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This book is the first scholarly treatment of the strategies employed by the New Christian Right In litigating cases regarding religion using the Free Speech Clause of the United States Constitution. Trumping Religion provides a detailed analysis of the five major public-interest law firms that have litigated religion cases in the federal courts between 1980 and 2000. Steven Brown argues that these organizations have not only stepped up their efforts to participate in religion cases but also fundamentally changed the way religious expression is viewed by the law, appealing not to the free-exercise-of-religion or establishment clauses of the Constitution but to the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. Allied with several highly vocal, evangelical ministries, such as those of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the legal organizations that litigate for the New Christian Right argue that religious expression is a form of protected speech and thereby gain a greater latitude of interpretation in the courts. This strategy has been criticized by both liberals and conservatives as demeaning to the concepts of belief and worship, yet it has been successful. The long-term agenda of the NCR as illuminated by this study is to shape church-state jurispridence in a way that permits free course for the Christian gospel. This result, they believe, would retard further secularization of the American way of life. Brown presents his research and conclusions from a balanced viewpoint, In filling a distinct void in the literature, this book will be of considerable interest to political scientists, legal scholars, law schools and seminaries, and anyone concerned with the intersection of religion and judicial politics.
