New ‘Secular Spotlight’ episode examines Hegseth-connected Christian nationalist pastor
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The Freedom From Religion Foundation’s “Secular Spotlight” takes on Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson in its latest episode.
FFRF’s Nancy Noet and Matt Kenyon speak with Spencer Macnaughton, editor-in-chief of Uncloseted Media, about his revealing interview with Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson, whose extremist views on LGBTQ+ rights, women, marriage and the role of religion in government have gained greater visibility through his ties to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. They examine Wilson’s support for patriarchal rule and his disturbing views on homosexuality and marital rape, and discuss the growing normalization of Christian nationalist rhetoric in American politics.
“That rhetoric in itself, the execution, the marital rape, all of these things where we now know, that that ideology is baked into the federal government, should alarm every American, and frankly I think should be primetime news consistently through the cycle,” Macnaughton says. “I see Doug Wilson as akin to the Ku Klux Klan as it relates to their view on black people. Line up the facts, and tell me where I’m wrong.”
You can catch this episode of “Secular Spotlight” on FFRF’s YouTube channel, as well as by watching on your smart TV after downloading FFRF’s free app, Freethought TV, which also highlights FFRF’s other video programming. Our recent episodes include psychologist and author Mary L. Trump providing a firsthand account of a recent gathering of nonreligious congressional members, and FFRF staffers breaking down the legislation whitewashing Christianity’s impact on American history. Make sure you’re subscribed to FFRF’s YouTube channel for all the latest updates!
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With more than 41,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
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India: Cockroaches, Entrance Exams and Political Disruption
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
WORT 89.9 (Madison, WI)
By Staff
FFRF Communications Director Amitabh Pal interviewed for his global affairs radio show journalist, researcher and educator Sukumar Muralidharan on the recent secular-minded, education and economic-focused student protests in India that have rocked the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi government: their genesis, ideology, tactics & impact.
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FFRF decries Trump administration’s nearly $2 billion giveaway to religious entities
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The Freedom From Religion Foundation says the Trump administration’s announcement that it will direct almost $2 billion in global funding toward faith-based organizations is outrageous.
The State Department is touting the initiative as the largest allocation of global health foreign assistance to faith-based groups in more than 20 years, which includes hundreds of millions of dollars for some of the world’s largest evangelical Christian ministries. The administration announced $1.4 billion for health services delivered through faith-based and community hospitals and clinics plus $538 million in humanitarian assistance involving Samaritan’s Purse, and a consortium led by World Vision and Compassion International.
“The administration is openly restructuring American foreign assistance around religion,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Humanitarian aid should be based on humanitarian need and the ability to provide effective, secular services, not on whether an organization puts ‘faith in action.’ Taxpayers should not be forced to bankroll an administration’s campaign to elevate and subsidize religion.”
The administration’s own language makes its religious favoritism impossible to miss. It celebrates the funding as a “historic” investment in faith-based groups and repeatedly identifies the religious character of recipients as a virtue. The government may contract with religiously affiliated organizations to provide secular services under appropriate safeguards. Still, it may not use public money to advance religion, subsidize evangelism or deliberately privilege religious organizations because they are religious.
The inclusion of Samaritan’s Purse, a pervasively sectarian religious outfit headed by zealous evangelist Franklin Graham, is particularly alarming.
Samaritan’s Purse is not just any old charity. It explicitly identifies itself as an evangelical Christian organization whose mission combines aid with spreading Christianity. Its own mission statement says it assists “with the purpose of sharing God’s love through His Son, Jesus Christ” and “serves the Church worldwide to promote the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.” The group says its mission is to help people in need while “proclaiming the hope of the Gospel.”
Those are constitutionally significant facts when the federal government proposes directing enormous amounts of taxpayer money through the organization.
Samaritan’s Purse also requires employees to affirm and adhere to its Statement of Faith, such as that the bible is “inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.” Its employment website describes working for the group as a “calling” and “ministry,” and states that its religious beliefs determine employment eligibility.
The organization has attracted particular controversy for its anti-LGBTQ+ religious requirements. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Samaritan’s Purse faced widespread criticism when workers at its emergency field hospital in New York were required to subscribe to a statement of faith containing its religious teachings about marriage. Samaritan’s Purse defended its practice of requiring paid staff to subscribe to that statement. Graham himself has publicly attacked marriage equality and insisted that marriage is defined by “God’s laws.”
It is untenable that theTrump administration now proposes making Samaritan’s Purse one of its favored conduits for American humanitarian assistance.
“Feeding hungry people and providing medical treatment are worthy public purposes,” says Gaylor. “Preaching the gospel is not a government purpose. When an organization expressly combines humanitarian assistance with an evangelical mission, the government has a heightened obligation to ensure that not one taxpayer dollar subsidizes religious activity, proselytizing or religious discrimination.”
FFRF emphasizes that the constitutional problem is not simply that religious organizations may participate in otherwise neutral government programs. The problem is that the administration is proposing to funnel extraordinary sums of public money through ministries because those missions advance Christianity.
The danger is especially acute overseas, where recipients of American assistance may be experiencing war, famine, disease, displacement or natural disaster. People in desperate circumstances should never have to encounter government-subsidized evangelism alongside food, medicine or shelter. U.S. foreign assistance must serve people regardless of their religion or nonreligion, without using their vulnerability as an opportunity for religious outreach. Making the allocations all the more concerning is the inhumane destruction of USAID under DOGE cuts, which have already cost as many as 750,000 lives worldwide. Lancet estimates the aid defunding will take as many as 9.4 million lives by 2030.
FFRF is urging the administration to disclose the terms of every award, the safeguards separating publicly funded services from religious activities, the rules governing employment and subcontracting with federal funds, and the mechanisms that will ensure beneficiaries are never subjected to proselytizing or religious discrimination. The state/church watchdog will be filing a Freedom of Information Act request to the State Department seeking records related to these awards, including grant agreements and funding terms, communications concerning the selection of faith-based recipients and documents detailing safeguards intended to prevent taxpayer funds from being used for religious activities, proselytizing or religious discrimination.
FFRF is also calling on Congress to investigate these awards and demand strict accounting for every taxpayer dollar. The American public deserves to know why these organizations were selected, how federal funds will be used and what protections are in place to ensure that humanitarian assistance does not become taxpayer-funded evangelism.
The United States can and should provide lifesaving assistance around the world. It does not need to finance the spread of Christianity to do so.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With about 41,000 members, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
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FFRF: Michigan police department must remove prominent bible passage
Tags:Freedom From Religion Foundation, Politics, Religion
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is demanding that the Battle Creek Police Department in Michigan take down a Christian bible verse in large lettering from its public waiting room.
“Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. — Matthew 5:9,” the display reads.
A concerned Battle Creek resident recently alerted the state/church watchdog to the display, explaining that encountering an explicitly Christian message inside a government law enforcement facility made them feel like an outsider.
“As an atheist . . . I was offended by witnessing a violation of the separation of church and state in the city of Battle Creek Michigan Police Department waiting room,” the resident reported to FFRF. “I personally felt discriminated against when observing the bible verse on display in a government building, concerned for the bias towards atheists and those of non-Judeo-Christian faith.”
FFRF has sent a missive to the Police Department pointing out the constitutional transgression.
“Posting a bible quote on government property fails to respect this constitutional mandate of neutrality,” FFRF Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Charlotte R. Gude writes to Police Chief Shannon Bagley. “This posting promotes religion over nonreligion and Christianity over all other faiths.”
People interact with and rely on law enforcement officers during some of the most urgent and vulnerable times of their lives, FFRF reminds the police chief. Battle Creek residents belonging to minority religions or with no religion at all, such as FFRF’s complainant, should not be made to feel excluded because the local Police Department promotes a particular religious group’s beliefs, implying official support for Christianity. Sectarian Christian displays marginalize community members among the 38 percent of Americans who are non-Christians, including the 31 percent of Michigan residents who are religiously unaffiliated.
“Imagine the outcry were a Quranic verse about peace posted at this Police Department. When a police department prominently displays New Testament Scripture, it sends a troubling message about whose beliefs are favored by those entrusted to safeguard citizens and enforce the law,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Every Battle Creek resident, Christian or non-Christian, religious or nonreligious, should be able to walk into their police department confident that they will be treated equally and will not be confronted with bible verses.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to defending the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters relating to nontheism. With more than 41,000 members across the country, including over 1,000 members in Michigan, FFRF is the largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and humanists) in North America. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
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Christian televangelist Katie Souza claims aliens stole her eggs and made a hybrid baby
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Ask any author you know what it’s like to promote a new book, and you’ll inevitably hear stories about how tough it is to break through all the chaos of the news. You’ll try anything to get people to pay attention to your book during that short period of time around when it’s published, but unless you’re already famous or have great connections, it’s rough.
In the case of convicted criminal-turned-Christian evangelist Katie Souza, she has a brilliant marketing plan to convince the most ignorant religious people to buy her new book about how aliens are engaged in “spiritual warfare ministry”: Just tell everyone that aliens stole her eggs in order to create half-alien-half-human hybrids.
Just as the Bible foretold.
I was visited when I was a young girl and… aliens… alien beings implanted an inter-dimensional device in me that harvested my eggs over my lifetime. ‘Cause eggs—you get hundreds of thousands of eggs when… you’re born with hundreds of thousands of eggs if you’re a female. But they don’t mature until you ovulate.
So this… this device obviously was harvesting them right when they would mature. So that they could then try to work their work—and I have no idea how they do that—but to try to create a hybrid child, which they actually eventually did.
And I saw it. I was shown it. And its name was Starburst.
[sighs]
Yeah. That’s why my husband and I are childless right now. Yep.
Yep. That’s the reason. It was aliens.
She also believes alien implantation causes infertility. Which will come as a shock to anyone who’s ever studied the subject.
No one in this woman’s life apparently has the heart to tell her she’s delusional. Instead, plenty of people are propping her up as a voice of reason. According to The Roys Report, her show “Healing Your Soul” airs on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and Faith Broadcasting Network and she was recently featured on the cover of conspiracy-driven Charisma Magazine (headline: “The Coming Alien Invasion”). It was an imprint of Charisma that published her book.
That’s before we even get into her background as a felon who decided she needed a new grift:
Her ministry started in 2006, a few years after she completed a prison sentence for the manufacture of methamphetamine and possession with intent to distribute. Katie Souza Ministries initially focused on prisoners, with Souza sharing a dramatic conversion testimony.
Souza then shifted into faith healing and deliverance, speaking more and more frequently, as time went on, about spiritual warfare and generational curses.
Her life story has also grown darker as time has gone on. In 2025, for example, she told Christian podcaster Dan Duval that her grandmother was sexually assaulted by a Nazi officer during World War II. She said that she had to break a family curse connected to Adolf Hilter’s attempt to harness the power of a Satanic altar.
She added that another family member was a sex trafficker with the Illuminati, a group that some conspiracy theorists believe controls major world events.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” Souza said.
Uh… sure you can. You can make up so many lies, weaved together in a tangled web, that you yourself start to believe your own mythology and assume it’s your reality. And if you know how to communicate, you can make good money trying to convince other people your delusions are also their reality. Souza apparently brings in over $2 million per year through her ministry by saying bullshit like this.
To paraphrase the Christian website Protestia, she’s not a formal criminal. She’s still a criminal. But instead of selling drugs, she’s selling religious lies, which our society tolerates and (for no good reason) respects.
The thing is, her story doesn’t even make sense on her own terms. We’re supposed to believe that aliens secretly implanted a device inside her, monitored her ovulation for decades, stole her eggs, created at least one hybrid child, and caused her infertility—but left not a single piece of physical evidence to confirm any of this. (C’mon! I want a DNA test on that child!) And every time someone asks a question, you know how Souza will respond: This is just too complicated for ordinary people to understand, much less people without faith.
Either Souza knows she’s lying or she genuinely believes this happened. Neither option makes her look good. It just shows that the conservative Christian media ecosystem will always highlight someone’s delusions if they think it’ll make for good content.
That might be the bigger problem here, how so many Christian outlets are validating, promoting, and monetizing Souza’s lies. None of them are fact-checking anything she says because facts aren’t part of their vocabulary. If a Christian says it, it must be true. It’s the logical result of a media system where there are no standards. Which means the lies will only get bigger from here on out.
