ACLU

The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 by Roger Baldwin and others in the aftermath of the Red Scare, with the explicit mission of defending constitutional rights regardless of ideology or popularity. The ACLU litigated landmark cases across the twentieth century: the Scopes Trial (1925), defending Japanese Americans during WWII internment, Brown v. Board of Education, and dozens of cases establishing the modern law of church-state separation, free speech, and civil rights. The ACLU's church-state litigation — particularly cases flowing from Engel v. Vitale (1962, school prayer) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963, Bible reading in public schools) — put it on a direct collision course with the emerging Religious Right. For movement leaders like Jerry Falwell Sr., Pat Robertson, and D. James Kennedy, the ACLU's litigation represented a systematic effort to expunge Christianity from American public life. The ACLU was doing what civil liberties organizations do: enforcing the Establishment Clause. The Religious Right interpreted this as anti-Christian persecution. The Alliance Defending Freedom was founded in 1994 by a coalition of Religious Right leaders including James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, and Bill Bright partly as a counterweight to the ACLU; ADF's communications have long cast the ACLU as its chief legal adversary. This is not incidental — ADF's entire organizational identity was constructed in opposition to the ACLU's model. Beyond ADF, the ACLU appeared as a named enemy in Moral Majority fundraising letters, Christian Coalition voter guides, and Family Research Council publications. The ACLU's work defending LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights, and the rights of religious minorities was framed by the Religious Right not as civil liberties advocacy but as ideological warfare against Christianity. This framing — the ACLU as the enemy of religious freedom — became one of the most durable tropes in Religious Right political communication. The ACLU was and is an organization that defends the rights of everyone, including religious believers. It has represented Christian groups in free speech cases. The Religious Right's portrayal of the ACLU as anti-Christian left out the cases in which the ACLU defended Christian groups' free-speech rights.

Themes this entry appears in

• Opposition / Resistance
• Anti-Democratic

Connections to ACLU

• Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) opposed (1994) — The Alliance Defending Freedom was founded in 1994 by a coalition of Religious Right leaders including James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, and Bill Bright partly as a counterweight to the ACLU, which ADF's communications have long cast as its chief legal adversary. ADF has mirrored the ACLU's model — building a network of allied attorneys, litigating test cases designed to reach the Supreme Court, and operating a legal training program — while pursuing the opposite constitutional vision.

Sources

• The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism — Katherine Stewart (2020)