God, Law, and the Cult of Power

Marci Hamilton on what it will take to restore the rule of law in an era of authoritarian religion

The First Amendment gives you an absolute right to believe whatever you want. It has never given you the right to act on those beliefs in ways that harm others. That distinction, simple as it sounds, is the one that the religious right has spent decades trying to erase, and it is the distinction that Professor Marci A. Hamilton has spent her entire career defending.

I recently had Marci on Cults, Culture & Coercion, and it was one of the most clarifying conversations I’ve had in a long time. If you are a survivor of a high-control religious group, a parent trying to understand what happened to your child, or a therapist trying to make sense of the legal landscape your clients are navigating, this episode will give you language and framework you can use. Also, since the recording, we wrote a rebuttal to a piece in National Law Review that spouted the same disinformation that cult propagandists use about how my work violates religious freedom, which it does not. Forced Labor Is Not Protected by the First Amendment was published June 11^th, 2026.

Marci is a Professor of Practice in Political Science and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow in the Program for Research on Religion at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in constitutional law. Marci is an intellectual leader against extreme religious liberty. She is the founder of CHILD USA, a nonprofit academic think tank dedicated to protecting children from abuse and neglect, and a leading national expert on clergy sex abuse and child sex abuse statutes of limitation, which she ran for a decade. She clerked for United States Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and is the author of God vs. the Gavel: The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty (Cambridge University Press, 2014). I have followed her work and cited it for years. This was our second in-depth conversation, and if anything, the stakes feel higher than when we last spoke.

Behavior, Not Belief, Is What the Law Governs

The core argument of God vs. the Gavel is one that sounds obvious until you see how hard it is to actually enforce: religious organizations, like every other institution, must obey the law. No mandatory exemption. No special carve-out because a leader claims divine authority.

Marci put it plainly: the very first free exercise case in United States history established that belief is absolute, but conduct is not. Conduct can harm others, and a functioning democracy does not allow anyone to use religion as a shield against accountability for harm. The cases that matter, she told me, are always about harm. Psychological harm is real. You only need to sit with a child sex abuse survivor once to understand that.

This maps directly onto what I see in high-control groups. The BITE Model of Authoritarian Control™, which I developed to identify behavioral, informational, thought, and emotional control in coercive groups, shows that the tactics used in destructive cults frequently involve both behavior and belief. Leaders use religious framing to justify behavioral control over members: isolation, food restriction, medical neglect, sexual abuse, labor trafficking. The religion is the cover story. The harm is what the law must address.

Children dying in faith-healing homes is the starkest example Marci raised. In several states, communities that refuse medical care on religious grounds have more children buried in their cemeteries than adults. These are ordinary, preventable deaths. A burst appendix. A high fever. These children are dying because the law is being told to look away in deference to religious belief. Marci’s work at CHILD USA pushed for over 300 legislative reforms across all 50 states and territories to restore accountability in exactly these situations. That is not abstract. That is children’s lives.

A Court That Has Taken Off the Blindfold

Our conversation moved to the Supreme Court, and this is where things get harder to hear. Marci clerked for Justice O’Connor at a time when justices across the ideological spectrum would walk into each other’s chambers and work toward a majority together. That culture no longer exists. What we have now is a six-justice conservative supermajority, all from Roman Catholic backgrounds, that is making decisions about religious liberty, abortion, LGBTQ rights, and parochial school funding through a shared theological lens. Six people from one faith tradition, deciding for 350 million people.

She explained the shadow docket in terms every person listening should understand. Normally, a case before the Supreme Court goes through a full briefing process: attorneys file arguments, oral arguments are heard publicly, and the public has time to engage. The shadow docket bypasses all of that. Lawyers who know the ideological leanings of the conservative majority file emergency requests, and decisions get made without public deliberation. Lower court rulings that are protecting the Constitution, rulings issued by judges across the country checking executive overreach, are being suspended or reversed in secret. As Marci put it, this is an outrage. When I was in high-control groups, decisions affecting my life were made at the top, without my input, without my knowledge. The shadow docket is that same structure, applied to the highest court in the land.

The Epstein Files and the Pattern of Non-Accountability

We opened our conversation with the Epstein files, which felt right, because the same dynamics of institutional cover-up that protect high-control groups are at work there. Congress passed the Epstein Transparency Act with bipartisan support, passing the House 427 to 1 and the Senate by unanimous consent before being signed into law in November 2025. The law required the Department of Justice to release all unclassified files within 30 days. Approximately 2.5 million documents were withheld (Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School).

Marci was careful to note the bright spot: bipartisan cooperation produced this law. That matters. It shows the majority of elected representatives, across party lines, understand that survivors deserve accountability. But she also named what is happening: survivors keep being retraumatized, required to return to Washington again and again, while those with power run out the clock. And as she observed, an armed conflict can be a very convenient diversion when files about powerful people are finally being opened.

The Silenced Majority and What Comes Next

The most galvanizing part of our conversation, for me, was Marci’s point about the silent majority. Pew Research Center data shows that only around 13% of Americans support eliminating the separation of church and state, and roughly 17% support Christian nationalism (Pew Research Center, 2023). These are minorities. Vocal, organized, well-funded minorities, but minorities. The Christian right failed, over decades, to persuade the American public that abortion should be banned, that LGBTQ people are undeserving of civil rights, or that women should have fewer legal protections. They lost the argument in the public square. So, they moved to control the courts and the levers of government instead.

The answer, Marci said, is not only for non-believers to speak up. The answer is for believers, the majority of Americans who have faith and also believe in civil rights, women’s rights, and children’s rights, to stop ceding the word “Christian” to a minority that does not represent them. She asked: which Christian are you talking about? The abolitionists were Christian. So were the defenders of slavery. We have never had a unified Christianity in this country, and the media does us all a disservice when it lets a small faction claim the whole tradition.

This is also, I will say, exactly how authoritarian groups work at the individual level. They claim to speak for God, for all true believers, for the only correct interpretation of scripture. They create the impression of unanimity where none exists. When you step back and look at the numbers, the coercive minority is always smaller than it appears. That is true whether you are talking about a cult of fifty members or a political movement claiming to represent a nation.

Marci told me she is launching a podcast, God and the Gavel, focusing on religion and rights, and we wrote a piece together on the apologists who claim you cannot define brainwashing or call a group a cult. We disagree. The science is behind us. The trafficking laws are available. The BITE Model of Authoritarian Control gives us a replicable framework for showing, systematically, when a group is suppressing free will and causing harm. That is where the work is going.

The belief-conduct distinction is not complicated. You can believe whatever you want. You cannot hurt people and expect the law to shield you. Marci Hamilton has spent her career making that case. I encourage you to read her work, follow her writing on Substack and LinkedIn, and listen to this episode.

Further Reading

The Perils of Extreme Religious Liberty and Protecting Children With Marci Hamilton — Our first in-depth conversation, covering child sex abuse statutes of limitation, CHILD USA, and the danger of religious institutions claiming immunity from accountability.

Right Wing Christian Movements Threatening Our Democracy With Matthew D. Taylor, PhD — Scholar Matthew Taylor explains how specific Christian movements have organized to reshape American law and politics.

Theocratic Politics: The New Apostolic Reformation With Andre Gagne and Frederick Clarkson — A deep look at the theology and political strategy driving the Christian nationalist movement influencing the current administration.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump and Censorship of Experts With Bandy X. Lee, M.D. — Psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee on authoritarian leadership, the suppression of expert voices, and the psychological profile of coercive power.

Opus Dei: BITE Model Evaluation and Discussion With Former Member Eileen Johnson — A firsthand account and framework analysis of Opus Dei, the secretive Catholic organization Marci Hamilton also identifies as a dangerous influence on the current court.