(RNS) — When Michele “Shelly” Henry became concerned that there was too much religion at her children’s public school, she turned to the local chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State for help.
Henry, an employment lawyer, would become chair of the Louisville, Kentucky, Americans United chapter and eventually joined the national board of Americans United five years ago because she believed in their mission.
Last week, Henry, who had been vice chair of the national board, resigned, saying she had lost faith in the nonprofit and its leadership. In her resignation letter, Henry said that the board had failed to address allegations of what she called “unacceptable conduct” by the group’s president, Rachel Laser, detailed in a board-authorized inquiry by an outside investigator into the workplace culture at Americans United, one of the most prominent defenders of church and state separation in the U.S.
“I am leaving for two reasons: First, I am deeply concerned that the organization has lost sight of its fundamental goal: to protect the separation of church and state by influencing policy and law,” she wrote. “Second, I am embarrassed by the Board’s utter failure to respond to and implement the recommendations proposed by the investigator regarding Ms. Laser’s leadership.”
Henry is the fourth board member to resign since December, including its chair, Jim Winkler, a former National Council of Churches president, who left after his successor was elected this week. Winkler declined to be interviewed for this story.
Henry’s claims have been echoed by an employee union, AU Collective, about what they allege is a toxic work environment. Besides harming the staff morale, her critics claim Laser has focused more on boosting AU’s public profile than on the legal and policy work at the core of the organization’s mission.
Michele Henry. Photo courtesy Henry
Laser was not made available for an on-the-record interview, but in written responses to questions from Religion News Service, AU’s leadership disputed these claims.
“Under Rachel Laser’s leadership, AU has consistently endeavored to create a workplace that values team members, feedback, and improvement even before the union was formed,” the nonprofit said in an email response to a request for comment. “Not a single person was laid off during the pandemic. In just the last few years the organization went fully virtual, at staff’s request.”
The nonprofit dismissed the claims by the union, which is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union, of a toxic work culture, saying that “such allegations are common during union negotiations.” The union was formed last fall by about two-dozen employees, about half the workforce.
Laser, a lawyer who has spent her career in nonprofits such as the National Women’s Law Center and managing public interest campaigns for the political arm of Reform Judaism, was selected six years ago to succeed the Rev. Barry Lynn, a United Church of Christ minister who had led Americans United since 1992.
Board members and former staffers alike credit Laser with improving AU’s finances and devising an ambitious plan to increase membership and AU’s visibility. Vickie Sevener, AU’s former chief development officer, said she was impressed with Laser’s leadership, calling her “one of the smartest people I’ve ever spoken to.”
For the fiscal year that ended in the fall of 2022, the organization reported a $1.5 million surplus, with $11.86 million in revenue, $10.3 million in expenses and $15.4 million in assets. In 2017, the year before Laser became president, it had reported a half-million-dollar deficit, with $6.7 million in revenue, $7.2 million in expenses, and $8.7 million in net assets, according to IRS financial disclosures.
AU board member Brian Kaylor, president of World&Way, a Baptist publication based in Missouri, who was elected vice chair to replace Henry, praised the executive staff Laser had assembled.
“The leadership team works together very well,” he said. “They are very enthusiastic about her leadership and the direction that AU is going.” He also cited an internship program for law school students, part of a long-term plan to build a movement for church-state separation.
Kaylor attributed any conflicts to the normal effect of a leadership change. “None of us is great with change,” he said.
Sevener said that after she arrived she heard disagreement among some leaders about how to move the organization forward. “Some of them started from a point of ‘No,’” she said. That resistance to change, she said, was the root of any conflict, not Laser’s leadership. Sevener said she believed some staff, in her opinion, had been at the nonprofit too long and could not adapt.
“There was a lot of pushback from people who had been there for a long time,” she said.
Rachel Laser. (Photo by Rick Reinhard)
But the complaints against Laser continued long past her transition. In her resignation letter, Henry said employees were hesitant to disagree with Laser for fear of retaliation and that she demanded an untenable degree of loyalty.
“No one else could have an idea,” said a former staffer, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution. “She did not trust her staff.” (A number of other former employees cited concerns about retaliation or non-disclosure agreements they signed in declining to speak with RNS.)
That mistrust, the former staffer said, extended to senior leaders, some of whom Laser believed stood in the way of her plans for the organization.
“It was us versus them,” the former staffer said. “My job was to always be on her side — and to be against staff.”
While several people agreed Laser grew public awareness about AU as a whole, critics say she increasingly made herself the face of the organization, handling press interviews that in the past had been delegated to staffers with relevant expertise.
She seemed, said the former staffer, to be more focused on building her brand than focusing on what was best for the organization.
In her resignation letter, Henry cited the departure of a dozen staffers, including former Vice President and Legal Director Richard Katskee, who left in April 2023 after seven years at AU, and former Vice President for Public Policy Maggie Garrett, who left last March after 16 years.
After the pandemic, a “Next Normal Task Force” was commissioned to study ways to improve “workplace culture, cohesion, and morale in a virtual office” and create an “inclusive, equitable, and productive remote work environment.” AU leaders said they adopted all the group’s recommendations.
According to Henry, the staff’s continuing complaints were enough to convince the board last fall to hire an outside investigator to look into the culture. The investigator was “highly qualified, she prepared a thorough report and also provided some recommendations in that report for actions that the Board should take that would improve the working environment at Americans United,” Henry said in an interview with RNS.
“Unfortunately, the board hasn’t acted on any of those,” said Henry. The board’s failure to do so “has betrayed the brave employees who reported her unacceptable conduct and participated in the Board-authorized investigation into that conduct,” she told the board in her resignation letter.
The report of the workplace inquiry, which the nonprofit said was an examination of the culture, not an investigation, has not been released, nor have its results been discussed with staff at Americans United.
The union made similar criticisms, saying in a statement, “After risking retaliation to speak out, staff never received any information about — or even acknowledgment of — the contents of any report produced at the end of the investigation or any steps that were being taken to address the toxic working conditions.”
Laser demanded loyalty not only from her employees, critics told RNS, but also from the board. In her resignation letter, Henry wrote, “I am also deeply concerned that the Board has ceded its duty of management of the organization and supervision of the CEO to the CEO.”
Murali Balaji, a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication and a consultant on diversity issues (and an occasional contributor to RNS) resigned from AU’s board earlier this year, in part, he said, because of the conflict at the organization. Balaji supported Henry’s claim that the board had fallen under Laser’s control, with its members increasingly being expected to be loyal to Laser, rather than to the organization’s mission.
“We had a situation that was becoming increasingly untenable and created a toxic climate, not just in terms of how staff were treated, but a toxic work climate among board members,” he said.
He said that Laser’s financial success had obscured problems with the organization’s culture. “Money cannot gloss over problems when it comes to an organization’s moral clarity and its adherence to mission,” he said. “If we have a situation where stakeholders are saying everything is okay because the money is coming in, then fundamentally, the organization is unhealthy.”
Pier Rogers, director of the Axelson Center for Nonprofit Management. Photo courtesy North Park University
Pier Rogers, director of the Axelson Center for Nonprofit Management at North Park University in Chicago, said that conflict at nonprofits is both commonplace and complicated. As mission-driven organizations, nonprofits are often held to a higher standard than commercial workplaces, said Rogers, but their sense of mission can also make them feel immune to disagreement.
“That’s unrealistic because we are dealing with people — fallible human beings,” she said. “There’s going to be conflict. The question is, how is it handled?”
The current board voiced its approval of Laser in response to inquiries. “By every metric, from grassroots engagement, fundraising, legal and legislative work, to the talented staff this vision has attracted, AU is succeeding. Ms. Laser has the full support and confidence of this board that our collective success will continue,” the board said. The leadership team echoed these sentiments, calling Laser, “a compassionate and visionary leader.”
The conflict at Americans United comes as the group has called out the threat of Christian nationalism and taken on high-profile cases such as a proposed religious charter school in Oklahoma and plans to post the Ten Commandments in Oklahoma schools.
In early July, the organization launched a national campaign to highlight what it called the dangers of Project 2025, a detailed conservative plan for a possible second Trump administration, published by the Heritage Foundation. In a press release touting the new campaign, Laser said the project would use religious freedom as “a license to discriminate.”
“We are all at risk,” wrote Laser in the release. “America doesn’t need Project 2025. It needs a national recommitment to the separation of church and state–the antidote that can stop Christian Nationalists.”
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But Henry and others believe that clarion calls like these are increasingly aimed at polishing AU’s, and Laser’s, image to the detriment of its core work. The departures aren’t only symptoms of a bad work culture but materially hurt the organization’s ability to do its job, former board members and the union said.
“I believe that the organization itself has lost its focus. Our mission is to ensure the separation of church and state by affecting policy and law,” Henry said. “At this point, we are doing less and less of that. We’ve lost real leaders in both our policy and legal departments. And we are focusing far too much on fundraising and publicity as opposed to the actual hard work of policy and law.”
