Religion · Statewide · MI · August 14, 2026
Traveling Preacher ‘Bearman’ Sues Michigan Town Over Religious Freedom
What Alinsky tactic is being used
3 of the thirteen rules are in play here — campaigns rarely run just one.
Rule 4
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
The plaintiffs' entire theory is the township's own rulebook. Their firm says the township zoning administrator told the VanSteenhouse family and the club they could meet if they obtained a special use permit, and that the township's own attorney advised the planning commission that high-school students gathering for prayer and Bible study on private property was permitted under the code — after which, the firm says, a majority of the commission dismissed that attorney and voted to deny. Whatever a court makes of it, the case is built on the gap between the ordinance as the township's own officials described it and the ordinance as applied at 110 N. Lake Street.
Counter-Rule 4 · Radical Integrity
Close the gap between stated values and actual practice before anyone else finds it. This tactic only works where the gap is real.
Close the gap in your own house before you point at anyone else's. This month, ask your own zoning office in writing for your congregation's certificate of occupancy, any special land use permit on file, and confirmation that your current uses (youth nights, food service, parking) match it — and keep the reply. Then get your youth-ministry policy on paper and adopted by the board: background checks, parental consent, and exactly how and where minors may be approached at a public school. In Leland the school-volunteer complaints came before the zoning fight; paperwork you can produce is what makes Rule 4 unusable against you.
Rule 13
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
Individuals, not just institutions, are being singled out on both sides. Opponents at the hearings pointed to township attorney Brad Wierda's Calvin College degree and his service on a Traverse City Christian Schools board as evidence he was too close to Youth for Christ. Conversely, the federal complaint names not only Leland Township but Supervisor Clint Mitchell, Clerk Lisa Brookfield and the individual planning commission and ZBA members, and in March the plaintiffs' lawyer sent a letter questioning the tax-exempt status of the Fishtown Preservation Society — a neighbor with no vote on the permit.
Counter-Rule 13 · Radical Solidarity
Stand publicly with whoever has been singled out. Isolation is the whole mechanism; refusing it disarms the tactic.
Refuse the isolation, and refuse to imitate it. If a believer near you is disqualified over a Christian school on their résumé rather than over anything they wrote, say so by name — three courteous sentences in public comment, or a signed letter to the local paper, is enough. And do not lend your name to collateral pressure on an unrelated neighbor's tax status; if a ministry you support does that, ask its leaders in writing what the tax exemption of a preservation society has to do with the permit.
Rule 11
“If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.”
The negative is being pushed to its hardest form by everyone with a microphone. Plaintiffs' counsel characterizes the commercial district as a "church-free zone"; opponents recast a high-school Bible study as recruitment of minors inside a public school. The aggregator that produced this alert then flattened a property owner's special-land-use appeal into a "traveling preacher" suing a "town" over religious freedom — a description that will not survive the first person who reads the docket.
Counter-Rule 11 · Proportional Truth
Refuse to overclaim, even where it would help. One exaggeration hands the other side the only weapon that works permanently.
Say the smaller true thing, out loud, even where the bigger one would help. Before you discuss this at a meeting or in a class, write the verifiable spine on a card: a 4-1 planning commission denial on April 15, 2026 of a special land use permit at 110 N. Lake Street; an appeal to the zoning board of appeals; a federal complaint filed August 10, 2026 in the Western District of Michigan. Then add the sentence that costs you something: the township has not yet filed its answer, so its account is not on the record.
Chapter 3 sets out the rules; Chapter 15 answers each of them in turn. This is that pairing applied to this story.
Know where you stand
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