Maine’s high court just settled who runs family court disputes over religion — and the answer applies to almost everything else parents fight about.
By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
On September 1, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court decided Bickford v. Bradeen, a case that started as a fight over one child’s church attendance and ended as a ruling about how much power family courts hold, period. The headlines framed it as a mother losing a religious liberty case. That’s true, but it undersells what the court actually did. It threw out 46 years of assumed doctrine, rejected a heightened constitutional test that both the trial court and the losing parent thought applied, and replaced it with a rule that reaches far past religion: when two fit parents can’t agree, the court’s ordinary best-interest standard governs — full stop, no special showing required — as long as the judge isn’t picking sides based on the content of anyone’s beliefs.
That holding will outlive the church at the center of it.
The setup
Emily Bickford and Matthew Bradeen shared parental rights and responsibilities over their daughter under a 2013 agreed order — one that required them to confer on major decisions and explicitly barred either parent from doing anything that could “estrange” the child or damage her opinion of the other parent. Beginning in 2021, Bickford brought the child to multiple services a week at Calvary Chapel Greater Portland without telling Bradeen. The child began showing fear and anxiety tied to sermon content about Hell and the Second Coming, and started leaving notes around Bradeen’s house out of worry he’d be “left behind.”
The fact pattern that ultimately drove the court’s decision wasn’t the theology. It was what happened after Bradeen raised concerns: Bickford told him she answered to God’s law rather than the state’s, continued making unilateral decisions about the child’s religious activities, and — most damaging to her case — brought the child to a service where the pastor delivered a six-and-a-half-minute prayer devoted to the litigation, naming both parents by name roughly thirty times, describing Bradeen as needing “salvation,” and framing the custody dispute as “the enemy” trying to “crush and quench and strangle the church.” Bickford didn’t remove the child from the room and later testified she thought it was “appropriate” for the child to hear it.
The trial court found that pattern — not the church’s doctrine — caused the harm: exposure to messaging that her father was going to “burn and suffer for eternity,” that he was “persecuting her,” that he was “the enemy.” It allocated sole decision-making over the child’s involvement with that specific church to Bradeen, while leaving joint authority over religion generally intact.
The doctrinal fight nobody outside family law noticed
Bickford’s appeal rested on a claim that should sound familiar to anyone who’s watched a family court allocate authority over a parent’s objection: that any restriction touching a fundamental right — here, the right to direct a child’s religious upbringing — triggers strict scrutiny, the most demanding standard in constitutional law, requiring the state to show a compelling interest and the least restrictive means available.
The trial court agreed with her on that legal premise. It read Maine’s 1980 precedent, Osier v. Osier, as requiring exactly that: proof of an “immediate and substantial threat” to the child before a judge could touch a parent’s religious authority at all.
The Law Court didn’t just decline to apply strict scrutiny here — it ruled the premise itself was wrong. Osier’s language demanding a heightened showing, the court held, was decided under Maine’s old binary “custody” regime, was never necessary to that case’s outcome, and has never once been cited by the Maine court to actually justify strict scrutiny in the 46 years since. It was dicta. The trial court had spent years litigating under a legal standard that, according to the state’s own high court, was never real law to begin with.
“The trial court had spent years litigating under a legal standard that, according to the state’s own high court, was never real law to begin with.”
In its place: courts may always use the ordinary best-interest standard to allocate rights and responsibilities between two fit parents — regarding religion, medical care, education, or anything else — without a threshold showing of harm. The only constitutional limit is that the judge can’t prefer one parent over the other because of the content of their religious beliefs, or otherwise show hostility toward those beliefs. Allocate based on co-parenting breakdown and demonstrated conduct: constitutional. Allocate based on which parent’s theology the judge finds more palatable: not constitutional, but that’s a neutrality problem, not a scrutiny problem.
The split the court knew it was picking a side in
This isn’t Maine going rogue. The court lined up alongside New Hampshire, Nevada, Kentucky, and Kansas, all of which have rejected strict scrutiny for parent-versus-parent allocation disputes. It’s also aware it’s now on the opposite side of Utah and Colorado, both of which require a compelling-interest showing before a court can restrict a parent’s religious authority over a child. Maine’s opinion engages that split directly and says the states requiring strict scrutiny never explained why religious rights should get a more protected doctrinal lane than every other fundamental parental right courts already reallocate on a best-interest basis.
That’s a live, acknowledged division among state high courts on a recurring family-law question with a constitutional label on it. Liberty Counsel has already said it will petition the U.S. Supreme Court. Whatever happens to this specific petition, the doctrinal question — how much scrutiny does a family court owe a fit parent’s constitutional claims when the dispute is with the other parent, not the state — is exactly the kind of circuit-style split that eventually gets resolved from above.
“Religion was the dispute in front of the court. The power Maine just confirmed reaches far beyond religion.”
Why this matters regardless of whose religion it is
Run the swapped-jerseys test on the actual holding, not the headline. Nothing about the court’s legal framework depends on which parent is religious, which parent is skeptical, or what the religion teaches. The rule the court articulated is symmetric: if a father were taking a child to services multiple times a week, refusing to tell the mother, and the child came home reciting a prayer casting the mother as an agent of the Antichrist — the same best-interest standard would apply, with the same neutrality limit, and the same result would follow if the facts matched. The court says as much, citing Mills v. Fleming and a string of allocation cases that have nothing to do with religion — extracurriculars, education, medical decisions — to establish that this is simply how Maine allocates authority between parents who can’t agree, in any domain.
“Allocate based on co-parenting breakdown and demonstrated conduct: constitutional. Allocate based on which parent’s theology the judge finds more palatable: not constitutional.”
That’s the part worth sitting with. The mechanism the court actually used to justify restricting a parent’s authority wasn’t “your church is harmful.” It was a fact pattern that recurs constantly in family court, dressed in different substantive clothes: one parent won’t co-parent on a contested issue, communicates with the child in ways that frame the other parent as an adversary, and shows no willingness to mitigate the resulting harm to the child’s relationship with that parent. Courts already have — and after this ruling, unambiguously have — broad authority to act on exactly that pattern, without waiting for a compelling-interest showing, in whatever domain it shows up: religion here, but just as easily politics, medical decisions, or a new stepparent’s role in a child’s life.
“The Osier standard, weak as it apparently always was, at least nominally forced judges pause before touching a fundamental right. Maine just confirmed that pause was never legally required.”
The Osier standard, weak as it apparently always was, at least nominally forced judges pause before touching a fundamental right. Maine just confirmed that pause was never legally required. Whether that’s the correct reading of the Constitution is now a live question above Maine’s court. Whether family court litigants and their lawyers understood, before this ruling, how thin that protection actually was — that’s the more useful question to sit with here.
This account is drawn from the Maine Supreme Judicial Court’s opinion in Bickford v. Bradeen, 2026 ME 94, Docket No. Cum-25-29, decided September 1, 2026, and authored by Chief Justice Valerie Stanfill for a unanimous panel — the full text is available through the court’s website. The case’s procedural history, the trial court’s factual findings, and the quoted trial testimony and prayer transcript all come from that opinion, which itself draws on the record built in Portland District Court (docket FM-2013-604) under Judge Nofsinger. The doctrinal background on Maine’s prior standard comes from the court’s own discussion of Osier v. Osier, 410 A.2d 1027 (Me. 1980), and from the allocation cases it cites to establish that a court dividing authority between two fit parents does not intrude on either parent’s constitutional rights, including Mills v. Fleming, 2017 ME 144, 166 A.3d 1012, and Klein v. Klein, 2019 ME 85, 208 A.3d 802. The interstate split described here reflects the court’s own citations, independently confirmed against each state’s reporter: In re Kurowski, 20 A.3d 306 (N.H. 2011); Kelley v. Kelley, 535 P.3d 1147 (Nev. 2023); Young v. Holmes, 295 S.W.3d 144 (Ky. Ct. App. 2009); and Yordy v. Osterman, 149 P.3d 874 (Kan. Ct. App. 2007) on one side, against Kingston v. Kingston, 532 P.3d 958 (Utah 2022), and In re Marriage of McSoud, 131 P.3d 1208 (Colo. App. 2006), on the other. Liberty Counsel’s stated intent to seek review at the U.S. Supreme Court comes from public statements by attorney Mathew Staver following the decision; as of publication, no petition for certiorari had been docketed.
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