Drupal 7 Can a custom textarea render html without a rich texteditor enabled?
I didn't find the answer I wanted to find, but after careful examination of the form api, I discovered markup and it led me down the path of fooling the end user into thinking it looked like a field with some css manipulation. This is working for me

$form['Venue Agreement'] = array (
 ['0']['#default_value'],
  '#weight' =&gt; '10',
  '#markup' =&gt; $form['field_venue_agreement']['und'['0']['#default_value'],
  '#prefix' =&gt; '&lt;div class="form_input"&gt;',
  '#suffix'=&gt; '&lt;/div&gt;',
);