🧩 BND Motif Index · M736
Render unto Caesar
A church's teaching collides with the state's rules, a pledge, a funding condition, a law, and believers are made to choose between their faith and the public program, each side calling it a matter of freedom.
📜 Plots🗂️ Faith and the sacred
- 3claims filed under it
- 1center show it came up on
- 2claims retold online
⚠️ A story people tell, not a claim that it's true.
A motif is the shape of a story as its tellers tell it, named the way a folklorist names a tale type, so the same story told about other people, by the other side or in another year lands in the same place. Some of the claims below are true, many are false. Arguing against a story is often a story of its own, its answer (Voter fraud is answered by Voter suppression, Lawfare by No one is above the law), and we file it there; where no answer has a motif yet, the arguments against a story sit with its tellings.
🎙️ Who it came up with
the shows we follow where its claims came up, by the show's lean
🫏 left 0
🦗 none of our left shows, so far
⚖️ center 1
🐘 right 0
🦗 none of our right shows, so far
"Came up on" means one of its claims was heard on the show: told, reported or argued against. We don't yet mark which. Show leans are our own grouping of the shows we transcribe.
📰 In the news
the stories its claims were told about, the most told first (matched by our tools, so a link can be wrong)
- 📰 Pope denounces death penalty as U.S. plans livestreamed execution 2026-10-10 to 2026-10-12
- 📰 Fort Hood survivors criticize plan to livestream Hasan's execution 2026-10-13
🧶 Its claims
what's been told in this shape, newest first, in our words, with where each was heard
- 2026-10-13 “Archbishop Timothy Broglio says Catholic soldiers should not serve on a firing squad.” 🧶 people online
- 2026-10-11 “Pope Leo XIV has declared capital punishment inadmissible in response to the U.S. military's plan to livestream an execution.” 🧶 people online
- 2026-10-06 “Colorado's universal preschool program creates a conflict between state non-discrimination pledges and Catholic Church teachings on LGBTQ issues.”
🎙️ Up First (NPR)
M736 · first seen 2026-10-10 · last 2026-10-19 · what this is · how the index works