Speaker A: This just in.  Terrorists have attacked a lawyer convention. They’ve taken everyone hostage, and they are threatening that if their demands are not met, then every hour on the hour, they will release one lawyer.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast, the Internet’s courtroom in the case of rash nationality versus religion. Here, our host uses his experience as both an attorney and an atheist to put religion on trial. We solemnly swear that it is the most informative, educational, and entertaining jury duty you will ever do. And now it’s time for the cross examiner.

Speaker A: Welcome. Welcome to the Cross examiner podcast. I am your host, the Cross examiner. I am an atheist. I am an attorney, and I am alarmed. I’m alarmed by the rise of Christian nationalism in this country and more importantly, the massive amount of misinformation that is powering that rise. I seek to bring my experience as an attorney and as an atheist to help educate and entertain. My goal is to arm you, to give you the facts about the legal system, about what the law says, what the Constitution says, so that when you’re confronted with this misinformation in your life, you can push back in an informed way. And today, I think I’m going to be able to do that better than ever, because today I am interviewing a very, very important guest. His name is Ryan Jane. He works for the Freedom from Religion Foundation. FFRF if you are unfamiliar with the foundation’s work, I encourage you to listen to this episode.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker B: You already are. But I also encourage you to check out their website@ffrf.org. There you can contribute to their efforts to help protect us all from the intrusion of religion into government. And you can get more informed, and you can also ask for help. And we’ll get into that with our interview. One note before we get started. This was a remote interview that we did over Zoom, and we use Zoom to record it. I think it sounds pretty darn good for a remote solution.

Speaker A: But we are not in a studio.

Speaker B: I’m not normally in a studio. I do this in my basement. I do this as a public service. It’s volunteerism on my part. I’m just noting the method, because if there are any sound issues, and I don’t think there are, they’re my fault, not Ryan’s.

Speaker A: So moving on, I don’t want to.

Speaker B: Waste any more time. I want to get straight to this interview. I have to say that Ryan was so generous with his time that we are going to be doing multiple interviews. This is part one of my interview with Ryan Jane of the FFRF.

Speaker A: Let’s go to the interview. So welcome to Ryan Jane of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Thank you for joining me. Absolutely.

Speaker D: Thank you for having me.

Speaker A: I’m so excited to have you here. Uh, as I said on a previous episode that I have recorded, I haven’t published yet. I hope I don’t fanboy too much about your presence here because you have the perfect lawyer job. So I’m going to embarrass you a little bit as I read off your credentials, if that’s all right.

Speaker D: Sounds good.

Speaker A: Okay. So you got a BA. In philosophy from University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Correct me if any of this is wrong. You graduated law school from Lewis and Clark in Portland, Oregon, where you focused on intellectual property and animal law. You were there. The associate editor of the Animal Law Review, which is a pretty big deal. Being an editor on any law review in law school is kind of a big deal, isn’t it?

Speaker D: Yeah. Uh, I thought so at the time, at least. Yeah, it’s a lot of work, though, I would say.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And your notes say that you co founded the Pacific Northwest’s first secular legal society.

Speaker D: That’s right, yeah. A friend of mine and I in law school were both atheists and interstate church separation. Noticed that there wasn’t a student group dedicated to that anywhere in the, uh, region, and so we decided to form one. And that was actually what first got me connected to FFRF. We had, uh, Andrew Seidel, who at the time was, uh, an attorney with the foundation, as a guest speaker. And I met him there and turned it into an internship. And the rest is history.

Speaker A: That’s amazing. It’s funny how these little connections can really change your life. It sounds like. It really. Did you then graduated cum laude from the school, so big props there. And did you begin immediately working for the foundation right away?

Speaker D: I did my last semester of law school. I externed, uh, back in Madison, Wisconsin, which is where FFRF is based. And I just threw everything into it because I knew that if I could land a job in state church separation, that is my absolute dream job. Uh, plus, I happen to be from Wisconsin, so it wasn’t too bad living in what to a lot of people, would be the middle of nowhere. Madison, Wisconsin, was fine with me. So I threw absolutely everything into it, trying to sell myself. And, um, they haven’t gotten rid of me yet, so I guess I did an okay job.

Speaker A: You’re doing something right. Yeah. Or they haven’t noticed you. So my notes indicate that you started as a Fellow, and then you became a staff attorney pretty soon after that, like, a year or two later. Is that about right? Yeah.

Speaker D: Our fellowship program is for young attorneys, and it’s a two year program. So you’re a fellow for two years. And the main idea is to educate young lawyers, teach them about state church separation, and then kind of send them off into the world. Um, but of course, I didn’t want to leave the nest, so I convinced them to make me, uh, a full time staff attorney after that.

Speaker A: Nice. Excellent. So where are you now? I think the title I saw was strategic Response senior, uh, Policy Council. Is that the right title for you?

Speaker D: Yeah. So our Strategic Response team handles our policy matters, uh, legislative tracking and also rapid response issues. And, uh, so my title is Senior Policy Counsel. So most of what I do now is handle policy at the state level. I track legislation across all 50 states, uh, write policy statements for us, and I still do some litigation and work with the legal team on other matters. But mostly I do policy and education stuff, which I really enjoy.

Speaker A: That’s amazing. Uh, it must be hard to keep track of everything, especially now with the rise of this sort of Christian nationalist push to move religion back into government. It must be hard to keep track of everything that’s going on in every.

Speaker D: State is incredibly hard. We are part of, uh, a coalition of other secular organizations. Uh, and then also, I have a sort of partner in crime here at Fffrf who is also named Ryan. Ryan Dudley is our, uh, state policy manager. So between the two of us and then all of our coalition partners, uh, that’s a big part of our job, is just trying to keep track of everything because it’s just like this endless flood of, um, mostly bad bills, but also some good stuff we can support, too. So, yeah, it’s juggling a million things at the same time. Um, but it’s interesting, and it’s something different every day.

Speaker A: Please tell me you’re collectively known as the Ryans.

Speaker D: I’m afraid so.

Speaker A: Okay. I figured, I think legal precedent dictates you must be known as the Ryans.

Speaker D: Yeah, that’s exactly right. You have to refer to it that way.

Speaker A: Absolutely. So what did attract you to church state separation issues?

Speaker D: Well, I’ve been an atheist my entire life. My parents were kind of raised moderately religious, but decided when they had kids to just not discuss religion with us. So, naturally, uh, that led me to being an atheist because I wasn’t indoctrinated as a kid. And I became fascinated with religious belief because when I was a kid, I thought that surely, uh, this was something that grown ups knew was not true. I learned about Santa Claus, and that wasn’t true. And when I learned about God, I assumed it was the same thing, that this is just everyone knows this is just something you tell kids, and then at some point, everyone learns it’s not true. And it wasn’t until really I was in middle school, I think, that I realized that, oh, my God, grown ups actually believe this stuff. So I became really fascinated. And that’s why I studied, uh, philosophy. Largely, I focused on philosophy of religion because I wanted to learn more about why do people believe this? And, um, of course I want to know. Am I missing something? If I’m wrong about this?

Speaker A: No.

Speaker D: So I did a really deep dive into apologetics, uh, and counterapologetics and got really into that realm of things. And then what I learned was that religious belief impacts our society in so many ways. And, um, most of them I felt and still feel were very negative. And it’s like, if we could remove the religious, uh, component of people trying to impact our policy, things would get better just across the board in so many different ways. And so I’ve never had a problem with people being religious, but people getting involved with public policy and inserting their personal religious beliefs on other people has always really bothered me. So then, of course, when I found out about state church separation, my eyes just let eyes are like, this is exactly what I care about. So, um, I never dreamed that I could actually get a job in state church separation until I was in law school and formed a student group related to it and then just kind of fell into it. So that was just sheer luck. Um, but, yeah, I’ve been passionate about it for decades now.

Speaker A: Well, we’re extremely lucky that there are organizations like FFRF that will hire people and give them jobs for this particular purpose. I will echo everything you said. We are brothers from another mother. As far as our experience, uh, the one difference is, I was naive enough when I was younger going through that thing I just said, well, there must be support for these beliefs because everybody believes it. And then when I went into my research phase and my apologetics phase and found out there’s no support not that there’s kind of weak support. There’s, like, no support for these core beliefs, that’s when I entered sort of my angry atheist phase of, like, uh, how can people be not talking about this? And so at that point, the same thing. I went through the same experience, but you ended up with this position. Do you realize that you have a dream job for many attorneys who went to law school, incurred seven years worth of graduate debt right. And then found that they couldn’t go to FFRF or similar organizations and had to go work for big corporations?

Speaker D: Yeah, I believe it. My little brother is a, uh, lawyer, too, and he works at a law firm, and he likes his job. And I have other lawyer friends who are in kind of the corporate world, and some of them like it more than others. But, uh, yeah, without a doubt, um, i, uh, know how lucky I am that I was able to get a position doing something that I love.

Speaker A: I think one of the things, uh, that I’d love to do an episode on later is what we can do as a society to encourage or incentivize attorneys to do more of your type of work. What can we do from a policy perspective? So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for doing what you do for FFRF. And that leads to my next question is what is the FFRF for listeners who are not familiar? What is their mission and what do you do with them on sort of a day to day basis?

Speaker D: Sure. So, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, uh, has been around since the 1970s, and we have two mission statements. So one is to fight for the constitutional separation between religion and government, and, uh, the other is to educate the public about non theism. And FFRF has been active in both litigation and education since the 1970s, uh, but it really picked up steam in the late 1990s, early two thousand s. And then since then, it’s been just growing and growing. So we have about 40,000 members now, and those are actual dues paying members. We have many more followers than that on Facebook. We’ve, uh, been to the Supreme Court one time and have gotten most of our kind of fame and notoriety from, uh, uh, law cases. But, uh, we also are, I think, pretty well known for just getting involved and solving people’s state church problems outside of court. So we’ll often get complaints about someone who says, my kid is in elementary school and they have a teacher, uh, who’s pushing religion on them. What can I do? And so what we do is we’ll write a letter to the school district and say, we got this complaint. We keep our complaints anonymous, but we say, here’s the problem. This is the teacher who we heard this about. And a lot of the time, the school district or other government entity will look into it and say, yeah, you’re right, we’re going to put a stop to this. And, uh, so that’s a big part of what we do. And sometimes that gets media attention. So we get to do fun things like go on local news programs and talk about it, and incur the wrath of local zealots who happy about us sticking around their community. So, uh, yeah, that’s pretty much what we do. And for me, on a day to day basis, um, when I was first here, I wrote a ton of letters like that. So I would come in and I kind of look at what complaints had come in, what I could take action on. And that’s what I did. I drafted letters, I gave media interviews. Uh, and then I got involved with our lawsuits, too. And then a few years ago, I transitioned into doing what I do now, which is more policy work. So I focus on tracking legislation, trying to help influence, uh, what state legislatures are doing. So to stop bad bills, promote good bills, uh, we weigh in on some administrative rules, things like that, and trying to generally educate and influence public policy. So it’s a different sort of work. But, um, especially with the way that courts have been going, which, if any of your listeners are not aware, is not great, the direction that courts have been going, uh, regarding the establishment clause is problematic. So the focus on state policy, I think, uh, uh, is more important than ever. So I’m happy that that’s the area I’m able to focus on now.

Speaker B: Me too.

Speaker A: Uh, I was describing FFRF to somebody the other day, and I said, if you are familiar with Jefferson’s wall of separation between church and state, FFRF are the soldiers standing on top of that wall look out all the time to prevent the invasion of these unconstitutional methods, uh, from creeping into our country. So thank you so much for doing what you do. It sounds, uh, fascinating. I know you handle FFRF and you specifically handle big issues and small issues, uh, writing letters for that one student who’s experiencing this problem versus threatening a lawsuit against a state. And I have two examples to go over of recent things where FFRF has gotten involved. So, on the big end, I did a show about all these bills in Texas where they’re trying to push religion into public school. And we’ve got a, uh, bill that’s trying to mandate the Ten Commandments to be posted in every classroom that has since, um, failed to get to the floor for a vote on a technical reason. We have the hiring of religious chaplains to be staff in school and proselytize and preach and teach. And we have the mandate is that boards will be able to mandate that a period of prayer be made available to students. Biblical reading, prayer, other religious texts. You can opt into it. It’s not an opt out. You have to get a permission slip. So those three bills are blatantly unconstitutional. And, uh, if I recall correctly, you responded directly and quickly to the Ten Commandments one.

Speaker D: We did. So it’s a rare thing that, uh, in our position, we’re able to just flat out say, we are going to file a lawsuit if this bill passes. And we were able to do that here. Uh, when the Ten Commandments bill was moving through the Texas legislature, we knew without any doubt that if this thing becomes a law, it’s going to get challenged and we’re going to be the ones who are leading the vanguard on it. So the nice thing about being the organization that says that is that you get kind of the media interviews. So I was on Texas Public Radio. They had me and someone from the ACLU on, uh, talking about it. So, yeah, it’s, uh, fun, and it’s very impactful to do big kind of national impact litigation type work like that. But it’s also, of course, it’s terrifying that Texas is doing things like that and doing what we can to stop it. But the idea that what if you lose? What if you challenge a, uh, law like that and the court upholds it? I mean, that would just be tragic. So, yeah, luckily, Texas, for the time being, has been spared of that one particular bill.

Speaker A: Your comment just there struck me with something I hadn’t thought of before as the soldier on the wall of separation. You see things coming that most people don’t. You see it earlier and you understand its seriousness. Do you ever get that feeling that you’re the Paul Revere doing a ride around the country to try to alert people and you’re worried people aren’t going to listen?

Speaker D: Yes, absolutely. Uh, it’s part of our educational outreach. We try to get out to as many people as we can as early as we can, when we see what’s kind of coming down the pike. And of course, you don’t know for sure what’s going to actually pass, what’s going to be as harmful as you think it is going to be. But we absolutely feel that way. Like, we’ll see something and say, hey, no one is talking about this and this could be really bad. So we try to get the word out.

Speaker A: Got you. You also work on small issues as well. And one example I found when I was researching your work is you wrote a letter to my home state of Maryland very recently. A couple of months ago, uh, Maryland was contemplating removing old unconstitutional requirements from our laws where tests of faith, religious tests in order to hold office, things like that. Can you tell me a little bit about that and why you took the time to do it? Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker D: So this is a bill that would have removed, as you said, outdated religious language, uh, from the Maryland Constitution in articles 36, 37 and 39. So I submitted testimony to a legislative committee that was considering this bill. And, uh, what this language says is it says that no religious test ought ever to be required as a qualification for any state office, which is similar to the no religious test clause that we have in article six of the US. Constitution. But then the Maryland Constitution goes on to say, quote, other than a declaration of belief in the existence of God. So it specifically says that discriminating against atheists is okay. And, uh, the kind of amazing thing about this specific Maryland provision is that it was the subject of a US. Supreme Court case in 1961, which is called Torcasso v. Watkins. And, uh, for one thing, there’s an Fffrf connection because Ray, uh, Torcasso, uh, was a friend of Fffrfs, was an honorary board member. And so we have interest in it. But also, it’s just that is language that, uh, it’s discriminatory and it ought to go. So we thought this was a great bill. So I wanted to write in support of the bill to get rid of this old language. So that’s what I did. I just wrote testimony encouraging the committee to pass the bill. And unfortunately, they didn’t. They just let it sit there, which is common. Most bills die in committee and that’s what happened.

Speaker A: Got you for our listeners. Maybe you can explain. If it was found constitutional, why wasn’t it automatically removed to begin with? Why did it take a bill to remove the language?

Speaker D: Yeah, it is kind of a weird legal fantasy that we have that even when the US. Supreme Court says that a particular law or state constitutional language cannot be enforced, uh, that doesn’t automatically remove the language from the books. So the state legislature has to go in and say, we want to take action to update our laws to remove this language. And, um, I could see people asking, why bother removing language if it’s inoperative? Are there more important things that we could do? Um, and my response to that is, first of all, if I were in Maryland, I would want to be proud of my state constitution, and I don’t want discriminatory language in there. But also, maybe more to the point is we’ve learned, if nothing else, from the Dobbs decision last year, that old unconstitutional laws don’t always stay inoperative. Like in my home state of Wisconsin, a Civil War era abortion ban sprang into effect the moment Roe v. Wade was overturned. And in the past, we had attempts to remove that law, and they were met with the same question, why bother? It’s not enforceable anyway. And now it’s suddenly, uh, a live law. And so we’re kind of scrambling to get rid of it and we can’t right now. So that’s the other thing is, I think when you have this old unconstitutional language, it is absolutely worth the effort to get in there and get rid of it.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Those are both excellent points, and you face an extra barrier, uh, in addition to those arguments, at least in my experience, politicians are, ah, nothing if they’re not good game theorists. And they say, well, the game theory on this is lose lose. If I support a bill that is removing the requirement that you believe in God to hold office in Maryland from the Constitution, if I support it, my opponent is going to say, see, my opponent wants to remove God from the country. This is why we have a problem, even though it’s already been removed by the courts and it’s inoperative and it’s unconstitutional. All of those things. We live in sort of a Trumpian post fact world where that doesn’t matter. If I support it, I’m going to give ammunition to my opponent and nobody’s talking about it, so why risk it, right. Why stand on principle? Do you run into that when you make these arguments?

Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. I think that is just a political reality. I mean, it depends entirely on your constituency. Um, being called an enemy of religion might be a big political problem in some places, but many voters would be in favor of this change. But the trick is, if you’re a, uh, sponsor of a bill like this, can you get enough co sponsors who not only like the bill, but are willing to put their name on it and willing to vote for it and kind of incur that blowback. And I think, without a doubt, that happens where you have a bill that a majority of lawmakers would like to pass if they could do it with kind of political cover, but they don’t see it as being worth it.

Speaker A: Yeah. We’re talking about different types of cases. What are your favorite types of arguments or cases to work on for FFRF?

Speaker D: Overall, I’ve always cared most about issues that have a, um, meaningful impact on someone. So that includes, uh, all the public school complaints that I’ve worked on, pretty much where we have, in particular, teachers or coaches imposing religion onto young kids, uh, and then also funding issues. I’ve been able to play a part on stopping several programs that gave taxpayer dollars to churches in New Jersey. Specifically, it amounted to millions of dollars over several years in a case in front of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Uh, so those are the most important cases to me. Uh, but really, I get pretty fired up about anything that’s state church related, which is why I work here.

Speaker A: Right. Excellent. As we all do. As we all do. You just have an effective outlet. The rest of us just sort of rant into the void.

Speaker D: That’s what you do in your free time, right?

Speaker A: Exactly. In fact, uh, you just provided me with a perfect segue to something I wanted to bring up. In the last 48 hours, I’ve seen two issues that made me think of FFRF. Like, just right off the top of my head, a big one is today, or I think yesterday, oklahoma approved the nation’s first religious charter school. I assume you’ve heard about that. What are you guys reaction ah, to that?

Speaker D: Yeah. So that one it’s actually an example, in a way, of what you were talking about earlier, about kind of being Paul Revere and calling something ahead of time. I had a school complaint a number of years ago in Chicago, uh, where I was complaining about a charter school that was secular, but they were renting space at a religious school, and there was this giant cross outside of this public charter school. And so I wrote to them saying, hey, you got to cover up the cross or something. You can’t have school kids being forced to go into this school that has religious iconography all over the place. And I was kind of amazed that the response from Chicago Public Schools was, they said, we’re not sure that the establishment clause applies to public charter schools.

Speaker A: And I, wow.

Speaker D: Holy cow. Like, this is a really scary line of reasoning, and if Chicago Public Schools is willing to make it, we’re going to see this elsewhere. So, um, I have been kind of reminding other lawyers in the field of, like, this is going to be an issue. I know, they’re public schools, but, um, there are going to be religious charter schools at some point. And so, um, here we are now, specifically in Oklahoma. This has been a proposal for a while now, for several months. So we knew that this was possible. And there’s some drama with the Attorney General’s office where an old opinion supported it, and then a new attorney general came in and said that it’s unconstitutional. So it’s kind of a mess. And there is definitely infighting going on in the state, uh, house of Oklahoma over this. So we are hoping that that sort of resolves itself. The Attorney General of Oklahoma, who’s a very conservative guy, is going after this because he correctly sees this is totally unconstitutional. So he wants to put a stop to it. So we’re hoping that he is going to be successful. Um, but we, along with a lot of other secular organizations, are absolutely ready to get in there and fight that out in court as needed. Because if this is allowed to, uh, exist, a Catholic public school, you will absolutely see them start springing up all over the country.

Speaker A: Absolutely. It’s good that you brought up the Attorney General. I had a quote put aside of something that he said that sort of spoke to me. He said, quote, it’s extremely disappointing that board members violated their oath in order to fund religious schools with our tax dollars. And that’s something that not a lot of people bring up. I don’t know about you, but as an attorney, I took an oath when I was admitted to the bar to support and defend the Constitution. People of the military take that oath. People who are politicians and go get elected and serve take that oath. Judges take that oath. Everybody involved in this takes an oath to support and defend the Constitution. And yet we see these religious organizations and religious operatives who have taken that oath time and time again violate the most important law of our country. Do you understand why? Uh, how are they rationalizing that?

Speaker D: I guess, yeah, I mean, it’s absolutely right. I’ve invoked that a few times in my letters of complaint to people saying, hey, you swore an oath to uphold the First Amendment, and here you are violating it. Willfully. Um, and probably we should invoke it more than we do. But I think that to play devil’s advocate, uh, it’s a squishy business when you’re trying to say, well, what does the First Amendment mean? And there’s always arguments on the other side. So that I think if they had to justify it, that’s where they’d have to go, is to say, well, I’m upholding my interpretation of the Constitution.

Speaker A: Right. Yeah. In many cases, that’s a reasonable discussion. Honest people can differ on the meaning of the Establishment Clause and free Exercise Clause, and they have in history. So it’s an honest one. But it starts straining credulity when you start seeing. Things like, hey, I want to put the Ten Commandments up on the wall of school, but I think the constitutional allows that.

Speaker D: Absolutely right. And when you have people who just deny that state church separation exists at all, you’re at this point just denying clear history.

Speaker A: Now, one other thing on the Oklahoma one, uh, there was a recent Supreme Court case where the court ruled that states cannot discriminate against religiously affiliated schools in its school voucher program. Do you think that is going to be applicable here? Is the argument going to be, well, that’s taxpayer money going to a religious school, what’s the difference?

Speaker D: I do think that’s the argument they’re going to make. And yeah, that case is espinoza. So the way I think that you should be thinking about these cases is, in the past, states tried to walk a line where they said, okay, we’re going to fund private schools, but only if there’s teaching secular education. And Espinoza has come in and told the Supreme Court is telling states, you can’t do that if you’re going to fund private schools, you have to fund religious education. And I think that’s absolutely wrong. That should be a violation of the establishment clause, because you’re forcing taxpayers to pay for religious education. One of the core motivations behind the establishment clause was stopping exactly that. So I think it’s outrageous, but that’s currently the law of the land. Now, the question here is going one step further, where the state is saying we’re going to fund public education, but administered by a private entity. And the question now would be, can they then exclude religious education on the grounds that it’s a public school? And it’s almost unthinkable that the Supreme Court would allow that. Just the entire history of public schools has always been that there’s no one really doubting that public schools cannot include actual religious education. That’s been pretty well agreed upon, even from very conservative religious litigators. So it’s hard to imagine them going that way. But if they do, the next step that states would have to decide if you don’t want to force this on taxpayers, is to say, well, the Supreme Court has forced us into the position where public funds only go toward actual public schools. We would love to have charter schools and give people school choice. But the Supreme Court has foreclosed that because they’ve said if you do that, you have to fund religious indoctrination.

Speaker A: And that’s a common situation that’s used on both sides. There was a case, I don’t remember it, small case. I think it was texas. It’s usually Texas, but the local board decided to allow religious advertising on buses. And as soon as that happened, the American, um, Atheist Association or somebody started putting up all of these you don’t need God, god is not real, these sorts of things on buses. And everybody got freaked out. And it was the same logic, well, if you’re going to let somebody play in the playground. You got to let everybody play in the playground. And then what did they do? They said, oh, well, we didn’t intend this. And then they revoked that policy. And now they took it away because they would rather have no discussion of religion than have a, uh, fair discussion of religion. So from what I’m hearing from you here is the court has, in my opinion, I think your opinion, erroneously framed this as if you are going to fund private schools through a voucher program, then you must fund all schools. You must let everybody play in the pay ground. And so that we’ll be back at the bus situation, we have to decide, okay, no religious discussion on the buses or everybody gets to discuss.

Speaker D: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, the only difference, because you see this a lot with holiday displays, too, where you get if you have a government that wants to put up a Christian nativity and it’s government sponsored, um, that’s unconstitutional if it’s a standalone display. The Supreme Court has been pretty consistent on that. But the one loophole they could do is they could say, well, we’re going to bring in private entities and let them put up their private displays. It’s not government speech anymore. And they do that, but then they have to open it up to everybody. And that’s when the Satanists show up.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker D: Everything’s, uh, that is a similar situation. But the difference here, of course, is that you’re paying for this with taxpayer dollars. So different than just opening a forum where you’re letting people come in and speak.

Speaker A: That’s a great point.

Speaker D: This is actually forcing taxpayers to support it.

Speaker A: Yeah. My wife, when she heard about this case, uh, her first response was, how long until we have the first Church of Satan school, public school in the country, if this Oklahoma thing stands, so watch out. Um, so the other issue that I ran into within the last 48 hours that made me think of your foundation was a Reddit instance, by the way. Uh, I, like many people, will explore the atheist forums on Reddit. And I saw a story of somebody saying, hey, my daughter just came back from a city sponsored camp. Summer camp has started, and she’s nine years old. And unbeknownst to us parents, the camp, which is city run again, brought in somebody, a member of the Good News Club. And that person started preaching about Jesus and telling the kids they needed to pray or they would go to hell. And this nine year old girl told her mother. I felt so embarrassed that I felt like I had to pray. So I pretended to pray, and I didn’t know what to do. And this person posted this story on R atheism. And pleasantly, the very top massively upvoted response was, somebody said, you need to contact the Freedom From Religion Foundation today. So that’s that sort of small case. Uh, I actually reached out to that person, telling them, hey, I’m going to be talking to somebody from them. Can you give me more details? And they did. And I actually made a few phone calls to the Parks and Rec Department around the city and nobody was answering their phone. I don’t know if it’s made the news yet, but have you experienced this good, uh, News Club, uh, trying to sneak in and tell nine year old children that they’re going to go to hell?

Speaker D: Absolutely. We have. And to echo all the people on that reddit forum, uh, anyone who’s in a situation like that absolutely should reach out to us. We have a forum on our website and this is our bread and butter is trying to resolve situations like that. And these are the sort of circumstances that frankly just really pissed me off. And no matter how tired I haven’t had my coffee yet, I will drum up the energy to write an angry letter to try to fix that because it is so outrageous. And so for people who don’t know, the Good News Club had a case before the US. Supreme Court. And what they do is they have these religious clubs that take place typically just after the school day in a public school. And so they’re trying to blur the line between the normal actual school day and the religious club. But legally, what they’re doing is they’re renting space at the school, so it’s not the government putting it on, so therefore they’re allowed to be there. Just like churches sometimes rent schools for their Sunday worship program, which is legal. But we often see the Good News Club and similar organizations trying to step over that line if they can get away with it. And this is a perfect example of that, where having someone come in and advertise for that religious program during a city, uh, sponsored summer camp, that’s outrageous and that’s not acceptable. So, uh, hopefully that’s the sort of situation that we can talk to an attorney for the city who will sort of see reason once we lay out the law for them and, uh, we’ll do the right thing, make sure that doesn’t happen again. But yeah, that’s the kind of thing that we see every day.

Speaker A: How often do you find and you may not get to this level, how often do you find that this sort of organization and to be clear, just to give our audience a little more background on Good News Club, the organization that runs it is called the Child Evangelism Fellowship. So there is no confusion about what’s going on here. Their mission statement is to evangelize and to indoctrinate five to twelve year olds. That’s their target audience. Much like your project that we’ll get into later in law school, your capstone project was on faith healing. There were religious based neglect of children. Mine was on the master settlement agreement. Uh, between the tobacco companies and all of the state’s attorneys general, this feels very much like this. The tobacco companies knew a big part of that was you can’t m market to children. You can’t produce candy, cigarettes anymore. You can’t put your stuff in Teen Vogue. They got to get them while they’re young or they won’t get them. Have you run into that level of insidiousness? I guess my question is, how much do you find that the teachers know what’s going on and they buy into this? And they do say use terms like, hey, let’s go see your teacher in the other room. How much do they try to make? It like school versus the teachers are blissfully ignorant, and this is just sort of the club alone that’s doing this.

Speaker D: You see both sometimes, but sadly, it’s not uncommon, I think, for teachers to step over that line because they think they’re saving their kids souls. Right. So it’s understandable. They think what they’re doing is good. And as you said, they know that you have to get them young, because if you wait once they become teenagers, it’s usually too late. You see this, too, with the Gideons that are famous for putting Bibles in hotel rooms, but they also love to camp outside of elementary schools. And it’s typically fifth grade is their magic spot, where they say, fifth graders are old enough to read what we hand them, but they’re young enough that they might actually believe it still.

Speaker A: Wow, I did not know they did that.

Speaker D: Yeah. So they will sometimes partner with fifth grade teachers if they can find one. And they have specific guidelines that we’ve found to, uh, try to seek entrance at the lowest level of authority. So they are instructed not to go to principals or superintendents or school attorneys, because if you do, they’re going to tell you you can go stand on the public sidewalk where you’re allowed to be. But if they can talk to a fifth grade teacher or a teacher’s, uh, aide, sometimes they are not as familiar with the law. And they’ll say, oh, well, let’s just set up a table in my classroom, or set up a table in the lunchroom, and you can put your Bibles and pamphlets there, and we’ll just have all the kids come and grab them inside the school. So we get complaints like that all the time, too. And, um, yeah, that’s exactly what’s going on, is they know this is the time that they can kind of get in and convert kids. So that’s what they’re doing.

Speaker A: Wow. The age makes it even more insidious, in my mind. The fact that they’re playing this flood the zone game of, uh, we know this is illegal, but we’re going to keep doing it, and we’re going to force you to constantly play zone defense is bad enough, but the fact that they’re going after kids like that, like, explicitly strategizing how to reach them is very disturbing.

Speaker D: It is. The other organization that I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with that has similar tactics is the, uh, Fellowship of Christian Athletes. And, um, m maybe there are kind of chapters of them that are really committed to staying within the bounds of the law, but I’ve seen them all over the country, just every they’re just pushing everywhere they can to get around it and to try to reach more kids, and it’s very frustrating.

Speaker A: We haven’t talked about this yet, but now that you mentioned that, do you think the Bremerton case from last year in which the high school coach who was kneeling supposedly. Depending on which Supreme Court justice you listen to. Supposedly just peacefully, quietly kneeling on the field for a moment after a football game in prayer was disciplined for doing so. And the, uh, Supreme Court said, you have to allow that. Do you think Bremerton is going to help this Christian athlete organization?

Speaker D: Absolutely. So that’s the case, for one thing, that specifically made it so that the Lemon test is no longer going to apply to public school Establishment clause cases. So in terms of, uh, litigation, work in the field is a huge difference, and that is well known to lawmakers and also to people who are plugged into the law, who are, um, coaches and teachers and are trying to find ways around it. Absolutely. They see this as a green light. Even to a lot of their minds, it goes beyond the bounds of that opinion, where they are misinterpreting it, or they’re seeing it as just a total green light to say, as long as I’m not forcing kids to pray with me, I can do whatever I want. I can pray right in front of them and subtly encourage them. And I think the Supreme Court has my back. So we’ve definitely seen an uptick in this sort of behavior since then, and I expect that to continue, for sure.

Speaker A: Are you hiring? Yes, we are. It sounds like you and grand needs help over the next, uh, 20 to 40 years.

Speaker D: Yes, we absolutely do. Yeah. If you know any lawyers who want to work in the state church field, we are, absolutely.

Speaker A: We’ll plug your site at the end, and I’ll put a link to the Freedom from Religion Foundation at my website for people who are interested in either joining, supporting you, or possibly working for you. So more to come on that. So you mentioned the fact that you get into these discussions and fights frequently. One concern that I’ve had in starting this podcast, a mild concern, is how much pushback personally, am I going to get as an individual for this podcast or your work there. I found a paper you wrote, uh, an op ed, I guess you would say, entitled Newspaper Prints Death Threat Against Me, in which you describe a newspaper receiving a letter to the editor. Correct. Me if I’m wrong on this, in which the letter says, hey, this Ryan Jane guy is coming into my town trying to do away with religion. He needs to remember that the wages of sin are death. And they printed that letter. Could you tell me a little bit about that and how much that affects, uh, you?

Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, it won’t surprise anyone to learn that at FFRF, we get a lot of hate mail, and, uh, we put out a newspaper almost every month, and an entire section of the newspaper is dedicated to the crank mail that we get. So this is both us mail a lot of email, of course, just things that we get from people who are not too happy with the work that we’re doing. And usually we just laugh at it. But the reality is there’s some of it that we get that is more serious or just more disturbing or scary that we don’t put those ones in the paper. So you don’t see those ones. I haven’t had too many that are personally directed at me. But of course, that’s when it gets more, um, legitimately scary. We were in one lawsuit where the cocounsel and I got, uh, a death threat, which was directed specifically at my coworker. And so, uh, it’s one of these where you know that this is almost certainly just a person blowing off steam and it’s nothing to worry about, but it’s credible enough that when that happens, we go to the police and say, hey, there’s a non zero chance that this person is actually going to try to carry this out. So we just need you to be aware. So it’s on our radar all the time. And, yeah, I was amazed. Um, it was a small town in Illinois called Effingham that had, um, a handful of complaints all within one year. So it was just like problem after problem that we were trying to get resolved. So I was writing letters to the school district there, and to their credit, the school district was trying to fix things. So it’s one of these situations where there’s just this pervasive culture in the school of certain teachers and coaches trying to push religion on kids. And once we alerted the administration to it, they actually tried to fix it. But when people in the community found out about this, the way they interpreted it was, oh, uh, this outside organization is sticking their nose in our business, and this is a Christian community. They got to get out of here. And so I’m used to seeing that, and I can understand this person writing to their newspaper and writing this, where they cited Romans 623, as you said, the wages of sin is death. And they specifically said they called me by name. They said, Mr. Jane, you are God’s adversary. The wages of sin is death. And it’s amazing to me that the newspaper didn’t see this as a problem. And I actually, when I put that article out, I got a call from the editor who was kind of upset. He’s like, hey, you said that I printed a death threat. I never would have printed a death threat. This is just this person venting steam. They don’t mean it, basically. And I thought, like, hey, that’s not a call for you to make. This is potentially very scary. So, yeah, every once in a while that does happen, but it is part of the risk that you take, uh, when you decide to work in the state church realm or the atheism realm. It’s just there’s going to be a lot of vitriol coming your way, and occasionally some of it will be scary.

Speaker A: Right. And I can’t think of another topic, and I haven’t thought too deeply on this, but I can’t think of another topic that would inspire as much emotion as religion does. And that surely is the core cause here. What does it say about your critics opponents, about these, quote, people following the Good book, the moral high ground? People supposedly, that you take it as given that you’re going to be getting death threats for just trying to make government entities follow the law?

Speaker D: Yeah. I mean, so many of them are just transparent hypocrites. All you can do is laugh at it. I mean, I will say to not paint with too broad of a brush. There are always people who are normally our opponents in various arenas who will stand up for this for us when this kind of thing happens. They’ll say, hey, this is absolutely non Christian behavior. So, I mean, they’re not all hypocrites, but, um, there’s a reliable contingent of hypocrites that are, uh, that are the ones who are pushing for, you know, putting God back in public schools. There’s no doubt about that.

Speaker A: Right? Absolutely. It reminds me of the length that people will go. The Jessica Alquist case. This was a young lady that was in high school, and if I remember the details correctly, that school had had a Christian prayer hanging on the walls of maybe the gym for a long time. Her father in her place, sued, went to the Supreme Court. The prayer had to come down. And a senator or a congressman said, described her as an evil little thing. This high school girl, this is, uh, a good Christian senator or congressman is saying, well, she’s an evil little thing. And that made the press. And she owned it. To her credit. She owned it and started selling merch and became a very good public speaker. And her tagline is evil little thing. Now, but doing that to a child just because they’re trying to say you must enforce the law has just got to get your blood boiling.

Speaker D: It absolutely does. And it just goes to show the way that religious thinking can warp our normal sense of decency in our approach to the world. Just it makes special rules apply that if you’re defending your religion, everything else is off the table.

Speaker A: Absolutely. That’s a good segue into my next segment. It’s going to be we’re going to spend the rest of the time talking about your studies and research into faith healing and its effects on children in the country. We’ll be back with the second half of the interview in a few minutes. Hi.

Speaker B: Editing cross. Examiner I’m going to end it there. Ryan was so generous with his time that I have a whole nother episode to do of just the conversation about the issues surrounding religious based medical neglect of children. Thank you very much for listening to this episode.

Speaker A: I’m going to try to get the.

Speaker B: Second half edited and posted very quickly. And of course, thank you very much to Ryan and FFRF for allowing him to be here. There will be links to their website online. You can go to www.ffrf.org to visit their site. You can also visit my site at www. Dot thecrossexaminer net. I’m excited about getting the second half of this out ASAP and I’m going to go edit it right now. See you soon.

Speaker C: This has been the Cross examiner podcast, the Internet’s courtroom in the case of rationality versus religion. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider subscribing. See you soon.