Suing for America's Soul

by Moore, R. Jonathan

• ISBN13: 9780802840448
• ISBN10: 0802840442
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-06-25
• Publisher: Eerdmans Pub Co

Summary

When John W. Whitehead founded The Rutherford Institute as a Christian legal advocacy group in 1982, it was interested primarily in the First Amendment??'s religion clause, serving clients only when religious freedom was at stake. By the mid-1990s, however, religious rights were but one subset of a whole host of freedoms threatened by an invasive government. In Suing for America's Soul R. Jonathan Moore critically examines the foundation and subsequent practices of The Rutherford Institute, helping to explain the rise of conservative Christian legal advocacy groups in recent decades. Moore exposes the effects ? good and bad ? that such legal activism has had on the evangelical Protestant community. Thought-provoking and astute, Suing for America's Soul opens a revealing window onto evangelical Protestantism at large in late-twentieth-century America.

Author Biography

R. Jonathan Moore is a visiting scholar in the Department of Religious Studies at Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa.

Table of Contents

Contexts	p. 1
Secular humanism on the loose : John Whitehead and the founding of the Rutherford Institute	p. 35
Raising the alarm : Whitehead and the Rutherford Institute in public	p. 83
Cleaning up "the dungheap of constitutional jurisprudence" : the Rutherford Institute as friend of the court	p. 133
The measure of success : religiously motivated legal activism and its consequences	p. 171
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.