Hamilton’s Unholy Crusade

Child USA’s antireligious heritage from a hate group is alive and well in the company Hamilton keeps today.

“Tell me what company you keep, and I will tell you what you are.”—Miguel de Cervantes

It has dawned on plenty of those familiar with Marci Hamilton that she is on a drive against religious institutions, and that it has to do with more than just money.

Victims’ advocate and former legislator Gary Greenberg said that in his dealings with Hamilton, “She’s vehemently against the church and possibly all religions,” citing Jehovah’s Witnesses as an example.

“She’s against religion—maybe all religions,” remarked one victim, who asked to remain anonymous while pursuing justice.

Or as one top legislative aide stated it: “She is trying to tear down these religious institutions. That is ultimately what she is trying to do.”

Swan and Hamilton were birds of a feather, illustrated as early as 1997 when the pair received accolades from the American Atheists for having made that organization’s 24th national convention a success.

The consensus is solidly supported by the heritage of Hamilton’s Child USA and by the company Hamilton keeps.

Child USA is the acknowledged “successor” organization of Child Inc., which was founded in 1983 by Rita Swan, a long-term Hamilton cohort who died in 2022. Hamilton turned Swan’s group into Child USA in 2016 and awarded Swan a board position of director emeritus.

Swan and Hamilton were birds of a feather, illustrated as early as 1997 when the pair received accolades from the American Atheists for having made that organization’s 24th national convention a success.

Swan was known for opposing all religions and for her affiliation with Cult Awareness Network (CAN), an antireligious hate group from which bigotry and violence metastasized in the United States for two decades.

CAN operated as a clearinghouse of antireligious “deprogrammers” for hire, and its agents and principals were notorious for criminal acts including kidnapping, restraint, assault, battery, and even rape. Targets were often young adults whose parents or other family members were manipulated into believing loved ones needed to be coerced from their chosen religious beliefs. Minority Christian groups were a favorite target. Multiple CAN deprogrammers went to prison.

Swan collaborated for years with CAN principals, including Los Angeles regional leader Priscilla Coates and the group’s national executive director, former topless dancer Cynthia Kisser. Swan spoke alongside CAN’s discredited antireligious psychologist Margaret Singer, a proponent of debunked “religious brainwashing” theories so outlandish and unseemly she was not only censured in her profession, but was barred from testifying as an expert in American courts.

CAN imploded in the mid 1990s after a jury found it had conspired to violate the civil rights of a Pentecostalist who had been forcibly abducted, assaulted, battered and deprived of his rights during a failed deprogramming attempt. CAN, the deprogrammer and his accomplices were slapped with $4.85 million in damages, after they were found to be in denial of the maliciousness of their actions and their violation of the victim’s rights. CAN declared bankruptcy and shut down.

Hamilton became affiliated with former CAN deprogrammers and exponents who rose from CAN’s ashes to merge with the propagandist International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA)—many of the same people, and the same mindset, with a different name.

Hamilton has supported ICSA’s antireligious cause through the years, including appearing as a featured speaker at two ICSA conferences. Among other speakers sharing the podium with Hamilton are deprogrammers with a record of violent kidnappings, all in the name of destroying religions they disagreed with.

One such deprogrammer with whom Hamilton found a kindred spirit is Steven Hassan. The two forged a bond after meeting up at the 2008 ICSA conference, and Hassan boasts that he is engaged in research with Hamilton.

[Hamilton research collaborator Steven] Hassan…became infamous for his violent deprogrammings in which his victims were abducted, held against their will, threatened, assaulted and battered….Hassan admitted his tactics amounted to “psychological rape.”

Hassan was heavily involved in CAN and became infamous for his violent deprogrammings in which his victims were abducted, held against their will, threatened, assaulted and battered in the attempt to coerce them from their religious choices. Hassan shamelessly admitted his tactics amounted to “psychological rape.” He wrote that despite the amount of “alienation, hardship and pain—as well as legal convictions” brought on by “involuntary intervention,” it was “the only effective method.”

After that “effective method” caused CAN’s collapse, Hassan elected to use the euphemistic “exit counseling” and “strategic intervention” for his blatantly abusive conduct, and he pursued academic credentials to plaster over his sordid past.

It is little wonder to many that Hassan has been a featured “expert” on religion for the Chinese Communist Party since their 2017 crackdown enforcing a national decree that all religions in the country must be “Chinese in orientation” and “adapt themselves to a socialist society.”

Notably, Hassan has even been rejected by his former deprogramming associates—including one who exposed that Hassan for years has promoted and recommended fugitive pedophile Anton Hein, a fellow “anti-cultist” who was criminally convicted for a “lewd act upon a child,” referring to Hein’s 13-year-old niece.

Another collaborator Hamilton counts in her crusade is antireligious Canadian sociologist Stephen Kent, who was a regular at CAN conferences and served as a mouthpiece for the hate group, co-authoring articles with criminal deprogrammers. Kent has repeatedly been condemned in the academic community for his works on religions.

“[F]ew Canadian academics agree with his findings and most disagree quite strongly,” wrote Professor Irving Hexham, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary in Alberta, in an academic journal.

“Kent’s essays suffer from methodological flaws so grievous as to call into question the validity and reliability of Kent’s conclusions, especially as the foundation for sound legal or legislative action,” wrote Professor Lorne L. Dawson, then scholar of Legal and Religious Studies at the University of Waterloo, Ontario.

Kent first gained infamy in 1990 for his unsupported claims of satanic ritual murders in Western Canada. While his claims made him a name in the tabloids, they earned him the scorn of academia. But Kent damaged his standing most profoundly when, in October 1993, he began to blame child abuse on passages in the scriptures of both Judaism and Christianity.

Tellingly, after suffering losses in her amicus arguments for her godless associates, Hamilton complained in 2018 that religious believers are weaponizing religious freedom unfairly….

As David Frankfurter of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University wrote: “[Kent] postulates a deviant, abusive group and then seeks scriptural or doctrinal sources for its putative activities. To concoct so many sources of ritual inspiration without a shred of historical evidence is not academic method, but rather an exercise in imagination.”

Hamilton has also long affiliated with and represented a collection of groups and organizations inimical to religion and the very concept of religious thought or belief.

Beyond the American Atheists, which she supported along with Rita Swan, Hamilton has been on the speaker bureau for the atheist-humanist oriented Center For Inquiry, whose mission includes that it “strives to foster a secular society” and “a society free of the dogmatic influence of religions and pseudoscience.”

Hamilton has strong ties with and has written amicus briefs for the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which describes itself as an umbrella for those who are “free from religion.”

Hamilton has also worked on behalf of the American Humanist Association—which aims to bring about a progressive society “without a god”—earning her an award at their annual conference in 2015.

Tellingly, after suffering losses in her amicus arguments for her godless associates, Hamilton complained in 2018 that religious believers are weaponizing religious freedom unfairly, asserting that “some religious actors…have sought to turn religious liberty into a weapon of exclusion, control, and harm.”

Hamilton claims the fault lies with law professors and attorneys who specialize in First Amendment law, and who have earned rulings in the nation’s courts upholding that law, because “their discourse treats all religious liberty as constitutionally required.”

Watch for Part VIII of this Investigative Series: Hamilton Objects: There’s “Too Much Religious Liberty”