The Maine Supreme Judicial Court — the Law Court, the state’s highest earthly tribunal — let stand last week an order forbidding a Christian mother from taking her daughter to church. Not in Teheran. Not in Beijing. Maine.

Here are the facts, and read them slowly. Emily Bickford and Matthew Bradeen never married and separated. Their daughter, Ava, is thirteen. The mother came to Christ in 2017, took the girl to church, and when the girl wanted to be baptized, the non-religious father said no — and, as the court opinion itself records, learned of the scheduled baptism only after it had been set. He went to court. In December 2024 a family court ordered that the mother may not take the child to Calvary Chapel, may not take her to any religious event, and may not “expose” her to any “religious philosophy or the Bible in general.” The father’s stated concern, per Liberty Counsel: the girl had panic attacks about the rapture — about missing heaven while her father would be there without her. A unanimous six-justice panel said the order should stand, because, as the saying goes, it’s not like the child’s soul is the one at stake.

No one accuses this mother of anything. No abuse. No neglect. Her fitness is not in dispute. And the State of Maine nevertheless decreed that a fit Christian mother may not read the book that built Western civilization to her own thirteen-year-old daughter. Baptism is not elective surgery. It is the new birth. And the words the Maine courts apparently cannot bear are “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

Notice what Maine has done. The old charge against the Religious Right is that it wants to make the state its church. Maine has done the thing without the embarrassment of admitting it. The state is the church now. The liturgy is the Family Court docket. The catechism is comfort. And the unforgivable sin — the sin against the Family Court itself — is a mother teaching her child that there is a Judge above her.

Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel, who argued the case before the Law Court, says the fight goes to the United States Supreme Court. Good luck to him. But while the lawyers brief the First Amendment, the dioceses of this state sit mute. Yes, the girl is headed to a Calvinist chapel; I would rather she be baptized Catholic too. Today it is a Baptist girl’s baptism the state regulates. I do not need the theology endorsement of a Calvary Chapel to recognize blasphemy when a court writes it. When the state decides how much “exposure” to religion a child may receive, the same pen will turn. Catholics will not get a warning before the sentence changes.

The court can take this case and still get it wrong. Whatever the nine in Washington do with it, Maine has already said what it thinks of Christ — and it said it unanimously.