Judicial Review and American Conservatism: Christianity, Public Education, and the Federal Courts in the Reagan Era

by Robert Daniel Rubin

The Christian Right of the 1980s forged its political identity largely in response to what it perceived as liberal 'judicial activism'. Robert Daniel Rubin tells this story as it played out in Mobile, Alabama. There, a community conflict pitted a group of conservative evangelicals, a sympathetic federal judge, and a handful of conservative intellectuals against a religious agnostic opposed to prayer in schools, and a school system accused of promoting a religion called 'secular humanism'. The twists in the Mobile conflict speak to the changes and continuities that marked the relationship of 1980s' religious conservatism to democracy, the courts, and the Constitution. By alternately focusing its gaze on the local conflict and related events in Washington, DC, this book weaves a captivating narrative. Historians, political scientists, and constitutional lawyers will find, in Rubin's study, a challenging new perspective on the history of the Christian Right in the United States.

ebook

Published April 12, 2017

Reviews

[Sarah Niebuhr Rubin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic narrative walking the reader through 1980s conservatism and particularly the religious right, as it played out through two Alabama court cases in the federal courts. The first case was brought by an atheist against prayer in his children's public schools, the second a rebuttal case suggesting that science/evolution topics in schools are tantamount to religion and should thus be banned under the same strictures that allowed banning public prayer in the schools. This book brings an important voice to the contemporary divide found in conversations between conservative and progressive, right and left, democrat and republican.