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Architect Of Christian Legal Movement Complains It’s Now Doing Too Much Winning

Whitehead’s supposedly principled criticisms say less about the alleged ‘hypocrisy’ of the Christian legal movement than they do about his naivete and historic need to play the contrarian spoiler.

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In 1982, evangelical lawyer John W. Whitehead penned a book arguing that the United States “should be an explicitly Christian nation.” A graduate of the University of Arkansas School of Law, he founded a Christian legal organization, the Rutherford Institute, which took on cases defending Christian children in public schools who were prohibited from reading their Bibles in school or on the bus or praying. In the 1980s, Whitehead even defended Georgia’s anti-sodomy law and warned of the dangers posed by the LGBT movement.

Now Whitehead believes the Christian legal movement has “gone astray,” according to a feature last week in The Washington Post. The cause, he claims, has “become dangerously politicized and intertwined with right-wing politics,” and has “wrongly elevated the rights of conservative Christians over those of religious minorities.”

Yet what has changed is less the Christian legal movement but America itself. Indeed, what Whitehead and his Christian confreres fail to recognize is that their promotion of religious liberty is predicated upon a legal framework that is Western in origin, and only exists in the West and elsewhere because of the (admittedly declining) influence of Christianity.

Whitehead: Shame on the Christian Legal Movement for Succeeding

“We started out trying to protect the little people,” Whitehead complained to WaPo. Now Christian legal movement leaders are “sitting in the White House with Trump. They’re now part of the nationalist movement. Religious liberty is a constitutional principle, not a political program.” Indeed, Whitehead’s transformation began in the 1990s, when he opposed an amendment to the Colorado state constitution that, in the Post’s words, “barred communities from passing laws to prohibit discrimination against gay and transgender people.”

“If the government is acting as a Christian nationalist organization as opposed to one representing the Constitution and all Americans, there is a problem,” Whitehead explained. Now Whitehead advocates for illegal aliens deported by the Trump administration and universities that lost........

© The Federalist