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Already, across the country nonprofit Christian legal groups funded by televangelists and direct-mail appeals are pursuing a broad range of cases, pioneering a savvy brand of First Amendment fundamentalism. "Christians from the 1960s on have taken a major beating in the legal arena and have lost a lot of their liberties," argues Mathew Staver, president of the six-year-old Liberty Counsel in Orlando, Florida. "In the '80s we discovered we must enter the mainstream to assert those liberties." Along with a number of school-prayer cases, the Liberty Counsel has advocated free speech in an amicus Supreme Court brief on behalf of the Ku Klux Klan, which wants to erect a cross on the Ohio statehouse grounds. Other legal groups focus on defending antiabortion activists, while the Rutherford Institute, established in 1982, concentrates on what founder John Whitehead calls "legitimate civil liberties cases," such as school prayer and home schooling.
"We just want to see a level playing field for people of all faiths," says Robertson, whose own ACLJ sports the motto "To defend the rights of believers." The handsome suite of 20 ACLJ offices, in the new Regent Law School building dedicated by Dan Quayle in 1994, looks like any other prosperous law firm, with leather couches and Daumier prints. The desk of ACLJ's executive director, Keith Fournier, bears a sign that reads FAITHFULNESS NOT SUCCESS, yet the center's chief council, Jay Sekulow, has gone an impressive three for three arguing religious-speech cases before the Supreme Court. "We have learned a lot from watching other public interest groups utilize the courts,'' says Fournier.
Like the ACLU, the ACLJ relies substantially on direct-mail efforts to meet its $10 million annual budget. The group is also about to launch the Human Life and Reproduction Project, clearly modeled on what was once the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project and is now the Center for Reproductive Law & Policy. Unlike the ACLU, however, the ACLJ also has a group of 1,500 nuns, ministers and lay people organized to pray for it around the clock, and ACLJ lawyers are paid handsomely.
"We're moving from our adolescence to our adulthood,'' says Fournier, whose organization has five branch offices and 500 affiliated lawyers who do volunteer work around the country. "We want to institutionalize our work so we'll be here in 50 years.'' Increasingly too, the Christian-law groups are beginning to act in concert, most notably on a religion amendment to the Constitution, which they plan to unveil this month. Representative Ernest Jim Ishtook, a Republican from Oklahoma who will sponsor it in the House, expects the measure to have broad support. "Too many people have tried to create a new standard based on whether a single person gets their feelings hurt," Ishtook says. "What about the emotional injury suffered by the vaster number of people who wish to be able to express their faith freely?"