were Catholic found it funny or acceptable but "tacky."

John Grondelski, conservative foreign policy specialist and Catholic theologian, answered, "Yes, because the Christian message of the Nativity is Incarnation — God became man, not Sebastian the Lobster. Maybe 50 years ago, as a kid, it might have been cute in a kitschy/tacky sort of way, but human embodiment is under such attack that diluting the Incarnation is wrong."

He later added, "we have an Incarnation problem today — and since religious scenes shape minds, I do not want the Savior to be thought of as a shape-shifter."

A few folks on X asked about whether it was considered offensive. Gabriel Said Reynolds, a Crowley Professor of Islamic Studies and Theology at Notre Dame, polled his following. The majority agreed it was "blasphemy."

In its report, the news and culture site Denison Forum commented, "A 'Lobster nativity scene' on Cape Cod challenges perceptions of Christmas. Consider the profound humility of Jesus, who chose to become human and sacrifice his own 'life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.'"

An Israeli resident questioned, "Can lobster Jesus walk on water?"

Dan Turrentine, co-host of The Huddle, said he planned on getting the lobster Nativity for former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, a devout Catholic.

Several remembered the Nativity scene in the film "Love Actually," which featured a Christmas play in which the daughter of one character, played by Emma Thompson, was "First Lobster."

"There was more than one lobster present at the birth of Jesus?" she questioned.

Meanwhile, the Church of Lorb, has embraced the lobster Nativity. The faith describes itself as "conscientious creators with plans to create and worship our Leviathan Lobster God. Lobsters don't die of old age and typically can't keep up with their gigantic size as they continue to grow and molt their shells. Together we can make a difference. The faith's mission is to help save the planet."

The lobster Nativity is available online for $114.90.

Jimmy Swaggart, one of the most popular and enduring of the 1980s televangelists, died on July 1, 2025, but his legacy lives.

The eight-day Jewish festival of Hanukkah commemorates ancient Jews’ victory over the powerful Seleucid empire, which ruled much of the Middle East from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D.

In a region known for its tumultuous change, one idea remained remarkably consistent for centuries: Latin America is Catholic.

The region’s 500-year transformation into a Catholic stronghold seemed capped in 2013, when Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was elected as the first Latin American pope. Once a missionary outpost, Latin America is now the heart of the Catholic Church. It is home to over 575 million adherents – over 40% of all Catholics worldwide. The next-largest regions are Europe and Africa, each home to 20% of the world’s Catholics.

Yet beneath this Catholic dominance, the region’s religious landscape is changing.

First, Protestant and Pentecostal groups have experienced dramatic growth. In 1970, only 4% of Latin Americans identified as Protestant; by 2014, the share had climbed to almost 20%.

But even as Protestant ranks swelled, another trend was quietly gaining ground: a growing share of Latin Americans abandoning institutional faith altogether. And, as my research shows, the region’s religious decline shows a surprising difference from patterns elsewhere. While fewer Latin Americans are identifying with a religion or attending services, personal faith remains strong.

Women known as ‘animeras,’ who pray for the souls of the deceased, walk to a church for Day of the Dead festivities in Telembi, Ecuador. AP Photo/Carlos Noriega

Religious decline

In 2014, 8% of Latin Americans claimed no religion at all. This number is twice as high as the percentage of people who were raised without a religion, indicating that the growth is recent, coming from people who left the church as adults.

However, there had been no comprehensive study of religious change in Latin America since then. My new research, published in September 2025, draws on two decades of survey data from over 220,000 respondents in 17 Latin American countries. This data comes from the AmericasBarometer, a large, region-wide survey conducted every two years by Vanderbilt University that focuses on democracy, governance and other social issues. Because it asks the same religion questions across countries and over time, it offers an unusually clear view of changing patterns.

Overall, the number of Latin Americans reporting no religious affiliation surged from 7% in 2004 to over 18% in 2023. The share of people who say they are religiously unaffiliated grew in 15 of the 17 countries, and more than doubled in seven.

On average, 21% of people in South America say they do not have a religious affiliation, compared with 13% in Mexico and Central America. Uruguay, Chile and Argentina are the three least religious countries in the region. Guatemala, Peru and Paraguay are the most traditionally religious, with fewer than 9% who identify as unaffiliated.

Another question scholars typically use to measure religious decline is how often people go to church. From 2008 to 2023, the share of Latin Americans attending church at least once a month decreased from 67% to 60%. The percentage who never attend, meanwhile, grew from 18% to 25%.

The generational pattern is stark. Among people born in the 1940s, just over half say they attend church regularly. Each subsequent generation shows a steeper decline, dropping to just 35% for those born in the 1990s. Religious affiliation shows a similar trajectory – each generation is less affiliated than the one before.

Personal religiosity

However, in my study, I also examined a lesser-used measure of religiosity – one that tells a different story.

That measure is “religious importance”: how important people say that religion is in their daily lives. We might think of this as “personal” religiosity, as opposed to the “institutional” religiosity tied to formal congregations and denominations.

People attend a Mass marking the International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on June 26, 2024. AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd

Like church attendance, overall religious importance is high in Latin America. In 2010, roughly 85% of Latin Americans in the 17 countries whose data I analyzed said religion was important in their daily lives. Sixty percent said “very,” and 25% said “somewhat.”

By 2023, the “somewhat important” group declined to 19%, while the “very important” group grew to 64%. Personal religious importance was growing, even as affiliation and church attendance were falling.

Religious importance shows the same generational pattern as affiliation and attendance: Older people tend to report higher levels than younger ones. In 2023, 68% of people born in the 1970s said religion was “very important,” compared with 60% of those born in the 1990s.

Yet when you compare people at the same age, the pattern reverses. At age 30, 55% of those born in the 1970s rated religion as very important. Compare that with 59% among Latin Americans born in the 1980s, and 62% among those born in the 1990s. If this trend continues, younger generations could eventually show greater personal religious commitment than their elders.

Affiliation vs. belief

What we are seeing in Latin America, I’d argue, is a fragmented pattern of religious decline. The authority of religious institutions is waning – fewer people claim a faith; fewer attend services. But personal belief isn’t eroding. Religious importance is holding steady, even growing.

This pattern is quite different from Europe and the United States, where institutional decline and personal belief tend to move together.

Eighty-six percent of unaffiliated people in Latin America say they believe in God or a higher power. That compares with only 30% in Europe and 69% in the United States.

Sizable proportions of unaffiliated Latin Americans also believe in angels, miracles and even that Jesus will return to Earth in their lifetime.

In other words, for many Latin Americans, leaving behind a religious label or skipping church does not mean leaving faith behind.

An Aymara Indigenous spiritual guide blesses a statue of baby Jesus with incense after an Epiphany Mass at a Catholic church in La Paz, Bolivia, on Jan. 6, 2025. AP Photo/Juan Karita

This distinctive pattern reflects Latin America’s unique history and culture. Since the colonial period, the region has been shaped by a mix of religious traditions. People often combine elements of Indigenous beliefs, Catholic practices and newer Protestant movements, creating personal forms of faith that don’t always fit neatly into any one church or institution.

Because priests were often scarce in rural areas, Catholicism developed in many communities with little direct oversight from the church. Home rituals, local saints’ festivals and lay leaders helped shape religious life in more independent ways.

This reality challenges how scholars typically measure religious change. Traditional frameworks for measuring religious decline, developed from Western European data, rely heavily on religious affiliation and church attendance. But this approach overlooks vibrant religiosity outside formal structures – and can lead scholars to mistaken conclusions.

In short, Latin America reminds us that faith can thrive even as institutions fade.

Matthew Blanton, PhD Candidate, Sociology and Demography, The University of Texas at Austin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Despite Pope Leo XIV to calling on his Catholic leadership to issue a forceful statement condemning President Donald Trump's "villification of immigrants," Trump loyalists, writes John Kenneth White in The Hill, have responded by declaring war on the Catholic church.

By a nearly unanimous vote, the United State Conference of Catholic Bishops issued their first special message in 12 years, saying they were “saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants,” and “concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care.”

They added that "we are grieved when we meet parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school and when we try to console family members who have already been separated from their loved ones.”

The bishops then put out a video denouncing the “dehumanizing rhetoric and violence” against those confronted by ICE — over 1.4 million have watched it so far, according to White.

But as clergy members continue to denounce the Trump administration's policies, MAGA has doubled down against the church.

“Boarder czar” Tom Homan condemned the bishops’ letter and the church as “wrong," adding “I’m saying it as not only border czar, I’ll say it as a Catholic. I think they need to spend time fixing the Catholic Church, in my opinion.”

White notes that Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) "accused the Catholic Church of using government grants to profit from services rendered to refugees. Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft charged that the bishops squandered more than $2.3 billion dollars received from the government, and praised Trump for terminating them."

Laura Loomer, Trump loyalist and so-called MAGA whisperer who called Pope Leo a "woke Marxist Pope," posted on X, "Are all of the Jew haters going to be calling out the Catholic bishops and the Marxist American Pope for condemning deportations?”

Matt Walsh, another Trump defender, White explains, "attacked the bishops, saying they didn’t make a video criticizing the Biden administration 'for supporting, funding, and facilitating the mass slaughter of children in the womb,' or 'its support for the castration and sexual mutilation of children.'"

White says that these attacks are the antithesis of the church's teachings.

"Those attacking the bishops and making reference to the sexual abuse scandals that have plagued the Catholic Church over the past decades does not diminish the bishops’ call for humane treatment of immigrants and adherence to the Gospel teachings of Jesus Christ," he writes.

"Trump casts himself as pro-Catholic and calls himself 'the most pro-life president ever.' But that does not mean that the maltreatment of those living outside the womb is no less a sin," he adds.

Actual Catholics, White says, are not happy with Trump.

"Catholics are swing voters and often determine election outcomes. Joe Biden won their votes in 2020; Donald Trump had a 12-point advantage in 2024. Today, a majority of Catholics disapprove of Trump," he writes.

"The Catholic Church is more than 2,000 years old. Declaring war on it is hardly civilized or politically smart. Trump has three years left in office. The Catholic Church will survive condemnation by those in power; it’s hardly the first time this has occurred in its long and storied history," he concludes.

When former President George W. Bush described himself as a "compassionate conservative" during his eight years in the White House, some far-fight pundits objected to the "compassionate" part. Bush, they argued, was hurting conservatism when he called himself "compassionate," and they believed the right needed to purge itself of "compassion sickness."

The term "compassion sickness" isn't as popular in right-wing media as it was during the 2000s, but the concept is alive and well. Tesla/SpaceX/X.com leader Elon Musk considers "suicidal empathy" a major threat to the United States' wellbeing.

That term is closely identified with Musk. But in an article published on December 1, Salon's Amanda Marcotte stresses that the far right's use of "empathy" as an insult originated with evangelical Christian fundamentalist podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey.

"As with much of the asinine ponderings coming from the Silicon Valley billionaire class," Marcotte explains, "there's a pseudo-intellectual rationale to prop up this nonsense. Musk got this 'suicidal empathy' language from Gad Saad, a Canadian college professor who falsely presents himself as an 'evolutionary behavioral scientist'… But I'm not here to debate Musk and Saad's self-serving delusions. More interesting is that while they have tried to frame this anti-empathy discourse in faux-scientific and masculinized rhetoric, the right's modern war on empathy really began with a woman."

Marcotte continues, "Unlike Saad and Musk, fundamentalist Christian influencer Allie Beth Stuckey doesn't see empathy as a failure of evolution. As a creationist who denies the scientific reality of prehistoric dinosaurs, she doesn't even believe in evolution. And even though she believes the Bible forbids women from being pastors, Stuckey has made it her mission to rewrite the teachings of Jesus so that her savior is a harsh disciplinarian whose 'love' has little to do with empathy."

"Phyllis Schlafly knock-off" Stuckey, according to Marcotte, has been railing against "empathy" for at least three years on her "Relatable" podcast.

"Stuckey's book 'Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion' came out in late 2024," Marcotte observes, "but the idea for it appears to have originated on a 2022 episode of her popular podcast 'Relatable.' She hadn't yet come up with the catchphrase 'toxic empathy' — which, in true trolling style, appropriates the progressive use of the term 'toxic' to describe unhealthy and cruel behavior — but her basic argument is right there…. In a sense, she is simply reworking a longstanding argument from the Christian Right that kindness and compassion are not what Jesus meant by 'love.'"

Marcotte adds, "To the contrary, true Christian love is what looks, to most people, like beating someone into submission…. This line of thought has always been the paper-thin rationale for bigotry and abuse. But Stuckey's sinister genius was in using her gender to make these tired gambits seem fresh and modern."

Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.

On the night of Oct. 8, a man named Delmar Gomez drove to pick up his younger brother from a mechanic’s shop on Lamar Avenue. He never came home.

On the return trip, law enforcement officers with the Memphis Safe Task Force pulled over his 2011 Toyota Tundra pickup and arrested the brothers on immigration charges.

The Guatemalan brothers — both longtime Memphians — are known in national Pentecostal Christian circles as well-traveled worship singers, performing at churches from New York to Florida.

They were moved from one immigration detention center to another, finally arriving at a lockup in Louisiana, more than 300 miles from Memphis. The younger brother, Eber Gomez, a 30-year-old with no known criminal record, was soon deported, leaving behind a wife and two young children in Memphis.

Delmar Gomez, a 38-year-old husband and father of four U.S. citizen children, is still holding on. Though he had only minor motor vehicle violations on his record, he’s spent more than 40 days in an immigration detention as he heads into a hearing Tuesday that could result in his deportation.

Not only did the Trump administration lock up the brothers, the government published a news release with false information portraying Delmar Gomez as one of 11 “worst of the worst” immigrant criminals in Memphis.

The allegations deeply upset his wife, Sandra Perez.

“I want people to know that all of the charges that they’re accusing him of now are false, that none of that is true,” she told the Institute for Public Service Reporting in a Spanish-language interview. “He’s a person who is very respectful, honest, very hardworking. He is a good person.”

The news release included the false claim that Delmar Gomez had been arrested on an aggravated assault charge. The claim was re-published on at least one local TV station’s website.

In a second version of the news release, the Trump administration published Delmar Gomez’s mug shot and misidentified him as “Miguel Torres, a criminal illegal alien from Mexico arrested for selling synthetic narcotics, vehicle theft, traffic offense and drug possession.” The same caption also appears under another man’s photo.

Weeks later, the government has not corrected the misidentification, or explained how it happened, even after a reporter repeatedly asked about it.

The situation reflects broader issues. The Trump administration is conducting a massive immigration crackdown in Memphis and across the country, spending billions of dollars to arrest, detain and deport people, using stories of criminal immigrants as justification for harsh treatment.

The arrest and detention of the Guatemalan singing brothers illustrates the sharp contrast between the administration’s rhetoric — that it’s arresting hard-core criminals — and the reality on the ground in Memphis and across the country: that it’s mostly arresting immigrants with minor criminal records or no criminal record at all.

As of this month, 74% of immigrants in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention had no criminal convictions, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Many of those who were convicted committed only minor offenses, such as traffic violations.

Detailed numbers for Memphis are not available. The top state prosecutor in the Memphis area, Steve Mulroy, told The Institute in October that immigration arrests account for about 20% of total task force arrests, and most of the immigrants have no criminal history other than unlawful presence in the United States.

Delmar Gomez’s wife Sandra acknowledges her husband entered the country illegally in January 2005, more than 20 years ago. He was 17 at the time.

Sandra said Delmar was unable to gain legal immigration status, but has lived a clean life.

Delmar Gomez’s attorney, Skye Austin with advocacy group Latino Memphis, said she is aware of the federal government’s news release that included the false information.

“When I was first made aware of it, my immediate thought was, ‘Do people think that all Hispanics look alike?’ ” Austin said. “Do people think that it is OK to mix up names and faces and histories?”

There is no evidence that Gomez was ever accused of aggravated assault, drug dealing, vehicle theft or any other major crime, she said.

The Institute for Public Service Reporting conducted its own independent records search and was unable to locate any such criminal charges against Delmar Gomez.

Austin said Gomez’s entire criminal history consists of six traffic tickets issued over a period of nearly two decades, from 2006 to this spring. The tickets were for violations such as driving without a license and without insurance — both misdemeanors, and an Atlanta ticket for driving too fast for conditions and a related driving charge. The most recent ticket came this March, when he was cited for following too closely and driving with an expired tag, she said, adding that prosecutors dropped those charges.

“I think that people should view this as unjust and that this is the opposite of the narrative that we’ve seen where criminals are being taken into detention,” she said. “Because my client’s not a criminal. He is an everyday hard worker just trying to provide for his family.”

From work and singing to detention

Delmar Gomez’s wife Sandra spoke in an interview in the kitchen of her family’s East Memphis home, which is decorated with a poster depicting the Ten Commandments.

She said she learned of the arrests when Eber Gomez called her on the way back from the mechanic’s shop, when the two brothers were in Delmar’s truck. Delmar was driving, but Eber blamed himself for what happened, she said, because if hadn’t needed the ride, Delmar wouldn’t have gone on the errand at all.

“He just told me ‘I’m sorry, it’s my fault that they stopped us.’” she said. “And I told him ‘It’s not true.’

He said ‘Yes it is. Listen.’ And I heard them (law enforcement officers) talking in English.”

“‘Now we can’t do anything,’ he told me. That’s all he said.”

Sandra Perez is a stay-at-home mother to four children who range in age from 17 to three. Delmar Gomez is the family’s primary breadwinner and earns money mainly by mowing yards. He has a lineup of about 60 houses, and he and his father typically mow about 30 yards one week, then about 30 more the next, his wife said.

He’s also a lead vocalist for a Christian band called Agrupacion Vision Emanuel, or Vision of Emanuel Group, which has produced studio recordings and professionally edited music videos.

In the band’s music videos, Delmar Gomez stands in front of as many as 15 musicians, singing passionately at scenic locations including Shelby Farms, the Overton Park shell, and near the “Memphis” sign on Mud Island. One of the videos has been watched more than 400,000 times.

His younger brother Eber Gomez has worked as a roofer and sang with a different touring band called Adoradores de Cristo Memphis, which means “Christ Worshipers of Memphis.”

The two bands have traveled as far away as Chicago, Florida, Alabama, New York and Atlanta to perform at weddings, church anniversaries and other Pentecostal church events, family members said.

Delmar Gomez’s band doesn’t treat these performances as a money-making endeavor, his wife said.

“They don’t charge. They go for faith. If the brothers (at the other churches) want, they give them an offering for their expenses, and if they don’t, they cover their own expenses,” his wife said. “They go for love of the work of God.”

Amid a surge of well over 1,000 federal agents and state troopers in Memphis, community groups say law enforcement officers are arresting and detaining immigrants every day here, often in traffic stops.

The Memphis Safe Task Force has released little information about the immigration arrests. In a statement early this month, the task force said it had made 319 immigration arrests in October.

That’s about 17% of about 1,900 total arrests.

As of November 17, the task force arrest total had risen to 2,790 arrests, Supervisory Deputy U.S. Marshal Ryan Guay said in an email to The Institute.

He did not say how many of these were immigration arrests, referring questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not respond.

Delmar Gomez was taken to an ICE office near the airport, then an immigration prison in Mason, Tennessee, then a lockup in Alabama, and finally to a big ICE prison in Jena, Louisiana, his wife said.

She said she wants one thing. “That they let him go,” she said through tears. “That he can be with my family and with me, because he’s been a good person. To be together as a family and work on the things of God, that’s been our desire.

“We’re a very decent family, and it’s unfair what they’re accusing him of.”

Mass deportation campaign

The federal government generally has treated unlawful presence in the United States as a civil violation, not a crime. Under prior presidents, including Republican George W. Bush and Democrats such as Barack Obama and Joe Biden, it’s unlikely people like the Guatemalan singers would ever have been detained.

The background: Businesses wanted a low-cost, reliable workforce. Congress didn’t want to increase legal immigration.

The federal government found a solution: quietly tolerate illegal immigration. Consequently, the government usually enforced immigration law only at the border.

But in non-border areas like Memphis, the federal government rarely bothered to expel unauthorized immigrants, unless the immigrants committed crimes. Unauthorized immigrants like Delmar Gomez could live normal lives – working and raising families, but they often had no way to gain legal status.

The Trump administration has thrown out the practice of non-enforcement and is arresting people who have allegedly committed civil immigration violations, but have no other criminal history. It is also arresting some people who have legal immigration papers, and has even arrested and detained U.S. citizens, most of them of Hispanic origin.

The October 20 news release involving Delmar Gomez demonstrates how Trump’s government is also publishing false information about specific immigrants in Memphis and across the nation.

It’s part of a broader pattern by President Trump and his administration of portraying immigrants as dangerous and evil. Trump famously launched his first presidential campaign in 2015 by calling Mexicans “rapists” and claimed in a presidential debate last year that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating other people’s cats and dogs.

Today, the administration sometimes labels immigrants as “terrorists” as justification for deporting them.

In high-profile cases, including a big raid on an apartment building in Chicago, nonprofit news outlet ProPublica has found that those claims were frequently false — that the so-called “terrorists” are often ordinary immigrants with no criminal records.

In fact, multiple studies from the Cato Institute, the U.S. Department of Justice and other researchers have concluded that immigrants are less likely than U.S. citizens to commit crimes — even if the immigrants are in the country illegally.

The Institute contacted the White House for comment for this story. Spokeswoman Abigail Jackson responded by criticizing the reporter.

“Violent criminal illegal aliens who murder, rape, and assault innocent American citizens deserve to be condemned in the strongest possible terms. It’s despicable for any so-called journalist to try and compare these monsters with law-abiding immigrants. This is why no one trusts the media.”

News release includes unverifiable claims

Memphis TV station Action News 5, which had originally re-published the government’s false aggravated assault claim about Delmar Gomez, has since broadcast a follow-up story saying there’s no evidence to support it.

Not only does the government’s October 20 news release include false information about Delmar Gomez, it also includes unverifiable information about at least four other men arrested in the Memphis area.

For instance, the news release says a man named Jardi Caal Requena was arrested “for domestic violence and for making a physical threat.” A reporter with The Institute found no criminal records for anyone with this name in local or federal courts.

The news release claims that a man named Simeon Sosa-Camargo had been convicted of “smuggling aliens into the U.S.”

Federal records show that a man with the same name was convicted in Texas for at least three cases of entering and re-entering the U.S. illegally.

But The Institute found no record that he was ever convicted of human smuggling.

The news release says a man named Wilmer Flores Godoy was convicted of “illegal alien in possession of a firearm and arrested for larceny.” A man named Wilmer Flores was arrested on a felony domestic violence charge in the Memphis area in 2024, and the case was dismissed in October.

But a reporter found no local or federal court records related to gun possession or larceny.

Delmar Gomez is misidentified in the news release as Miguel Torres, a man from Mexico whom the feds accused of drug dealing, vehicle theft, traffic offense and drug possession.

A search for the real Miguel Torres turned up little – the name is common, with hundreds of criminal cases against people with that name in the nationwide federal court system.

But a reporter found no records that matched those allegations for Torres in the Shelby County criminal court system or in federal courts for the western district of Tennessee.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to written questions about the Delmar Gomez case and the other men mentioned in the Oct. 20 news release.

Younger brother accepts deportation

The father of the two brothers, Ramiro Gomez, told a reporter he originally had eight children. One of them, Jaime Gomez, was a heavy drinker who was found dead in the Mississippi River several years ago, he said.

By contrast, he said arrested sons Delmar and Eber are clean-living family men. “What I want is for my sons to come back. My grandchildren need them,” he said.

Days after that interview, on Oct. 30, the younger brother, Eber, accepted deportation back to Guatemala, according to an online system that allows people to search immigration court hearings by an identifying number. He arrived back in Guatemala on Saturday, Nov. 8, his father said.

Ramiro Gomez said he had spoken with his son briefly by phone from Guatemala, but he didn’t have a chance to talk with him about why he accepted deportation.

However, the Trump administration has made it extremely difficult for detained immigrants to win release on bond. Instead, detained immigrants are forced to fight their deportation cases from behind bars.

Critics say that by denying bond, the government is using the hardship of imprisonment to grind down immigrants’ will and ability to fight and pressure them to sign paperwork accepting deportation.

Ramiro Gomez said the deportation has caused severe hardship for his son’s wife and their two children. “She’s still at home and paying rent and food for the children.”

Delmar continues to fight deportation

Delmar Gomez remains behind bars in Louisiana. As of today, he’s been locked up for 48 days.

He is scheduled for an individual hearing Tuesday before Immigration Judge Maithe Gonzalez at the lockup in Jena, Louisiana.

Gomez’s attorney Skye Austin will appear via remote link from Memphis and argue for “cancellation of removal” — an immigration judge’s formal ruling that he should not be deported.

Her argument: Delmar Gomez has lived in in the U.S. at least 10 years continuously, and his deportation would harm his four U.S. citizen children. “I also have to prove that he is a person of good moral character and has not been convicted of a crime that would have serious immigration consequences.”

What would she say if an ICE attorney argues that his six traffic tickets for driving without a license, speeding and other violations show bad moral character?

“So, my pushback would be that a number of these traffic violations have been (dropped by prosecutors) or closed, and that my client does everything in his power to pay the fines and make sure that he has nothing pending with the court. He’s not causing any judicial delay or anything of that nature.”

Austin said she’s collected dozens of reference letters to present to the immigration court on her client’s behalf.

“Seven local ministers have written me letters, and that’s on top of again, neighbors, friends, clients of Señor Delmar just wanting to let people know, ‘Hey, this is a good man. I know him personally. I’ve known him for years,’ et cetera, et cetera.”

Most immigrants who go before Judge Gonzalez lose their cases, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

In 2024 and 2025, the judge decided 148 asylum cases and denied about 87% of them, slightly higher than the denial rate of 78% across judges at the Jena immigration court.

“Mommy, where did Papi go?”

Meanwhile, Delmar Gomez’s children are struggling with his absence.

His oldest child, 17-year-old high school senior Nancy Gomez, said her father had only a limited education in Guatemala and is pushing for her to study.

She’s already been accepted to the University of Memphis.

“He always has given me advice on everything that I do and always has been proud of me and everything that I have done. And then I just want to see him again. I feel really something that has been taken away from me that I want back. Every time he came from work, I would hear his truck coming in, but now I haven’t heard that and I just want to hear it again,” she said.

“When the house is quiet and he comes from work, he fills the environment with his laughter. And he always be talking about his day and asks us about our day, how it was. And I just want to see him back. I just miss him a lot.”

As the adults showed a reporter a family album during a recent visit, the youngest child, three-year-old Betuel, spoke up.

“Mommy, where did Papi go?” he said in Spanish, crying.

His mother picked him up, gave him a hug and kissed him.

“He went to sing, my love,” his mother said.

“He’s working?” the boy said.

“Yes, my love.”

As of Monday the news release with the false information identifying the Guatemalan singer as a Mexican drug dealer remains on the official Department of Homeland Security website, uncorrected.

President Donald Trump’s "wrecking-ball approach to America has a precedent: the MAGA evangelical perversion of Jesus’s message of radical love to one of hate and aggression," writes The Guardian's Bill McKibben.

McKibben notes that Trump's " most revealing and defining moments – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most dangerous, nor stupidest, but perhaps its most illuminating," came when he started posting plans of his gilded ballroom and then posted an AI video dumping feces on American cities.

"He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of deaths from his cuts to USAID is 600,000 and rising, and this week a study predicted his fossil fuel policies would kill another 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional," McKibben says.

But "no one – not Richard Nixon, not Andrew Jackson, not Warren Harding, not anyone – would have imagined boasting about defecating on the American citizenry," he notes.

" Trump has managed to turn America’s idea of itself entirely upside down. And he has done it with the active consent of an entire political party," McKibben adds.

McKibben says that those, including himself, raised as "mainline Protestant Christians" should not be surprised by any of this.

"We have watched over the years as rightwing evangelical churches turned the Jesus we grew up with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be," he writes.

"At its most basic, they turned a figure of love into a figure of hate who blesses precisely the cruelties that he condemned in the Gospel; we went from 'the meek shall inherit the Earth' to 'the meek shall die of cholera'," he says.

McKibben says that despite this, he and his fellow Christians have not fought back against this effectively, if at all.

"What particularly hurts is the fact that at no point did we manage to fight back, not effectively anyway. Without intending to, we surrendered control of the idea of Jesus. It is a story that may provide some insights into how to fight the attack on democracy."

McKibben explains how Christianity has morphed into something completely different than it was in the 1950s when a majority of Americans subscribed to some form of the religion.

"Now the most public and powerful forms of Christianity, the vast and often denominationally independent megachurches and TV ministries, are as wildly different from that version of Protestantism as Donald Trump is from Eisenhower," he says.

Today's "newly ascendant version of Christianity," McKibben explains, is a far cry from that.

"The Jesus of this imagination – muscular, aggressive and American – is a different man than the one I grew up worshipping," he says. "The idea that he can be invoked to justify cutting off aid to foreign countries and bundling immigrants into the back of unmarked vans is repulsive to me, but also mystifying – as if gravity suddenly pulled objects upward."

McKibben says that "I am less concerned with the shrinkage of the mainline church than with the replacement of its Jesus with this very different one."

Allie Beth Stuckey, "one heir to Charlie Kirk’s place at the top of Maga Christianity," McKibben writes, has a very different version of the Jesus he grew up worshipping.

"She is a distillation of the currently dominant American Christianity, and above all, her Jesus rejects empathy," he says.

"Basing your support for ICE raids on terrified immigrants on a relatively obscure passage in a relatively obscure Old Testament story is a good example of what is known as prooftexting – the citing of some verse somewhere to support your predetermined beliefs," he explains.

The Bible, McKibben says, also says nothing on much of the culture wars MAGA mouthpieces use verse to attack.

It "has almost nothing to say about the rest of their favorite culture war hobby horses – you can find five scattered references to what might be homosexuality in the Bible, though recent scholarship makes clear they were actually attacks on prostitution and abuse," he writes.

And while the Bible says nothing about transgender people, he writes, "57 percent of the Republican party’s advertising spending in her race had reportedly gone to attacking transgender people, a topic – again – that Jesus ignored."

"None of that spending went to attacking Elon Musk (a recently self-proclaimed “cultural Christian”), who had managed to kill 600,000 poor people by 'feeding USAID into a woodchipper' in the first weekend of his Doge campaign," McKibben notes.

The parallels in today's MAGA movement are there, but they are lost on them completely, he explains.

"If you think I am being hyperbolic here, a 'rich young ruler' actually presented himself to Jesus and asked what he should do, and Jesus said he should sell his stuff and give it to the poor. This is what Jesus was about." he writes.

The hypocrisy, McKibben notes, has become downright farcical.

"The idea that personal salvation – as opposed to concern for others – was at the heart of Christianity always bordered on the heretical, but over the decades it has morphed into the absurd farce we see now, where Jesus is held to bless every show of dominance and aggression we can imagine," he says.

More people are becoming aware of this and acknowledging and fighting against it, he says.

Rep. James Talarico (D-TX), a part-time Presbyterian seminary student, has surged on the "strength of his forthright declaration of the kind of retro Christianity," McKibben says.

In a sermon Talarico gave two years ago, he said, "Jesus came to transform the world. Christian nationalism is here to maintain the status quo. They have coopted the Son of God. They have turned this humble rabbi into a gun-toting, gay-bashing, science-denying, money-loving, fear mongering fascist. And, it is incumbent upon all Christians to confront it, and denounce it.”

McKibben says Pope Leo's recent words condemning the Trump administration's cruelty show demonstrate this denunciation as well, and he hopes there will be more.

"America is best defended, in other words, by reference to the best about American history, just as Christianity is best defended by reference to what makes it distinctive and beautiful, which is the example of Jesus," he says.

Our investigation of a little-known church community in northeastern Minnesota started with something that has become depressingly familiar: child sex abuse.

ProPublica and the Minnesota Star Tribune found that some members of the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church community in Duluth enabled Clint Massie, who pleaded guilty to sexually abusing young girls. Massie is currently in prison in Faribault, Minnesota.

The Old Apostolic Lutheran Church — which has no affiliation with mainstream Lutheran denominations and is known as the OALC — is an insular community with many old-world traditions. There is no official count, but one academic study estimated 31,000 members worldwide as of 2016, with most in the United States.

We examined hundreds of pages of criminal records, conducted more than a dozen interviews with alleged victims across the country, reviewed video and audio of police interviews with Massie, victims and church leaders, and attended a service at the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church in Duluth.

Daryl Bruckelmyer, an OALC preacher, declined to comment or answer a detailed list of questions for this story. But in a 2023 interview with a St. Louis County detective, he acknowledged knowing about Massie’s sexual abuse. He said at the time that it was up to victims to report the crimes to police, a clear misreading of the law for mandated reporters — doctors, teachers and others who are required to report crimes against children.

“We don’t protect either one,” Bruckelmyer said of sexual abusers and their victims.

You can read the investigation here, but here are five takeaways from our reporting:

Church leaders knew about the abuse: Leaders of Bruckelmyer’s church didn’t report Massie to police though they knew he’d sexually abused girls for years and Bruckelmyer had been told by police that reporting it was their duty. It was an open secret in the congregation: Mothers warned their children to stay away from Massie, victims said. Church leaders also sent Massie to a therapist who specialized in sex offender treatment. In December 2024, Massie pleaded guilty to four felony counts of sexual conduct with a victim under the age of 13. In March, a judge sentenced him to 7 1/2 years in prison.

Victims were told to forgive and forget: Church leaders held meetings where children were told to forgive the man who sexually abused them and forget the abuse. If they spoke of it, the sin would be theirs. The meetings, described by victims to the police and confirmed through our reporting, ended in one case with a church leader allowing Massie to hug the victim. An internal church document also outlines guidelines for handling abuse and suggests that, when appropriate, both parties be brought together for a discussion.

Missed opportunities to intervene: Prosecutors had at least one opportunity to intervene but hoped educating church leaders about their duties would encourage them to cooperate with authorities. Our reporting found that church leaders did not report what they learned about Massie despite a state law requiring clergy and others to share the information with law enforcement. According to law enforcement notes, Bruckelmyer told investigators that they encourage abuse victims to go to police, but that they believed it was “on [victims] to do that.”

John Hiivala, a spokesperson for the Woodland Park Old Apostolic Lutheran Church in Duluth, said that the church “has fully complied with the law in the referenced case, and it’s a matter of legal record.”

Kimberly Lowe, a lawyer and crisis manager for the church, said its preachers are unpaid and therefore might not be legally required to report sexual abuse of children. Asked if she believes the preachers are mandated reporters under Minnesota law, Lowe would only say that the language of the statute is unclear.

A small but rapidly growing church: OALC is a conservative Christian revival movement that came to the U.S. with 19th-century settlers from Norway, Finland and Sweden. It is not affiliated with any mainstream Lutheran denominations. Only men hold leadership positions. The church is rapidly growing, and its emphasis on large families has created booms in places like Washington state and Duluth. Members attempt to live a life as modest and simple as Jesus’. This is why they do not dance, listen to music or watch movies, according to former members. In the OALC, they said, forgiveness is one of the most important acts one can perform.

Victims filed lawsuits: Since Massie’s sentencing, two of his alleged victims have filed lawsuits against him, their church in South Dakota and the OALC. They have retained the same lawyer who represented some of the victims in the Jeffrey Epstein case.

In a letter written from prison that was filed in court, Massie denied the abuse allegations in the lawsuits. He did not respond to interview requests. The OALC, in a motion to dismiss both lawsuits, wrote that “while OALC-America is mindful and sympathetic to Plaintiff for the abuse Plaintiff alleges occurred by Massie, such empathy does not take away from the plain fact that this Court does not have personal jurisdiction over OALC-America.”

As President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown elicits stark condemnation from leaders in the Catholic church, which says the administration's policies clash with religious liberty, Pope Leo has emerged, writes David French in The New York Times, as the anti-Trump.

"If you examine the new pope’s pronouncements, there is a consistent through line. He defends human dignity and condemns government brutality. In addition to his defense of the human rights of migrants, he’s decried Russian abuses in Ukraine, and he’s called for a cease-fire, hostage release and compliance with international humanitarian law in Gaza," French writes.

Pope Leo's concerns, French writes, also extends to the tech sector, as seen in a November 7 post on X, in which he wrote, "Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight, for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity. The Church therefore calls all builders of #AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work—to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life."

That post, French says, drew immediate ire from tech billionaire and Trump supporter Marc Andreessen, "who posted (and then deleted) a meme mocking the pope’s statement," French notes.

Despite the pope's obvious dismay with Trump and his policies, French says that's probably where his own involvement ends.

"When I said that the path past Trumpism is beginning to emerge, I did not and do not mean that the pope will somehow enable the defeat of any particular politician or program at the ballot box," he writes. "American Catholics are true swing voters. A majority voted for Trump in 2024, but a majority disapprove of him now."

That being said, French also notes that there are "many devout Catholics who are deeply embedded in the MAGA movement, including Vice President JD Vance."

Noting the volatile mix between church and state, French writes, "Partisanship is poisonous to the church," adding that "when partisanship becomes part of your identity — much less part of your faith — it has a pernicious effect: It causes you to highlight the deficiencies of the other side while tempting you to rationalize or minimize the injustices on your own. Partisanship makes hypocrites of us all. I know it made a hypocrite of me on my worst partisan days."

Pope Leo, he notes, manages to rise above the fray, putting "virtue outside and above politics. His declarations are the living embodiment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s admonition that the church “is not to be the master or the servant of the state, but the conscience of the state.”

However, French says, it's almost impossible for religious voters today to put politics aside.

"When Democrats win the White House, then evangelicals tend to feel more defensive and fearful, as if their churches are at the edge of extinction," he writes.

French explains how Trumpism became a "thoroughly religious movement," saying that "the result is a relentless one-way cultural ratchet that amplifies Democratic sins and minimizes Republican vices."

"It elevates politics to the place of religion because it is only through politics that many evangelicals can feel confident and secure in the practice of their faith," he adds.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) recently issued a rare, near-unanimous rebuke of Trump's immigration policies, specifically condemning the "indiscriminate mass deportation of people" and the associated "dehumanizing rhetoric and violence," but they did not specifically mention Trump by name.

"Since Trumpism is a religious phenomenon, it requires a religious answer. But it can’t be a partisan answer. That’s why it was wise for the bishops not to directly mention Trump in their statement," French notes.

Pope Leo has done the same, French writes, but, he says, "I'm under no illusions that Pope Leo’s example will matter to the evangelical political class. It is so far gone that many of its leading lights advance the absurd claim that Christians cannot vote for Democrats."

Despite that doubt, French says, "a pope’s moral witness can — and should — still matter to Christians of every tradition."

"Unless the values behind Trumpism are defeated, the man himself will be replaced by another like him — Republican or Democrat — and our culture will continue to slide into cruelty and depravity," French says.

The pope's own words, he writes, speak volumes.

"To quote Pope Leo, 'justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life' ought to be the touchstones of our public engagement. There is another spiritual victory to be won — this time over the in these United States."

Texas Rep. Nate Schatzline’s energy was palpable as he gazed out from the video on the computer screen, grinning ear to ear, the sleeves of his white dress shirt rolled up.

The Republican legislator from Fort Worth had a message to share with people watching the prerecorded video: As a Christian, you have an essential role in politics and local government.

“There is no greater calling than being civically engaged and bringing the values that Scripture teaches us into every realm of the earth,” Schatzline said.

The legislator was teaching a section of Campaign University, a series of online lessons he and others associated with Fort Worth-based megachurch Mercy Culture created to raise up so-called “spirit-led candidates.”

The course, created in 2021, is an extension of Mercy Culture’s increasingly overt political activities that have included candidate endorsements. The church’s political nonprofit, For Liberty & Justice, houses Campaign University.

Campaign University builds on Mercy Culture’s growing political reach as Schatzline, a pastor at the church, joins President Donald Trump’s National Faith Advisory Board and as the course now is offered at other congregations across the country.

The lessons emphasize that would-be candidates don’t need to be experts in government or the Constitution to seek public office or a place in local government. They also train potential candidates to “stand for spiritual righteousness” and teach them how to build a platform and navigate the campaign trail while maintaining a strong family and church life.

At the core of Campaign University is the idea that there is no separation between what happens within the church and what happens in the government. Students are taught to interpret the First Amendment’s establishment clause on the separation of church and state as a protection against government involvement in religion, rather than vice versa.

Previously, churches risked losing their tax-exempt status by discussing or engaging in politics. Then this summer, the Internal Revenue Service decided to allow religious leaders to endorse political candidates from the pulpit, a decision Schatzline took as a green light for him and other pastors to ramp up political activity.

Programs such as Campaign University serve as the “next stage” of this religion-driven political movement, said Eric McDaniel, a government professor who researches the intersection of race, religion and politics at the University of Texas at Austin. Past movements encouraged churchgoers to become activists, he said, but Campaign University stands out for training Christian conservatives to seek public office.

“One of the things about this movement that’s really important is that they started winning local elections, then started winning state and then now they’re winning at the national level,” McDaniel said. “And that’s how you’re able to build a movement and maintain a movement — you start locally.”

In an attempt to better understand Mercy Culture’s approach to recruiting candidates, two journalists from the Fort Worth Report purchased and completed the more than five-hour Campaign University course and listened to hours of the For Liberty & Justice podcast. What became clear in the course is For Liberty & Justice’s mission to push Christian conservative values beyond church doors and into the public sphere.

The nonprofit states on its website that it vets and supports “candidates who are willing to do whatever it takes to protect our God-given liberties and take a stand for Biblical Justice!” Its leaders have said they stand against LGBTQ rights and abortion access, and they have pushed for the ban of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in government and public education.

For $100, Campaign University provides its students the knowledge, practical skills and spiritual guidance “to make an impact for the kingdom in government” — not “just in a way that’s passionate but in a way that’s calculated,” Schatzline says within the first five minutes of the course.

The Fort Worth Report identified at least 10 people — through social media posts, press releases and podcasts — who completed Campaign University. They included Texas GOP Chairman Abraham George; an unsuccessful candidate who ran for a Dallas City Council seat this year; Tarrant County Republican precinct chairs; campaign managers; and a number of people who work for or previously worked for Mercy Culture or For Liberty & Justice.

None returned the Fort Worth Report’s requests for comment.

Schatzline twice agreed to an interview but never responded to efforts to set a date and did not return phone calls and emails seeking comment. He and other Mercy Culture pastors created Campaign University after working on Texas political campaigns, including the legislator’s, through For Liberty & Justice. Schatzline previously told the Fort Worth Report that he’s working to take the nonprofit to the national level.

It’s not unusual for churches or spiritual leaders to encourage political activity from congregants, said Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and lead organizer of the national nonprofit’s Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign.

“What does seem unusual — and perhaps unique — is an actual candidate training academy that’s run out of the church,” Tyler said. “Often, particularly if we’re talking about partisan campaigns for public office, that’s a place that churches and other houses of worship have largely steered clear of partisan politics.”

Schatzline has said he won’t seek reelection to his seat representing north Fort Worth and its surrounding suburbs but plans to continue as a pastor with Mercy Culture and to lead For Liberty & Justice.

The national faith board that Schatzline has been tapped to join declares its mission is to be “a strong, unified, uncompromising voice” on issues such as religious freedom, marriage, reproductive and parental rights, and gender-affirming care.

“It’s never been more apparent that the church has to rise up and be a bold voice in American government today,” Schatzline said in an Oct. 27 video he uploaded to social media announcing his new position.

That sentiment is recognizable in Campaign University.

At the start of the course, Schatzline tells Christians to ask themselves three questions the typical candidate might not consider but that he stresses are key to success if one is called to serve.

Did the call to government come from the Holy Spirit? Will your loved ones pray with you about it? Even if you don’t win, are you still giving God glory?

Don’t run if you “can’t hear the Holy Spirit” because other voices on the campaign trail may “shift your perspective,” Schatzline said.

A Divine Calling

Campaign University and other Mercy Culture political activities deliver on a commitment that Steve Penate told the Report he and fellow church pastor Landon Schott made to each other years ago: build a church that would “turn the city upside down” and be a leader in local politics.

Schott and his wife, Heather Schott, senior pastor of Mercy Culture, did not return emails seeking comment for this story.

Over its six years, the church has become a center of conservative religious politics in the region and increasingly across the state. This year, members gathered for prayer at the Texas Capitol, blessing its walls on the first day of the 2025 legislative session.

Last year, pastors urged Fort Worth City Council members — using threats of litigation — to approve the church’s new shelter for victims of human trafficking, despite opposition from residents of the adjacent neighborhood. Council members in favor of the move said at the time that politics did not affect their decision.

Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker, a Republican, did not return a request for comment on Mercy Culture’s impact on the city through political efforts such as Campaign University.

The skills taught in Campaign University build off lessons learned from Penate’s failed campaign for Fort Worth mayor in 2021, when he lost to Parker, the pastor told the Fort Worth Report.

Penate said “tons” of people have completed Campaign University since its creation. Neither he, Schatzline nor Campaign University’s other instructors provided lists of graduates. About 50 people were pictured in the Campaign University’s first graduating class, according to a 2022 Instagram post by For Liberty & Justice.

Mercy Culture’s expansion has included additional church campuses in Fort Worth, Dallas, Waco and Austin, and it plans to open a San Antonio campus next year. Penate said For Liberty & Justice aims to partner with churches across the country as it seeks to elevate Campaign University to a national level. Although he didn’t provide specifics, Penate said the goal is to create lessons for local churches to politically mobilize congregants, similarly to how Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA mobilizes students on college campuses.

He said the church is already spreading awareness about Campaign University by opening For Liberty & Justice chapters in other states.

As of late October, two For Liberty & Justice chapters outside of Texas offer Campaign University, Penate said. They are Florida’s nondenominational Revive Church and Hawaii’s Pentecostal megachurch King’s Maui, according to Schatzline’s social media posts. Representatives from the churches did not return requests for comment.

The nonprofit plans to open its next chapter in Arizona at the start of 2026, Penate said. After that, he expects For Liberty & Justice to grow exponentially thanks to Schatzline’s visibility on Trump’s faith advisory board.

“Next year is going to be explosive,” Penate said.

Religion has long had a historic role in major American political movements, McDaniel, the government professor, said.

Leaders such as Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. were involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Televangelist Jerry Falwell founded the political organization called the Moral Majority in 1979 and mobilized a generation of Christian conservative voters.

“This idea that God has called you to do this is a very empowering message. It gives you a clear source of identity and direction,” McDaniel said.

Many of Campaign University’s teachings address basic civics that might be useful to anyone running for office. Its lessons and 92-page course materials offer hands-on assignments for participants to start engaging with local government, such as reading the U.S. Constitution, identifying the elected officials who represent them at different levels of government and creating lists of potential campaign donors.

Campaign University’s goal is to bring Jesus into “every sphere of influence and every mountain,” Joshua Moore, another course instructor, says in the course’s second lesson. “That’s what we’re called to do as political activists.” Moore, who serves as Schatzline’s district director in the Texas House, is a former Republican New Hampshire state lawmaker. He did not return phone calls and emails seeking comment for this story.

In Campaign University, instructors often emphasize what they describe as a divine calling for Christians to serve in local government.

“A grandma can pray at home on her knees, but who’s in Austin on the inside, that has a voice, that has a vote?” Penate told the Report. “It starts in prayer, but you gotta get on the inside.”

Schatzline embodies this ethos in many ways, and he’s become a well-known face in far-right Christian conservative politics in Texas.

During this year’s legislative sessions, he authored 75 state bills on a range of issues, such as limiting DEI initiatives in local government, banning drag show performances in front of children and further penalizing the possession or promotion of child pornography. He failed to get many of his bills passed this year, except for one aimed at criminalizing the promotion or possession of child-like sex dolls.

“We’re going to give this space back to the Holy Spirit,” Schatzline said at the Capitol during the Mercy Culture-led worship session earlier this year. “We give you this room. … The 89th legislative session is yours, Lord. The members of this body are yours, Lord. This building belongs to you, Jesus.”

Landon Schott, the Mercy Culture co-founder, also participated in the January event at the Capitol, as did George, the state Republican Party chair, who has taken the Campaign University course.

“There is no separation between church and state,” George said at the event, according to published reports.

Campaign University lessons highlight what its instructors argue were the Founding Fathers’ “deep religious beliefs” as evidence that “God was not separate from the public square; nor was that the intent of the founders.”

The Founding Fathers “insisted upon a country that welcomed the role of religion in society, viewing it as a public good,” said Jeremy Dys, senior counsel for the First Liberty Institute, a Plano-based legal group known for representing clients in high-profile religious freedom cases, including a Plano student who was banned from distributing candy cane pens with a religious message on them at a school party and an Oregon woman who refused to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple due to her religious beliefs.

“Abandoning our societal cynicism toward religion would strengthen our commitment to liberty. It would do much to strengthen our country to regain the vision of our founders that celebrated the role of religion in our lives, public and private,” Dys said in an email to the Report.

But under the establishment clause, government entities shouldn’t impose religious laws or policies, said Tyler, the Christians Against Christian Nationalism organizer. Laws should “serve and support a pluralistic society,” she said.

“If our goal in engaging in partisan politics is to impose our own interpretation of the Bible, our own religious views on other people, that will lead to harm for people in our communities that are not of the same religious views,” Tyler said.

County at a Crossroads

For Liberty & Justice’s efforts to mobilize Christian conservatives through Campaign University come at a pivotal moment in Tarrant County, where Fort Worth is located, as Republicans seek to maintain control of the nation’s largest urban red county, which has shown occasional signs of turning purple. Tarrant voters supported Joe Biden’s presidential bid in 2020 and twice voted in favor of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s Democratic opponents, in 2018 and 2024.

“Every single seat matters, and now is the time to rise up. Now is the time to run. Now is the time to get godly men and women in office,” Schatzline told dozens of attendees at a Sept. 9 For Liberty & Justice event at Mercy Culture aimed at encouraging political action.

The Republican-majority Tarrant County Commissioners Court, the county’s governing body, led by County Judge Tim O’Hare, steamrolled through a redistricting process this summer to gain a stronger majority as detractors alleged racially motivated gerrymandering. In late October, a federal appeals court upheld a judge’s decision not to block the new map.

O’Hare did not respond to a request for comment.

After state lawmakers adopted a new congressional map to create additional GOP seats at Trump’s request this summer, the political makeup of Tarrant County’s congressional delegation is poised to shift from five Republicans and two Democrats to four Republicans and one Democrat.

For Liberty & Justice continues to develop its pipeline of candidates for local and state offices. The group circulates a friends and family list of candidates that it says share the same values. One candidate who repeatedly made the list was conservative Fort Worth City Council member Alan Blaylock, who announced his bid for Schatzline’s seat Oct. 27 after the lawmaker said he wouldn’t seek reelection.

Others named on the list included city council and school board candidates across the county. Several told the Report they weren’t required to complete Campaign University to be included on the list and that they hadn’t taken the course.

For Liberty & Justice is prepared to ensure strong Republican results as Tarrant voters gear up for next year’s elections, plus a runoff election to fill a Texas Senate seat vacated by now-Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock.

It makes sense that Tarrant County, which political experts describe as a bellwether in national politics, may be a driver in national conversations around how religion and politics intersect, said McDaniel, the UT professor.

His message echoed the sentiments expressed by For Liberty & Justice leaders and attendees during a recent night of action at Mercy Culture Church.

Throughout the night, volunteers who completed Campaign University emphasized how the lessons can not only activate people to run for office but also enable them to lead small groups of fellow Christian conservatives in political action, such as advocating for policy issues at city council or school board meetings.

Event organizers encouraged attendees to get civically engaged that night by joining small political action groups in neighborhoods scattered across Tarrant County, with specific interests such as “biblical citizenship” or “prayer and intercession.”

To end the night, one Campaign University graduate led the crowd in prayer. “We need you, Lord, desperately to be able to accomplish what you are calling us to do for this nation, for our city, for our county, for our state.”

In recent years, litigation on certain types of religious freedom lawsuits have been practically run of the mill: prayer on school premises, for example, and government funding for students at faith-based schools.

A case scheduled for U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments on Nov. 10, 2025, however, is very different from most other high-profile cases at the moment. Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections involves whether an inmate of a minority religious group, the Rastafarians, can sue for monetary damages after the warden violated his religious rights – specifically, the right to not cut his hair.

Landor v. Louisiana stands out because it underscores the complexity and far-reaching nature of religious freedom laws in the United States and the increasingly diverse faith traditions to which they apply. Christians now represent 62% of the American population, while 29% have no religious affiliation and 7% belong to other faith traditions.

Religious vow

Damon Landor, the petitioner, wore long dreadlocks for almost 20 years as an expression of his beliefs as a Rastafarian – part of a biblical practice known as the “Nazarite vow.” Many members of the movement, which first developed in Jamaica in the 1930s, do not cut their hair.

Landor was incarcerated in 2020 after being convicted for possessing methamphetamine, cocaine, amphetamine and marijuana. At first, officials respected his religious practice. Just three years before, in a case about another inmate in Louisiana, a federal appeals court had affirmed that Rastafarians must be allowed to keep their dreadlocks under the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.

Toward the end of his sentence, Landor was transferred to a different correctional facility. There – with three weeks left for Landor to serve – the warden ignored the judicial order, directing guards to shackle Landor and forcibly shave his head.

Not surprisingly, on finishing his sentence, Landor filed suit for money damages under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. The act forbids the government and its officials from imposing “substantial burden(s)” on incarcerated people’s religious free exercise rights.

Key question

In 2022, a federal trial court in Louisiana condemned Landor’s treatment but rejected his claim, concluding that money damages were not an appropriate remedy. The following year, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed that decision, denying Landor’s claim.

His legal team then filed a petition for the case to be reheard “en banc.” In this uncommon procedure, parties seek further review from all of the judges in a circuit, or federal appellate court. The court denied his request, but 15 of the 17 active judges wrote that this was a question for the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal after more than 20 organizations submitted amicus curiae, or “friend of the court,” briefs in favor of Landor. The Trump administration also filed an amicus brief encouraging the Supreme Court to take the case.

The briefs include groups that often have diverging opinions. Americans United for Separation of Church and State, for example, typically supports those wishing to keep religion out of public life. Conversely, the Becket Fund usually defends the rights of those seeking to increase faith’s role in public life.

They are of one mind in Landor because the case involves his right to express his beliefs freely by how he lives, in a very personal way: grooming and hair length.

Lower courts agree that Landor’s religious rights were violated. The key question is whether he can sue an individual official – here, the warden – for monetary damages.

Sister statutes

Weighing heavily in Landor’s favor is a previous Supreme Court order in Tanzin v. Tanvir. That 2020 case was brought by two Muslim men who sued FBI agents after their names were put on a “no-fly list.” The plaintiffs alleged that their names were added to the list in retaliation for refusing to spy on fellow Muslims.

The Supreme Court unanimously affirmed that the men could sue the agents as individuals, not just in their official capacity. Being sued as an individual means defendants must pay damages on their own, without the government helping to foot the bill – a potentially very expensive outcome.

There’s a key difference here in Landor’s case, though. In Tanzin, the plaintiffs sued for violations of their rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a federal law enacted in 1993. Landor brought his case under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, enacted in 2000. The laws are similar; in fact, the key language in both statutes is identical. But the Religious Land Use Act has not yet been interpreted as providing money damages against government officials.

The earlier statute, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, became law in response to a pivotal Supreme Court case about religious freedom: Employment Division Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith. The justices upheld the dismissal of two drug counselors under state law for ingesting peyote, a natural hallucinogenic substance, during a Native American Church ceremony – even though most states and the federal government had decriminalized peyote’s use for religious purposes.

The act was essentially a rebuttal of 1990’s Smith ruling. It requires laws that restrict religious freedom to pass strict scrutiny, the highest form of constitutional analysis. If the government seeks to limit someone’s religious exercise, laws must be based on a “compelling governmental interest” and carried out by the “least restrictive means” possible. Under that standard, laws usually cannot withstand judicial review. In 1997, the Supreme Court narrowed the act’s reach in City of Boerne v. Flores, restricting its application to the federal government rather than states.

The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which Congress adopted by unanimous consent in 2000, is often referred to as a sister statute because of its similarities. Notably for Landor, it forbids governments, or their agents, from imposing unnecessary “substantial burden[s]” on the “religious exercise” rights of those who are incarcerated. The act also protects religious land uses from discrimination through zoning restrictions.

Bigger picture

At first glance, Landor appears to be little more than a procedural disagreement over whether parties can recover damages under two similar statutes protecting religious freedom. However, at a time when there are nearly 2 million people in prisons, jails and detention and correctional facilities, the inability to seek damages under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act limits accountability for violations of their rights to religious freedom.

What’s more, Landor’s case illustrates that minority religions have as much protection under the First Amendment as larger faiths. How the Supreme Court resolves it will say a great deal about the future of religious freedom on issues that the authors of the Constitution could not have anticipated.

Charles J. Russo, Joseph Panzer Chair in Education and Research Professor of Law, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Churches are seeing a mass exodus of formerly evangelical Christian women who are "disengaging from religion" due to conflicting viewpoints and politics, according to a report in the Religion News Service (RNS).

These women, known as "exvangelicals," have found themselves turned off by their churches' and families' embrace of President Donald Trump and his far-right viewpoints.

"What upsets me most is how politics has become so intertwined with the church,” said Taylor Yoder. “It turned a lot of evangelicals in my life really ugly.”

Yoder said her family's support of Trump caused her to "deconstruct" her faith. She also said that friendships with LGBTQ co-workers caused her to "reexamine what she’d been told about homosexuality."

“Do I really believe that these people deserve to burn in hell just because they don’t believe like me?” she asked.

Yoder, now an atheist, critiques evangelicalism and its political ties in videos on TikTok, where she has amassed an impressive following.

This trend of "exvangelicals," RNS writes, is catching on with many young women like Yoder, who are generating "a flurry of memoirs, podcasts, social media posts and YouTube channels depicting evangelical culture as oppressive, unhealthy and even harmful."

"Their critiques converge on four themes: politics, patriarchy, abuse and the treatment of LGBTQ people. They tell of churches rallying behind Trump, keeping women out of leadership and instead promoting a culture of 'purity,' while failing to address abuse scandals exposed in the #ChurchToo movement that followed #MeToo," they explain.

Some call this divine intervention.

“I think God is raising up women to speak out,” said Amy Hawk, author of “The Judas Effect: How Evangelicals Betrayed Jesus for Power.” “God is allowing this so that we can see the corruption and step away from it.”

Hawk also has an impressive following on social media where she argues, "Bible in hand, that it is unbiblical to support Trump," RNS writes.

This has made her a beacon for women who have left the church. “Many are coming to me and saying, ‘Thank you, I thought I was going out of my mind,'" she said.

April Ajoy, author of “Star-Spangled Jesus: Leaving Christian Nationalism and Finding a True Faith,” woke up when she saw a former church acquaintance on TV storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 "under Christian nationalist flags." Then her brother came out as gay.

“I spent nights crying because I felt so alone and confused, questioning if everything I ever believed was a lie,” she said, and only later recalled things she’d said to others. “I didn’t realize my own hypocrisy in the middle of it,” said Ajoy. “I feel like the evangelical God is in a very tiny box.”

Yoder said her decision to leave the church was confirmed after seeing late MAGA podcaster Charlie Kirk elevated to martyr status.

"He embodies how hateful and divisive they can be toward LGBTQ people. He was very much the opposite of what I wanted to be a part of," she said.

According to the Pew Research Center, research from the Public Religion Research Institute suggests that exvangelicals are comprised of 58 percent female and 42 percent male.

Their reasons vary, RNS writes: "80 percent say they no longer believe their religion’s teachings, 58 percent cite anti-LGBTQ views, while half say their faith harmed their mental health."

Beth Allison Barr, a Baylor University historian who chronicles women’s roles in the early and medieval church, says that women make up more of the exvangelical movement for one reason in particular.

"Women don’t see a place for themselves in the church,” Barr said. “They don’t hear women-elevated stories. They do not feel like their callings are appreciated.”

For many women, "Trump’s rise — and evangelical support for him — was a turning point," RNS explains. About 80 percent of white evangelical Protestants voted for him in the past three presidential elections.

“I honestly could not believe that the church was holding him up as anybody besides a con man and an abuser,” Hawk said. “I spent all those years ministering to women, being the hands and feet of Jesus, and then the church is telling me I should be excited about somebody that attacks women.”

Christian author Sheila Wray Gregoire likens the stories of exvangelical women to the early stages of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s.

It’s a “rejection of Christianity as being about power,” Gregoire said. “I think that’s where we are, where people are dissatisfied with the church as it is. What’s coming hasn’t come yet. And we can’t see what that’s going to look like. But it’s an exciting place to be.”