Science-fiction book about colonizing an exomoon to escape theocracy in the USA

I'm trying to remember a book I read in my mid to late teens, so probably in the late Aughts, about a group of colonists who flee a "Christofascist" theocratic USA in a slower-than-light relativistic ship. The world they settle is a moon of a gas giant, called Bear - the phrase "Bearlight" appears frequently where 'moonlight' might, and always brought a wonderful mental image of a ringed giant planet dominating the sky. I wish I remembered the name of the planet.

There's sabotage and intrigue to the colony ship, and at the end a second-wave ship arrives that left Earth centuries later but arrives just a few months after due to the many centuries of technological progress that happened while the colonists where on their voyage.

I think the colony ship used a design that was once popular in sci-fi, the "Brussard ramjet", which has fallen out of favor in harder sci-fi as our understanding of the interstellar medium has improved. I'd guess a publication date between 1989 and 2009, most likely in the later Aughts.

ETA: probably general-audience science fiction, not YA though I don't recall the narrative or reading level as particularly challenging and I was young at the time.

Edit 2: The book I was looking for is called Coyote: A Novel of Interstellar Exploration, by Allen Steele.