Fired For Her Faith

A True Story of Faith, Fear, and the Fight for Justice

My name is Larry McDaniel. In the fall of 2021, my wife Christina was fired from the senior-living community where she had spent four years caring for the elderly — not for anything she did wrong, but because she would not violate her Christian faith by taking the COVID-19 vaccine.

She was not a bad employee. The company's own records called her "an excellent employee" and marked her "eligible for rehire." She offered to keep masking and keep testing — everything she had already done safely for nearly two years without testing positive once. It did not matter. Nine days before anyone sat down to "review" her request, an internal email already asked the others: "Do we all agree we need to tell her we will not accept it?" The decision was made before she ever walked into the room. Then they typed one last thing onto her termination paperwork. They called her firing "voluntary."

Losing her income nearly broke us. We had bought our first home months earlier — the first real stability two formerly homeless kids had ever known. Within a year we were in mortgage forbearance, then Chapter 7 bankruptcy, with a lien on the house we were fighting to keep. Today our household runs on my paycheck as a bus driver and Christina's $889-a-month disability check. The stress made her health worse, and she was later approved for Social Security Disability.

I am not a lawyer. I taught myself the law on night shifts and long commutes, because I had to know whether what happened to Christina was merely cruel or actually illegal. I came to believe it was illegal — and so did a religious-liberty legal group that reviewed our evidence. The problem has never been the evidence. The problem is money and a clock.

Under Oregon law, Christina has until October 2026 to file suit. After that, the door closes for good. We have contacted close to a hundred attorneys. The ones with the experience to win a case like this want $350 to $400 an hour and estimate $50,000 to $200,000 to see it through. On our income, that may as well be the moon.

So I wrote a book — Fired for Her Faith: Rights Don't Matter if Courts Ignore Them — both to tell our story and to leave a real, documented legal roadmap for the next family handed the same impossible choice. This fundraiser exists for one reason: to give Christina a fighting chance to be heard before her time runs out.

Where every dollar goes:

1. Retaining qualified counsel before Christina's October 2026 deadline.
2. Digging our family the rest of the way out of the hole this created — the bankruptcy, the lien, the years of forbearance.

That is it. There is no third use, and there will not be one.

If our story moved you and you are able to give, anything helps — a few dollars from a lot of good people is how families like ours get a fighting chance. And if you cannot give, you can help just as much for free: share this page, and share the book. Hand it to a friend, a coworker, a pastor, an attorney, a lawmaker. The right person seeing it could change everything.

Thank you — for reading this far, for caring, and for whatever you choose to do next. Christina is in the other room as I write this. The dogs are at her feet. By the grace of God and people kinder than we can count, the house is still ours. Whatever happens next, we are still here. That is the one thing they could not take.

This was never about politics for us. It was about conscience. We could not, in good faith before God, do what we were being told to do — and we held to the same verse this whole fight has rested on: "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). We are not asking anyone to agree with our convictions. We are asking for the chance to defend the right of every American to hold their own.

— Larry & Christina McDaniel