INDIANAPOLIS — A Wiccan activist and his ex-wife are challenging a court order that they must protect their 9-year-old son from what the divorce decree terms their "non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals."

Thomas E. Jones and Tammy Bristol of Indianapolis are fighting a Marion Superior Court stipulation that they shelter the boy from their religion. The Indiana Civil Liberties Union has taken on the case, appealing the December decree to the Indiana Court of Appeals.

Jones, a Wiccan activist who has coordinated Pagan Pride Day in Indianapolis for the past six years, said he and his ex-wife were stunned when they saw the language in the judge's dissolution decree.

"We both had an instant resolve to challenge it. We could not accept it," Jones said.

Neither parent has taken their son to any Wiccan rituals since the decree was issued, he said.

"I'm afraid I'll lose my son if I let him around when I practice my religion," he said.

Religious-freedom experts contacted for this article said they could not recall any similar steps by a court to protect a child from parents' religious beliefs. They said the First Amendment and court rulings are clear that parents have a fundamental right to raise their children in any religion they choose as long as it causes no harm.

A court commissioner wrote the unusual order into the couple's dissolution decree after a routine report by the court's Domestic Relations Counseling Bureau noted that both Jones and his ex-wife are pagans who send their son, Archer, to a Catholic elementary school.

"Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones display little insight into the confusion these divergent belief systems will have upon Archer as he ages," the report said.

The dissolution decree said "the parents are directed to take such steps as are needed to shelter Archer from involvement and observation of these non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals."

The splitting parents challenged that section of the decree, but Judge Cale Bradford, who reviewed the commissioner's work, let it stand.

Bradford said judicial ethics prevent him from discussing the case while it is pending.

The appeal challenges the decree on grounds including that it is unconstitutionally vague because it does not define mainstream religion. It cites estimates that showed an estimated 1 million pagans worldwide in 2002 outnumbered Unitarians and, in the United States, had larger numbers than those who practice Sikhism, Taoism and other established religions.

Judges cannot substitute their religious judgment for that of parents in regard to the upbringing of children, said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a nonsectarian, nonpartisan organization based in Washington, D.C.

"This is an absurd result, because in the eyes of the law being a pagan should be no different from being a Presbyterian," Lynn said.

Although Wiccans are diverse and do not adhere to a single set of beliefs, a core tenet is to harm no one and live in harmony with all people and nature, said the Rev. Selena Fox, high priestess and senior minister of Circle Sanctuary, a Wiccan church and pagan resource center near Madison, Wis.

Wicca also is becoming more mainstream, according to Fox, who says she has presided at religious rituals with ministers of other faiths, serves on a religious-practices advisory committee for the Wisconsin state prison system and serves as president of the Greater Madison Religious Association.

"There continues to be misunderstanding and prejudice and discrimination, not only against Wicca but against any religion that is not centered on monotheism," she said.

The head of a conservative Christian group in Indianapolis also sided with the Wiccans.

"The parents have the right to raise their child in that faith, just as I have the right to raise my child in the Christian faith," said Micah Clark, executive director of the American Family Association of Indiana.