PORTLAND, Maine (LifeSiteNews) – A legal battle that stripped a Maine mother of the right to take her daughter to church began when the child’s religious awakening triggered a “hidden anger” in her father, according to the mother slated to take her case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
As first covered last year by LifeSiteNews, the dispute is between Emily Bickford and Matthew Bradeen, the unmarried, separated parents of 13-year-old Ava. The father maintains that their daughter has displayed panic attacks since the mother started taking her to Calvary Chapel of Portland, stemming from fears that the rapture is drawing near and her sister and father will not make it to Heaven.
He produced a witness whose assessment of Calvary Chapel’s sermons claimed that they were potentially psychologically harmful, prompting the court to transfer full control of the child’s religious upbringing from Bickford to Bradeen.
Represented by Liberty Counsel, Bickford – whose child has not been abused or neglected, and whose parental fitness has not otherwise been disputed – said that this assessment offers nowhere near a sufficient basis for such a significant intrusion on a parent’s right to direct her child’s religious upbringing. This week, the Maine Supreme Court unanimously upheld the custody order, which Liberty Counsel has vowed to appeal to the nation’s highest court.
Bickford, who agreed to 50/50 custody with Bradeen in 2013, when Ava was nine months old, recently elaborated on her story in a Freedom Alive interview with Liberty Counsel founder and chairman Mat Staver.
She explained that initially the two were “very good at co-parenting,” they ‘communicated well” and “were willing to support one another if we ever needed help with anything.” But the seeds of a shift were planted when Bickford had a religious conversion in 2017, and the “beginning of the changes in me were being made known to Matt as well through Ava. Ava had heard the Gospel as well, and she heard for the first time about heaven and hell, and she was starting to see that the only way for us to be saved from our sin is through Jesus Christ. And those who don’t believe on Jesus Christ and His payment for our sin would see eternal hell.”
“And she didn’t want that for her dad, so she ended up speaking to him about it,” she continued. “And I think that’s initially where some of the, it was like a hidden anger, I think, started to happen when Ava was four, and then going forward, she just ended up, she was being the salt and the light in her house when she was with her dad.”
Things came to a head, she says, when Ava expressed interest in being baptized at an upcoming church service. The service was slated for one of Bradeen’s weekends, and he said no. But the baptisms had been delayed anyway due to weather and would next land on one of Bickford’s weekends with the girl.
“And because of that, Matt, through a mutual friend, had heard that Ava was to be baptized,” she said. “Now, that decision hadn’t been made. And so Matt had just come to the conclusion that I was doing it behind his back (…) he gave me a call. So this was the day of the baptisms, and he gave me a call saying I’m not to baptize her,” starting a three-year legal battle.
As a result, Bickford has not been able to take Ava to any church, associate with her church friends, attend any church-related events, or even read the Bible with her daughter since December 2024.
“Ava was really heartbroken. She asked her dad if she could attend a camp this past summer at Calvary Chapel. It’s a camp that she went to the year prior. She can’t go to any youth group events … so she’s really in her faith in Jesus Christ and Him alone right now, and she goes to a public school, so she is exposed to some things that I wouldn’t agree with. But she is remaining steady in her faith, and we look forward to this court order to be overturned so that she can get back into fellowship.”
Staver called the situation “one of the most outrageous cases we’ve ever seen at Liberty Counsel.”
“Depriving one parent their right to instill their religious views into their child and granting sole authority to the other parent fails to give proper protection to parental rights and religious freedom under the First Amendment. The implications of this opinion pose a serious threat to religious freedom,” Staver said after Maine’s highest court sided with Bradeen.
Authorities in Maine display a pattern of hostility to the rights of conservative and religious residents. The state is under federal investigation for allegedly coercing health providers into covering abortions, and another mother has petitioned the Supreme Court over a public school helping hide her child’s gender “transition” from her.