What Happened
Emily Bickford and Matthew Bradeen have a daughter born in January 2013. In 2013 they agreed to "shared parental rights and responsibilities" — joint decision-making on everything from schooling to religion. That arrangement held quietly until 2021, when Bickford began taking the child, then eight, to Calvary Chapel Greater Portland, an evangelical congregation in Westbrook, Maine, without telling Bradeen. When he found out, the two spent three years in mediation over every other issue in their parenting plan, but religion and healthcare could not be resolved, and the case went to trial in August 2024.
The Portland District Court heard two days of testimony, including from a stipulated expert on "cults," Janja Lalich, and from Calvary Chapel's own pastor, Travis Carey. In December 2024, the trial court gave Bradeen sole authority over the child's involvement with that specific church, while leaving other religious decisions jointly shared. Bickford appealed, arguing the order violated her First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. On September 1, 2026, Maine's Supreme Judicial Court unanimously affirmed.
The Evidence the Court Relied On
By the pastor's own description, Calvary Chapel preaches the Bible "verse by verse, chapter by chapter," including what the court's opinion calls "quite vivid descriptions" of Hell — wailing, gnashing of teeth, burning, torment, "eternal perpetual pain and regret" — and sermons on the Second Coming describing seven years of "pure hell on earth under the persecution of… the Antichrist" for anyone who has not, in the church's terms, "accept[ed] the terms of God."
The trial court found the child began asking Bradeen "a lot of questions" about Heaven and Hell, and specifically why he and her half-sibling would not be there with her. She left notes around his house out of fear that the Rapture was approaching and that he would be "left behind." She experienced documented panic attacks tied to these topics. When Bradeen raised his concerns directly with Bickford, her response was that she lives "under God's law, not the state's law," and that the child was not, and should not be, anxious, because the two of them "just pray" and "give it to God."
What moved the court was not the content of the doctrine as such, but two further things layered on top of it. First, concealment: Bickford did not tell Bradeen the child was scheduled to be baptized — he learned of it from a third party — nor that an overnight church retreat for children as young as eleven (at which the child was not permitted to have her phone) was taking place; he found out from the church's own Facebook page. When confronted, Bickford would "double down," according to the court, sending the child back to Bradeen's house with new religious-themed clothing and accessories. Second, and most decisive: on the evening after the first day of trial, Bickford brought the child to a service where Pastor Carey delivered a six-and-a-half-minute prayer devoted entirely to the litigation, naming the parties and the child by name nearly thirty times, calling Bradeen "in need of salvation," describing the case as "an attack on God's Word," and asking God to defeat the "plans and the snares and the tricks of the enemy." Bickford did not remove the child from the service and later testified under oath that she considered it "appropriate." The court noted this was not unusual for Carey, who "consistently characterizes those who challenge the church's beliefs — including [Bradeen] — as the 'enemy.'"
The trial court's own words draw the line precisely: "there has been no showing of harm to [the child] associated with a belief system that is rooted in the Bible. Instead, the harm is associated with [Bickford's] inability to co-parent… and the specific messaging… which divides [the child] from her father and characterizes him as the 'enemy' who poses a threat to her eternal salvation." The Supreme Judicial Court agreed that finding was about alienating messaging and an unwillingness to co-parent — not a verdict on whether Hell, the Rapture, or Bickford's theology are themselves true.
Just How Broad Is the Order?
This is now the best-documented point in the whole case, thanks to Liberty Counsel's own reproduction of the trial court's actual language. The order gives Bradeen sole authority to decide, regarding Calvary Chapel specifically, whether Bickford may take Ava to "any services, gatherings, or events associated with Calvary Chapel," what "material, literature, video, or other messaging" from the church she may show her, and "whether she associates or communicates with any member of Calvary Chapel other than Ms. Bickford." A second clause extends Bradeen's sole authority to "their daughter's participation in any other church or religious organization" and to her "exposure to the teachings of any religious philosophy or of the Bible in general." Bradeen, according to Liberty Counsel, has denied every alternative church Bickford has proposed since the order took effect in December 2024 — "nothing for nearly two years," in founder Mat Staver's words, as of this September's coverage. Practically, that includes things not obviously about Calvary Chapel at all: Staver has said in interviews that, under the order, Ava could not ring a bell for the Salvation Army at Christmas or volunteer at a crisis pregnancy center with her mother, because both are religious organizations. Christmas and Easter services, Bible study together, and ordinary contact with the friends Ava made at church are all covered by the same restriction while she is in her mother's care.
The Supreme Judicial Court's own published opinion, which this article draws from directly, states the outcome more narrowly — sole authority over Calvary Chapel, with joint decision-making and a Bradeen tiebreaker for other religious organizations. That is not necessarily a contradiction; the appellate opinion summarizes the order rather than reproducing it in full, and if Bradeen has in practice refused every proposed alternative, a "tiebreaker" and a "veto" look identical from Ava's side of it. Readers should hold both descriptions in mind: the Court's own summary, and the fuller order language Liberty Counsel has published.
Did the Child's Grades Suffer?
This remains the one point this site cannot confirm. Neither the Supreme Judicial Court's opinion nor Liberty Counsel's public statements, including a lengthy radio interview with Bickford's attorney, address Ava's school performance directly. Readers should treat any specific claim about her grades as unconfirmed either way.
Claims From the Mother's Side Not Independently Verified Here
Mat Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel and Bickford's attorney before the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, discussed the case at length on the radio program CrossTalk (VCY America) on September 8, 2026. Two of his claims deserve to be reported plainly as his claims, since this site cannot independently verify them against the trial court's full written order.
First, Staver stated that the trial judge wrote "God" in lowercase throughout the original order, and characterized this as deliberate disrespect toward Bickford's faith. He noted that the Supreme Judicial Court's September 1 opinion does not address this claim at all, which is accurate as far as this site's own reading of that opinion goes — it is simply silent on the point, neither confirming nor denying it. Second, Staver characterized the testimony of Bradeen's cult expert, Dr. Janja Lalich, as identifying belief in Heaven, Hell, angels, demons, and salvation itself — ordinary components of historic Christian doctrine, not anything specific to Calvary Chapel — as markers of a "cult." The Supreme Judicial Court's own opinion describes Lalich's testimony differently, in its own footnote, as characterizing Calvary Chapel specifically as adhering to a "Moses model" and as a "closed social system," without extending that label to Christian doctrine generally. Both characterizations may be capturing different parts of the same testimony; without a transcript of Lalich's testimony itself, this site cannot resolve the discrepancy and reports both sides' framing rather than adopting either.
One detail from the same interview is worth including for its own sake, not as a disputed claim but as an illustration of how a shared-custody order like this one actually bites: a caller asked whether Ava, who does have her own phone and internet access, could simply look up religious material herself. Staver's answer was that she could, on her own, at school or elsewhere — but that if her mother were to sit with her and do the same thing, even privately, Bickford could be found in contempt of the court's order and risk losing custody altogether. The restriction, in other words, does not reach what the child does on her own; it reaches what her mother may do with her.
For balance: Bradeen's attorney, Michelle King, has called the Maine Supreme Judicial Court's decision "well thought-out and reasoned," and the court's own opinion, as this article has already shown, frames the case as a co-parenting and child-welfare dispute rather than a ruling against Christianity as such. Staver, in the same CrossTalk interview, said his firm intends to argue that a nearly identical order was recently issued by a New York court, though this site has not been able to independently locate or confirm that case, and it is not named in any source reviewed for this article.
Could the Father Force the Child to See It His Way?
This is the most commonly missed distinction in coverage of this case, including by some readers, and the court's order does not answer yes to it. Bradeen was given authority to bar the child's participation in this one church's services, events, and activities, and, per the underlying order, to bar contact tied specifically to that church and its people. He was not given a license to make her share his own view of the matter, to compel her toward disbelief, or to indoctrinate her in the opposite direction. The order restrains one parent's ability to expose the child to a particular, named source of alienating messaging and the relationships built inside it; it does not appoint the other parent to re-author her convictions. The distinction matters because a father who used this ruling to demand his daughter recite his own theology back to him, rather than simply keeping her away from the specific church and its circle found to be causing harm, would be doing something the order does not authorize and something Scripture does not ask of him either — more on that below.
Two Legal Frameworks Compared
The most consequential part of the opinion is not the facts but the law the court applied to them, and this is where the case will matter for other parents. The trial court initially believed — reading Maine's 1980 precedent, Osier v. Osier, involving a Jehovah's Witness mother who would not consent to a blood transfusion for her son — that any restriction on a parent's religious decision-making had to survive "strict scrutiny," the most demanding standard courts apply, reserved for laws that threaten fundamental rights. The Supreme Judicial Court corrected that reading.
| The Question | What the Trial Court Initially Believed | What Maine's Supreme Judicial Court Held |
|---|---|---|
| Standard for religious custody disputes | Strict scrutiny required before considering best interest | Best-interest standard applies, same as any other custody issue |
| What protects the losing parent's religious rights | A demanding, narrowly-tailored, compelling-interest test | A rule against religious bias or hostility in the court's reasoning itself |
| Does allocating authority to one parent violate the other's rights? | Potentially, absent a compelling justification | No — allocating between two fit parents is not a "state intrusion" on either |
| Osier's 1980 "strict scrutiny" language | Treated as binding precedent | Clarified as non-binding dictum from an outdated "custody" framework |
Put simply: when two fit parents disagree and the court must decide, the Constitution requires only that the judge not play favorites based on whose religion is whose. It does not require the judge to treat a religious dispute between two parents as more constitutionally fraught than a dispute over vaccines, schooling, or extracurricular activities — all of which Maine courts already resolve under the ordinary best-interest test.
Other Cases Reaching the Same Result
Bickford is not an outlier. Courts around the country, in cases that have nothing to do with religion at all, have repeatedly allocated final decision-making to the parent more willing to protect the child from alienating messaging and to co-parent in good faith — and Maine's own precedent bears this out directly.
- Mills v. Fleming (Maine, 2017) — a Maine mother was ordered to facilitate her children's participation in an extracurricular activity the father preferred; the court held this was not a "state intrusion" on her rights at all, the same reasoning applied here.
- Klein v. Klein (Maine, 2019) and Seymour v. Seymour (Maine, 2021) — both allocated final say on educational and medical matters to one parent over the other's objection, with no constitutional violation found.
- Little v. Wallace (Maine, 2016) — the court found a child had been "seriously emotionally injured by the chronic conflict between her divorced parents," language the Bickford court echoed almost exactly.
- Kendall v. Kendall (Massachusetts, 1997) and In re Marriage of Jensen-Branch (Washington, 1995) — both religious-disagreement cases cited approvingly by the Bickford court, restricting a parent's religious teaching specifically because of its alienating effect on the child's bond with the other parent.
- In re Kurowski (New Hampshire, 2011), Kelley v. Kelley (Nevada, 2023), Young v. Holmes (Kentucky, 2009), and Yordy v. Osterman (Kansas, 2007) — all applied the ordinary best-interest standard, not strict scrutiny, to parent-versus-parent religious disputes, the same position Maine has now adopted.
Not every court agrees. Kingston v. Kingston (Utah, 2022) and In re Marriage of McSoud (Colorado, 2006) both held that strict scrutiny should apply once a court goes beyond simple decision-making authority and actually restricts a parent's ability to expose a child to their faith. Maine's court considered and rejected that reasoning, but the disagreement means this exact question could eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court on its own.
Prior U.S. Supreme Court Rulings on Parental Rights
The Bickford opinion leans heavily on nearly a century of Supreme Court precedent — almost all of it, notably, involving a fight between a parent and the government, not between two parents.
- Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) — established that parents have a constitutional liberty interest in directing their children's upbringing and education, including the right to choose religious schooling.
- Prince v. Massachusetts (1944) — held that parental authority is not absolute; the state may still intervene to protect a child's welfare, in that case limiting a Jehovah's Witness parent's use of a child to distribute religious literature on public streets.
- Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) — protected Amish parents' right to withdraw their children from public schooling after eighth grade on free-exercise grounds.
- Parham v. J.R. (1979) — addressed parents' authority in committing a child for mental health treatment; Bickford's lawyers cited it, but the court found it did not apply to a dispute between two parents.
- Palmore v. Sidoti (1984) — the single Supreme Court case most directly on point, and the one the Maine court leaned on most heavily. A trial court had denied a mother custody partly out of concern for the "social stigmatization" her child might face living in a mixed-race household. The Supreme Court held that was unconstitutional — not because best-interest analysis itself was suspect, but because a court may never rely on a forbidden classification, there race, within that analysis. Maine applied the identical principle to religion: the best-interest standard stands, but the judge may never let hostility toward one parent's faith do the deciding.
- Troxel v. Granville (2000) — recognized a fit parent's presumptive right to make decisions for a child, again in a dispute against a third party (grandparents seeking visitation), not against a co-parent.
- Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025) — the Court's most recent parental-rights decision, holding 6–3 that Maryland public schools had to let parents opt their children out of LGBTQ-themed classroom instruction that conflicted with their religious beliefs, reaffirming in strong terms that "the right of parents to direct the religious upbringing of their children would be an empty promise if it did not follow those children into the public school classroom." Bickford's attorneys invoked Mahmoud heavily; the Maine court agreed it states the law correctly but found it, too, addresses parents against the state rather than parents against each other.
That last distinction is the hinge of the whole case: every one of these landmark rulings restrains what the government may do to a parent's religious authority. None of them, until Bickford squarely raised the question, told a state court what to do when two parents, both constitutionally entitled to direct their child's religious upbringing, want opposite things at the same time. Maine's answer is that someone still has to decide, that the judge is not the enemy of either parent's faith by doing so, and that the only constitutional guardrail is impartiality, not paralysis.
What Happens When Co-Parents Hold Different Religions?
Under joint or shared custody, the honest answer is: it depends on whether the parents can still cooperate. Courts everywhere, Maine included, strongly prefer to leave both parents with a voice, and this order did exactly that — Bickford retains a say in every religious matter except this one specific church, and the court's stated reason for narrowing it that far was that both Bickford and the pastor testified they would simply disobey a broader order they disagreed with. Where two co-parents hold different faiths but can still discuss a child's religious activities in good faith, courts generally leave joint decision-making alone. The trigger for judicial intervention, in Bickford as in the cases cited above, was never the disagreement itself — it was one parent's proven unwillingness to co-parent, to disclose, or to protect the child from messages designed to alienate her from the other parent.
Calvary Chapel's Own Doctrine, Examined
Nothing in this article, or in the court's own findings, turns on whether Calvary Chapel's teaching is itself sound. It is worth saying plainly, though, that this site does not regard it as sound on two specific points, both confirmed by the church's own statements of faith and by Pastor Carey's own testimony in this case. Calvary Chapel congregations hold, as a matter of settled doctrine, to a pretribulational, premillennial eschatology — a literal seven-year tribulation (Revelation 6–18) from which the church is removed by rapture beforehand. That is precisely what Carey described under oath: "seven years of… pure hell on earth under the persecution of… the Antichrist" awaiting those who have not "accept[ed] the terms of God." Calvary Chapel also holds, explicitly and by name, to Arminian soteriology, rejecting what its own materials call "5-point Calvinism" and teaching instead that Christ died for every person without exception and that salvation turns on the sinner's own choice to "accept" Him.
This site holds, with believers in God across history — from Old Testament saints onward, through various Christian groups since — that faith itself is God's gift to the sinner, not a work the sinner contributes toward his own salvation — and that grounding salvation in a man's own "acceptance," however sincerely meant, quietly relocates the deciding factor from God's grace to the sinner's own will. That is a real error. It is worth being just as clear, however, about what kind of error it is. Unlike the doctrines this site examines in its articles on Roman Catholicism, the Jehovah's Witnesses, or Islam — each of which builds an explicit doctrine of salvation by works — neither Arminian soteriology nor a pretribulational timetable is a denial of Christ Himself, His deity, or His atoning death; Calvary Chapel affirms all three. A pretribulational timetable, though this site does not hold it to be biblical, touches no doctrine of salvation at all. Arminian soteriology is different, and its own form of works is a quieter one: it treats the sinner's own act of receiving grace — opening the door, in the common phrase — as the condition without which God, by that system's own logic, cannot save him. Sovereign grace holds the opposite. It teaches that even the receiving is itself the fruit of the Holy Spirit's prior work in the sinner, not a contribution the sinner supplies before God may act. Arminianism asks man to open the door; sovereign grace holds that the Holy Spirit Himself gives the very willingness to open it, so that a sinner's reception of grace is evidence grace was already at work in him, not the precondition for it. Scripture is plain about why the door was never simply waiting to be opened: "For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23), and fallen man's natural response to the light is not curiosity but hostility — "every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light" (John 3:20). Christ told Nicodemus the same truth directly: "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God… Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again" (John 3:5, 7). The new birth is not the sinner's own response to grace waiting at the door; it is what makes any true response possible at all. This site intends to take up total depravity and the new birth in more detail in future articles and messages.
A believer can hold either view in good conscience and still be, in practice, trusting Christ alone for salvation; these remain secondary matters, not gospel ones, and nothing in this case turns Calvary Chapel into a false church in the sense that term is used elsewhere on this site. The concern here is narrower and, in some ways, more useful: not whether Calvary Chapel's members are Christians, but whether its specific teaching, delivered the way it was delivered to an eleven-year-old, served her well.
Unequally Yoked: A Caution This Case Illustrates
The public record does not establish what Matthew Bradeen believes about God, and this site will not guess. What is established is that he is now at odds with Calvary Chapel, and the church, through its pastor's own prayer, regards him as a man in need of salvation and outside its fellowship. Both things can be true without settling the underlying question: it is entirely possible he professes no faith at all, and equally possible he simply never wished to join this particular congregation, or any congregation, for reasons that have nothing to do with saving faith. What is on the record is this: Bickford and Bradeen were never married, had Ava together in 2013, and by every account available neither was a professing Christian at the time. Bickford's own conversion came around 2017; Ava's, in 2021. Nothing in the record indicates Bradeen has ever made a similar profession. If that is the whole picture, this case sits squarely inside the caution 2 Corinthians 6:14 gives — a family begun before either partner was walking with the Lord, later strained precisely at the point where one parent, and then the child, began to.
But even setting that question aside entirely, Scripture nowhere suggests a believer may marry, or have children with, any other believer without regard to doctrine either. Two genuine Christians who disagree sharply on how Christ returns, or on whether salvation rests finally on grace alone or partly on the sinner's own choice, are laying the groundwork for exactly this kind of dispute the moment they have children — whether or not the marriage itself ever fails. A wrong view of the tribulation costs no one his soul. Raising a child between two parents who each hold their own view as settled certainty, and each want the child taught accordingly, can still cost a family its peace, precisely because a child cannot hold two contrary pictures of the same coming King without feeling the contradiction between the two people she trusts most. The lesson for Christian readers is not only to marry someone who names the name of Christ. It is to marry someone who actually agrees with you about what that means — someone who will teach your children the same gospel, the same doctrine of grace, and the same hope of Christ's return, so that your children never have to choose between their parents to know what their own family believes.
A Christian Perspective
Scripture gives fathers real, weighty authority in a home, and it never treats that authority as optional decoration:
That verse cuts two ways at once, and both cuts are relevant here. It commands a father to raise his children in the Lord — a real, active duty, not a passive one. But it opens with a warning against provoking a child to wrath, and the Greek word behind "provoke" carries the sense of exasperating a child to the point of resentment or despair. A church that tells an eleven-year-old her own father is bound for eternal torment, that names him from the pulpit as an "enemy" whose "tricks and snares" must be defeated, and does this in a prayer timed to a custody hearing, is not nurturing that child in the Lord — whatever the truth of its underlying doctrine on Hell or the Rapture may be. Provoking a child to fear and alienation from a parent is condemned in the very verse that commands godly instruction, and no appeal to sound doctrine rescues a delivery method Scripture itself forbids.
Scripture is equally direct about honoring both parents, not one selectively:
A church that trains a child to see one parent as an obstacle to her salvation, however sincerely that church believes its own theology, is training her toward the opposite of that commandment, not toward it. And Bickford's own testimony — that she would not do anything "contrary to what God wants," even if a court ordered it, echoed by her pastor's testimony that God's Word supersedes the law of the land — deserves a careful word rather than a simple cheer from believers who might otherwise sympathize with a parent standing on conviction. Scripture does command obeying God rather than man when the two directly conflict (Acts 5:29), but that principle answers a different question than the one this case actually presented. No one ordered Bickford to deny Christ, to stop praying, or to abandon her faith. She was ordered to stop taking her daughter to one specific congregation whose messaging a court found, after two days of sworn testimony, to be harming the child and severing her bond with her father. Romans 13 still commands submission to civil authority in matters civil authority is actually competent to decide, and custody of a child is squarely one of them (Romans 13:1–2). Even the truest doctrine, delivered in a manner that frightens a child into panic attacks and estrangement from a parent she is commanded to honor, is not exempt from a lawful court's authority to intervene — and a father restraining that specific harm, without compelling his daughter to adopt his own unbelief in its place, is standing on exactly the ground Ephesians 6:4 gives him.
Stand back from the details of Calvary Chapel's own doctrine and a wider lesson comes into view, one this site would urge on any Christian reader weighing marriage or already raising children. A family not first grounded in a right, shared confession of Christ before children arrive should not be surprised when, if that family later fractures into shared custody, the final word on how the child is raised in matters of faith belongs not to either parent's own conscience but to a civil court. That is exactly what has happened to Ava: a judge, not her mother or her father directly, now decides which church door she may walk through. And as this article has already shown, that is not confined to Calvary Chapel — the order's own language reaches "any other church or religious organization" as well. If Bickford and Ava sought out a different congregation tomorrow, one holding to sovereign grace and a more careful eschatology, the same order gives Bradeen standing to object, and if he judged that church too strict, or too similar to the one already found harmful, the same court could restrict that one as well. The deeper problem was never only which specific church taught which specific error. It is that two parents never agreed, from the very beginning, on the one answer that matters most — and their daughter is the one now living inside that unresolved disagreement.
Sources drawn from the Maine Supreme Judicial Court's published opinion, Bickford v. Bradeen, 2026 ME 94 (Sept. 1, 2026), and the underlying trial court record; reporting by Fox News, the Maine Monitor, Newsweek, CBN, Billy Graham's Decision magazine, the Bangor Daily News, and the First Amendment Encyclopedia (MTSU); Liberty Counsel's own press statements, published order-language excerpts, and case updates on behalf of Emily Bickford; Mat Staver's September 8, 2026 interview on CrossTalk (VCY America); and Supreme Court opinions and case summaries for Palmore v. Sidoti, Wisconsin v. Yoder, Prince v. Massachusetts, Troxel v. Granville, and Mahmoud v. Taylor (Becket Fund, Wikipedia, and the Congressional Research Service). Updated September 9, 2026.