Several years ago Victoria Anderson, her spouse Owen Morga and Morgan’s daughter Kylie got a stark introduction to the erosion of church-state separation. 

Their story began in January 2021 in tiny Milton, West Virginia — a town of 2,773 people with an average household income of $42,857. Owen Morgan calls the town “Trumpville.”  

In January 2021, Kylie, then in the sixth grade, began taking a daily sex-education class with longtime teacher Karen Ashworth. The dominant theme of the course, Anderson told The Indypendent, was abstinence, a message Ashworth reinforced with readings from the Bible.

“West Virginia is a single-party consent state,” Anderson said, “meaning that as long as one party to a conversation wants to record it, it is legal to do so. I advised Kylie that if anything questionable was said in class, she could record it on her phone. I told her this was crucial to protecting students’ rights.”

Shortly thereafter, Kylie recorded Ashworth saying: “I’m hoping you are all brought up by a good family or person who is teaching you right from wrong and that it is not okay to be sexually active. The Bible says sex isn’t for love, it’s for after marriage. The thing is, you have to choose what you are going to do with those feelings and thoughts. And if you’re brought up with morals and values, then God’s going to be there to help you make better decisions.” 

Anderson and Morgan were aghast when they heard the recording. They contacted the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which immediately sent a cease-and-desist letter to the school. They also demanded that Ashworth resign. The school ignored the letter, but Anderson and Morgan pressed on.

In early March Morgan made a brief mention of the incident on his YouTube program, Telltale Atheist (since renamed Telltale). A week later, Morgan told The Indy, he aired the recording that Kylie had made. 

All hell subsequently broke loose.

A Change.org petition was launched and a Facebook group, Support an Excellent Cabell County Teacher, quickly amassed 1,600 supporters in Ashworth’s defense — and kept growing.

“Kylie was constantly getting harassing phone calls: ‘I hate you;’ ‘I hope you die,’ and we learned that there was a plan to attack her at the bus stop,” Morgan recalled. “We kept her home from school that day — a Friday — but throughout the entire day cars kept passing our house at 15-minute intervals and blaring their horns. After 24 hours of non-stop noise, we decided to go to Nebraska to stay with Victoria’s family. It’s a 14-hour trip, but we drove almost straight through. We stayed there for about a week. We figured it would blow over by then; it didn’t. It got so bad that we had to cancel Kylie’s phone, her lifeline, because of the threats and abuse.”

A week or so later, Kylie was sent to stay with relatives in Connecticut where she completed the school year online. Anderson and Morgan returned to Milton. Although they heard rumors that their house would be torched with them inside, it didn’t happen. But they still weren’t safe.

“Our tires were slashed, and we learned that the community had set up a Slack channel, a messaging app to allow the group to communicate more securely,” Morgan said. Meanwhile, as he and Anderson prepared to move to a city in the U.S. Northeast, cars continued to drive past their home blasting their horns. “This was to let us know that we were being watched, all day and all night,” Anderson said. 

Throughout, the pair say that they received little support: “Kylie’s mom, an anonymous whistleblower who gave us information, a school resource officer, and one of my professors from the community college I attended were the only ones. That was it,” Morgan said. “I’d lived in Milton since I was eight years old, and people treated me as if I was a stranger to the community.” 

Finding Safety in the Aftermath of Targeting

Although the family is now living in a secure building with a doorman in the Northeast, Kylie is enrolled in a public high school and Anderson is a law student, the experience in Milton has left each member of the family bruised. “As soon as we moved out of West Virginia, we got Kylie into therapy. The experience of being attacked so viciously shook her deeply. Losing her phone number hurt her, because the phone was part of her identity. It had kept her tethered to the outside world during COVID, and losing it was horrible for her,” Anderson said. “She withdrew and stayed in her room for most of the summer after we left Milton. But by the next school year, she began to make friends and later auditioned for a music and vocal program at a competitive high school and is now doing much better.”

Like Kylie, the adults also suffered. “For a while, I hid my identity,” Anderson said. “The car horns took a lot out of me and for a time after we moved, every time I heard beeping or a siren, I jumped. I am now more comfortable talking about what happened, but on some level I’m always on edge. I’ve poured that into law school and am devoted to working on church-state separation as a vocation,” she explained. “Law school gave me my power back. I feel I can protect myself, my family and others who might face similar situations.”

For his part, Morgan intends to keep running Telltale, using it as a platform to expose the dangers of religious fundamentalism. It’s something he feels he understands well thanks to his upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness. He’s also quite happy to be out of West Virginia.  

But, he says, he still thinks about what happened, and while he knows that it was extreme, he also knows that it is not anomalous.  

Anderson, meanwhile, plans to devote her legal career to protecting others from the kinds of torment her family experienced. She intends to use her training to bolster church-state separation and protect the rights of atheists and other non-believers. 

It’s a daunting challenge, and she is grateful to have allies who support this mission. Among them,  Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AU). Since its founding more than six decades ago, AU has tried to keep religion out of public life. The D.C.-based group has its work cut out for it and currently advocates at both state and federal levels. They also assist individuals, like Anderson and Morgan, who are targeted because of their work to stop religious incursions into public life.

AU describes the most recent push by white Christian nationalists to end the longstanding separation between church and state — a step toward making the United States conform to the type of Christian nationalism outlined in Project 2025 — as being driven by backlash against the changing demographic makeup of the United States, that is, panic over projected shifts that will reduce the white population of the United States from 199 million (in 2020)  to 179 million by 2060.  This resurgent movement, AU argues, is part of their effort to hold on to traditional power structures — structures that white, Christian men have, for the most part, controlled since the nation’s founding nearly 250 years ago. The group calls it an expression of rage “against the dying of their privilege,” 

Not surprisingly, AU has some mighty adversaries. 

The Billion Dollar Web

As AU reports, the religious right is led by “a billion-dollar clandestine web of Christian nationalist organizations, conservative billionaires and powerful political allies at all levels of government” that it says are collaborating “to upend democracy and equality.”

Among the most prominent players, AU notes, are the Alliance Defending Freedom, a 31-year-old legal advocacy group founded by televangelists that has openly called for the restoration of the “Christiandomic theology of the 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries;” the Becket Fund, a deep-pocketed legal organization that has successfully fought the contraceptive mandates included in the Affordable Care Act; and the First Liberty Institute, a legal firm that opposes the teaching of evolution and is working to bring prayer and proselytizing Bible classes into public schools. (Speaker of the House Mike Johnson worked as an attorney at the First Liberty Institute before being elected to Congress.)   

AU calls these groups a shadow network and reports that much of the network’s work has been choreographed by conservative powerbroker Leonard Leo, a former Federalist Society honcho, whose work with the Judicial Crisis Network helped George W. Bush and Donald Trump pack local, state and federal courts — including SCOTUS — with rightwing ideologues.

The upshot of this is a raft of renewed attempts to bring the United States into a blatantly right-wing Christian fold, including restoring school prayer; posting the 10 Commandments in school rooms and other public buildings; attacking the LGBTQ+ community; imposing book bans and restricting school-and-public library access to materials that address racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia; limiting how history is taught and what topics are covered; allowing pastors to counsel public school students; and promoting and enforcing a National Day of Prayer. 

These efforts have led to growing prejudice directed at people — like Anderson and Morgan — who challenge Christian hegemony or who are outspoken about their lack of religious faith. Worse, according to AU, there has been a surge in hateful comments and threats against individuals who show disinterest in organized religion, oppose proselytizing or object to Christian-nationalist incursions into secular public life. 

Alison M. Gill, vice president for legal and policy at American Atheists, told The Indy that this is particularly troubling because “while the United States is getting less religious overall, this change is not happening in an even manner. American Atheists looked at this issue in our Reality Check Secular Survey, and we found that there are really two Americas when it comes to faith. In the South and in very religious areas in Utah and Idaho, the church is still the center of the community, and data shows sky-high levels of discrimination against non-religious people.” 

This topic, she continued, is under-researched; nonetheless, she says American Atheists activists are aware that there continues to be an enormous amount of stigma against non-religious people in many regions of the country. “In places where people are scorned,” she adds, “we’ve seen a profound need for them to come together on a regular basis for mental health, support and socialization” to counter name-calling, assertions of immorality and isolation following disclosure of disinterest in attending services or participating in organized religious activities. This, Gill said, happens even if they are apolitical. 

Reality Check Uncovers Bias

The U.S. Secular Survey, conducted online by the American Atheists in 2019, included more than 34,000 people who identified as “atheists, agnostics, humanists, free-thinkers or skeptics” and revealed that many participants feared being “out” about their identity. In fact, 31.4% said they concealed their lack of religious beliefs from their families for fear of reprisals, and nearly half, 44.3%, concealed it at work. In addition, 42.8% hid this information while attending school. The impact of this concealment was devastating but clear: 71.2% reported depression and loneliness.   

Stories of family rejection, being treated as if they are diseased and being called immoral — as if living ethically is impossible without the threat of Hell and damnation — fill the 62-page report. 

And it’s not just happening in small cities and towns in the South and Midwest. Students at U.S. colleges and universities also report harassment. Kevin Bolling, executive director of the Secular Student Alliance (SSA), told The Indy that SSA-sponsored Ask an Atheist tables at campus events have led to what he calls “social targeting,” including death threats lobbed at SSA members.

Small wonder that identity concealment is so pervasive — a reality that allows the erosion of church-state separation to go unchecked.

Challenging Offenses Against Church-State Separation

Courageous people like Anderson and Morgan are standing up to those who want to silence them, and they are not alone.

“It appears that white Christian nationalists are ascendant among the politically active religious right,” Alison M. Gill of American Atheists told The Indy. “But overall their beliefs are being rejected. At the same time, while they are not a majority, there is a lot of money and political muscle behind them. It’s important to remember that this isn’t about religion. White Christian nationalism is a political coat people put around themselves to win domination and control. It’s about power.”

The presidential election, of course, will test whether the right is able to bring its views to center stage. The stakes have rarely been higher for church-state separation. 

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