Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF)

The Alliance Defending Freedom was launched on January 31, 1994, at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Washington, D.C. More than 30 senior Christian Right leaders — representing virtually the entire existing Religious Right infrastructure — gathered to create a dedicated legal institution. The co-founding figures included James Dobson (Focus on the Family), D. James Kennedy (Coral Ridge Ministries), Bill Bright (Campus Crusade for Christ), Larry Burkett (Crown Financial), and Marlin Maddoux. Alan Sears, a former federal prosecutor, was installed as founding president and CEO. The founding meeting's explicit framing was that the ACLU had spent decades winning the legal culture war, and Christians needed an equally dedicated counter-force. In its early years, ADF (then the Alliance Defense Fund) primarily operated as a funding clearinghouse — identifying and funding existing Christian attorneys litigating religious liberty and anti-LGBTQ cases, rather than litigating directly. This model built a network of allied attorneys aligned with ADF's goals across the country. In 2000, ADF launched the Blackstone Legal Fellowship — its attorney formation program, named for the 18th-century English jurist whose Commentaries on the Laws of England grounded law in Christian natural law theory. Blackstone is a three-week intensive training program followed by a six-week legal internship, which ADF describes as training Christian law students in natural law, constitutional jurisprudence, and the history of religious liberty. Through Blackstone, ADF has trained over 2,600 law students and placed them in internships with federal judges and state attorneys general. Amy Coney Barrett was paid to lecture in the program five times before joining the Supreme Court. ADF's Blackstone alumni now occupy positions throughout the federal judiciary, state governments, and Republican congressional offices. In 2012, ADF changed its name from Alliance Defense Fund to Alliance Defending Freedom, reflecting a strategic shift: the organization had grown into a direct litigation powerhouse rather than merely a funding body. By 2014, ADF had over 40 staff attorneys and had become one of the largest legal organizations of the religious right. By 2022, annual revenue exceeded $100 million. ADF has won at the Supreme Court in a series of landmark cases: Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018, baker's refusal to serve same-sex couple), 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis (2023, web designer's right to refuse same-sex wedding websites), and has been involved in multiple religious exemption cases. ADF attorneys and alumni were also involved in the legal strategy leading to Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), which overturned Roe v. Wade. The Southern Poverty Law Center designated ADF as an anti-LGBTQ hate group in 2016, citing its history of supporting criminalization of consensual same-sex activity in the U.S. and abroad, its defense of forced sterilization of transgender people in European cases, and its internal documents characterizing homosexuality as connected to pedophilia. ADF International, headquartered in Vienna, Austria, operates in over 100 countries, making ADF a global Christian nationalist legal infrastructure. Michael Farris succeeded Alan Sears as CEO and general counsel in 2017, serving until 2022 — connecting ADF directly to the HSLDA and Patrick Henry College educational pipeline Farris had built.

Themes this entry appears in

• Christian Nationalism
• Anti-LGBTQ
• Political Strategy
• Dominionism
• Abortion Politics

Connections from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF)

• influenced → Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) (2014) — Katherine Stewart argues that the Alliance Defending Freedom's decade-long development of religious liberty litigation strategy — including the RFRA framework, the theory that religious exemptions extend to for-profit commercial activity, and the development of sympathetic defendant profiles — created the legal architecture that the Hobby Lobby case operationalized. While ADF did not directly represent Hobby Lobby (the Becket Fund did), ADF's parallel litigation pipeline developed the same legal theories.
• opposed → ACLU (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.
• influenced → Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) (2022) — Alliance Defending Freedom was among the most active organizations in the legal ecosystem that produced Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. ADF filed amicus briefs in Dobbs, provided legal analysis and strategy to state legislatures crafting the abortion restrictions that created the vehicle cases for overturning Roe, and trained law students through its Blackstone Legal Fellowship, some of whom went on to legal and judicial careers. ADF's decades-long strategy of building test cases, training conservative lawyers, and cultivating judicial relationships was a direct tributary into the Dobbs result.

Connections to Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF)

• James Dobson founded (1994) — James Dobson was a founding co-founder of Alliance Defending Freedom (then Alliance Defense Fund) at its January 31, 1994 launch at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention. Dobson's involvement gave the new legal organization immediate credibility and access to his massive Focus on the Family donor and listener base.
• Michael Farris influenced (2017) — Farris became CEO and general counsel of ADF in 2017, connecting the educational pipeline he had built (HSLDA, PHC) to the Religious Right's primary legal litigation organization. He served until 2022.
• D. James Kennedy founded (1994) — D. James Kennedy was a co-founder of Alliance Defending Freedom at its January 1994 launch. Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries had long promoted 'reclaiming America for Christ' in law and culture, making ADF a natural institutional extension of his work.
• Project Blitz influenced (2016) — Critics note that Project Blitz's Tier 3 bills — religious exemptions in adoption, child welfare, and public accommodation — paralleled legislation the Alliance Defending Freedom had advocated. ADF was the litigation arm of the post-Obergefell religious liberty strategy; Project Blitz was the legislative distribution mechanism. The two organizations operated in complementary roles: ADF produced the legal framework and litigated test cases; Project Blitz bundled that framework into pre-written state bills and distributed them to Christian nationalist state legislators through the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation's network. When states passed Project Blitz's Tier 3 bills, ADF was positioned to defend them in federal court.

Sources

• The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism — Katherine Stewart (2020), pp. 131–165
• Profile on the Right: Alliance Defending Freedom — Political Research Associates (2017)
• Alliance Defending Freedom — Southern Poverty Law Center (2016)
• Anti-abortion attorneys ascend federal government ranks with Christian right legal training — Kansas Reflector (2023)
• Jesus and John Wayne — Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020), pp. 248–252