In the wake of high profile Supreme Court cases that have radically changed longstanding features in American politics such as the interpretations of the right to bear arms (District of Columbia v. Heller) and campaign finance regulation (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission), it is likely difficult for many to realize that the conservative legal movement is relatively new in American politics. As Steven Teles (The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law) illustrates, conservative public interest legal organizations’ early entries into organized activist litigation in the 1970s and 1980s were variably hobbled and disorganized. This is especially evident when one contrasts these conservative examples with the preceding decades of progressive legal activism in the nation's courts (The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective). It was not until the 1990s that one sees the emergence of a refined and powerful conservative legal movement that is associated with the cases noted above. While the rise, success, and political impacts of the secular conservative legal movement are increasingly well documented (see, for example, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition and Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution), the Christian Right's entry into the courts, and its effects, are less well researched and understood. Two recent books, Andrew Lewis's The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics: How Abortion Transformed the Culture Wars and Daniel Bennett's Defending Faith: The Politics of the Christian Conservative Legal Movement, draw attention to this advocacy with apt timing.

Given the Christian conservative legal movement's (CCLM) recent Supreme Court successes, like striking down an abortion protest regulation (McCullen v. Coakley and the extension of religious protections to include closely held for-profit corporations (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby), the relative dearth of scholarly attention to this movement is problematic. That said, a slowly growing collection of work has been moving toward filling the gap (e.g., Trumping Religion: The New Christian Right, the Free Speech Clause and the Courts; “In Legal Culture, but Not of It: The Role of Cause Lawyers in Evangelical Legal Mobilization,” in Cause Lawyers and Social Movements; “Purpose-Driven Lawyers: Evangelical Cause Lawyering and the Culture War,” in The Cultural Lives of Cause Lawyers; The Culture of Conservative Christian Litigation; Hollis-Brusky, A., and Joshua C. Wilson. 2017. “Playing for the Rules: How and Why New Christian Right Public Interest Firms Invest in Secular Litigation.” Law & Policy 39:121–141; “An Almost-Christian Nation? Constitutional Consequences of the Rise of the Religious Right,” in Evangelicals and Democracy in America; Wilson, Joshua C., and Amada Hollis-Brusky. 2014. “Lawyers for God and Neighbor: The Emergence of ‘Law as a Calling’ as a Mobilizing Frame for Christian Lawyers.” Law & Social Inquiry 39:416–448; The Street Politics of Abortion: Speech, Violence, and America's Culture Wars; The New States of Abortion Politics). Bennett's Defending Faith and Lewis's The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics are two of the most recent entries into this growing body of research.

Read in tandem, these two books build arguments from a trove of archival, interview, survey, and experimental data that culminates in a multi-level view of the CCLM — from the elites and formal organizations that lead the movement, to the rank and file who help supply the resources and voting power, and the clergy that can function as an effective shepherding intermediary between these two elements. We are thus given the most up-to-date and thorough accounts of (1) the institutions that comprise much of the CCLM; (2) the movement frames that have built and continue to sustain the CCLM; and (3) a sense of how the CCLM's activism may relate to the conservative, predominately white, Christian public's political opinions and behavior. Together, then, these books do significant work in expanding our understanding of not only the conservative Christian legal movement, but also the greater Christian Right. What's more, they deliver these benefits in eminently readable packages.

The two books also, however, sit in some degree of tension with each other. Lewis ultimately argues that as evangelicals continue to engage in the politics of rights as claimants, as opposed to opponents, they experience a moderate liberalizing effect — charting what could be a move from rights learning, to rights claiming, to rights extending to potential opponents. Bennett's book, however, gives reason to question the degree of this process and commitment. The depth of the learned instrumental value of rights claiming across CCLM organizations and within the layers of the Christian Right is clearly evident in both books. The extent of learning and internalizing other, more complex views of rights is far less apparent — a point that will be developed below.

Read in the context of the 2016 presidential election, both books also share a double-edged quality worth discussing. Considering the Christian Right's strong, though counter-intuitive, popular and institutional links to the Trump administration — close to 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump and continue to support him, and the administration has formally and informally tapped many within the Christian Right to help fill its ranks — these books are hitting the market when there should be great interest in studying the movement. For example, the Trump administration has many connections to the Christian Right, beyond Vice President Mike Pence, including Neil Gorsuch's selection for the Supreme Court, Betsy Devos's appointment as the Secretary of Education, National Right to Life lobbyist Teresa Manning's appointment in Health and Human Services, Jerry Fallwell, Jr's selection to lead a yet-to-be-defined task force on higher education, and Trump's hiring of American Center for Law and Justice's Jay Sekulow as his personal lawyer.

The timing and these connections should be a boon for the authors, especially as both authors were able to make some late additions to their respective books in light of the 2016 election. That said, reading the books in the contemporary political context also begins to point to a limitation that they share with the broader collection of political science research into the Christian Right — a lack of sufficient attention to race. No book can cover all things, but the intervening months between Trump's election and the books’ publications highlight the need for those studying the Christian Right generally, and even the conservative Christian legal movement specifically, to pay greater attention to the place and power of race in understanding the behavior and institutions of an overwhelmingly white movement. Before turning to this and the question of the Christian Right's depth of rights learning, however, I will first address some of each book's specific contributions.

In his own words, Daniel Bennett's Defending Faith, “explains how CCLOs advocate for issues that are central to Christian conservatives, highlights the influence of religious liberty on the [C]CLM's broader agenda, and shows how the Christian Right has become accustomed to the courts as a field of battle in the culture wars” (2–3). His ultimate argument is that “CCLOs, despite sharing much of the same broader agenda, differ in the pursuit of this agenda both substantively and strategically” given the differences in their resources, sense of purpose, and assessment of what the movement needs (3). In this way, Bennett has positioned his book within the line of scholarship looking at the confluence of social movements and litigation. By suggesting how resources differently enable and limit the various CCLOs, Defending Faith is more specifically engaging with social movement theories of resource mobilization. However, the full extent of how the massive resource disparities between the groups — for example, the book reports that Alliance Defending Freedom's (ADF) recent revenue is $48.3 million, versus Center for Law and Religious Freedom's roughly $300,00 — matter in terms of their activism and beyond is underexplored (20).

There is clear value in studying the universe (as defined by Bennett) of CCLOs, but their significant differences lead one to want to know more about: the tensions these disparities create; the reasons why ADF garners more than twice as much revenue as the second highest organization (American Center for Law & Justice, $17.5 million), let alone the remainder of the examined CCLOs which range from roughly $8 million to $240,000 in revenue); what attracts lawyers and litigants to one group versus another; whether and how other political institutions and organizations work with such differently resourced groups; how, exactly, those resource disparities relate to their forms of activism; and how we evaluate each group's relative impact and value (20). These and related questions, however, are clear fodder for future work in an understudied area.

Given the above, Defending Faith’s most significant contributions are its introduction and detailing of many of the contemporary leading CCLOs that comprise the CCLM. Bennett primarily has the organizations define themselves via their press releases, but this is limited since only seven of the 10 CCLOs supply reliable data, and of those seven, there are significant disparities in their use of press releases. For example, the ADF count includes 2,657 releases, followed by Liberty Counsel with 1,262 releases, while the remaining five organizations released between 306 and 531 (36). Fortunately, Bennett supplements this data with interviews. What's more, the themes in the press releases can still be used to talk about the CCLM's broader agenda, and what a given group's releases suggest about its activism within the CCLM. From these data, one is able to see how the CCLM has gravitated towards making religious liberty claims, and how specific CCLOs contribute to specific themes within the movement or are related to connections with larger conservative politics.

Given the other book reviewed here, there are two particularly interesting points to note in these data. First, of the seven organizations with substantial press releases, all but the Thomas More Society have significantly more releases related to religious liberty than sanctity of life claims. To be a little more specific, religious liberty claims outstripped sanctity of life claims by anywhere from roughly 1.5 to 14 times as many releases per organization. These differences would increase if one were able to isolate abortion-related claims within the broader sanctity of life category. Second, when looking at the religious liberty releases, “despite inclusive rhetoric, most CCLOs have paid relatively little positive attention to non-Christian religious traditions in their advocacy.” What's more, at least two of the CCLOs are overtly “critical of these [non-Christian] traditions and their activities” (51). These two points, then, are at the center of the tension between Defending Faith and The Rights Turn in Conservative Christian Politics, the latter of which I will now turn to.

While Bennett's book is overwhelmingly focused on CCLOs, Andrew Lewis's takes a step sideways to look at other leading institutions within the Christian Right (primarily the National Association of Evangelicals, the Southern Baptist Convention and its advocacy groups, the Baptist Joint Committee and the Christian Life Commission, which was later renamed the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission). He also builds from longitudinal survey data on clergy and the evangelical public's political opinions over time, as well as experimental survey data. In Lewis's words, he then uses these data to, “identify the epic shift in evangelicals’ approach to rights through some of the most pressing political issues — free speech, religious liberty, health care, capital punishment, and LGBT rights … [and to] trace the sources of this shift, identifying an under-appreciated cause — the politics of abortion” (3).

Lewis is not talking about the CCLM directly, and he is not studying CCLOs, but he is connected to this movement and these organizations since the politics and language of rights and abortion are intimately entangled with the CCLM. In brief, the conservative Christian legal movement and its organizations were in part born from evangelicals’ increased engagement with the confluence of abortion politics and the politics of rights, and the CCLM and its organizations have gone on to further fuel this engagement (The Street Politics of Abortion; The New States of Abortion Politics). As both Bennett's Defending Faith and, before him Kevin den Dulk (Purpose-Driven Lawyers) have pointed out, CCLOs are engaged in teaching the evangelical public about rights alongside the organizations on which Lewis focuses. Given the layers of his inquiry, though, Lewis's book is more accurately categorized as one about political opinion creation and diffusion, in addition to the religion and politics label that applies to both books.

Chapters in The Rights Turn follow a clear pattern of starting with a rich contextual history establishing the engagement of evangelical political elites and the public with various issue areas over time, and the subsequent shifts in belief driven by, or at least entangled with, abortion politics. From here Lewis turns to survey data documenting the moves in evangelical clergy and public opinion, and, where gaps exist or particular questions are raised, survey experiments. The detail and range within each chapter allows them to easily stand alone to illustrate the process of issue opinion creation, modification, and diffusion and/or the power of abortion as a frame within the evangelical community. Read as a whole, though, one is struck by two things.

The first is the extent to which evangelical organizations have turned their public rhetoric and issues statements from, “Moralizing … to liberalizing. Rights and justice have taken precedent over right and wrong” (26). The second is the apparent overwhelming power of abortion as a frame for creating and changing beliefs within the tiers of the evangelical community, even with issue areas that one would not naturally associate with abortion politics. While its power varies across the issues Lewis examines, abortion's presence is a constant. Bennett's data marking the rise of religious liberty concerns and their eclipsing of life issues, however, makes one wonder how much work this ascendant rights claim is now doing in the evangelical public alongside or instead of abortion. Defending Faith, though, does more to contest Lewis's conclusions regarding the liberalizing of evangelicals.

Lewis ends the book with a reflection on what the evangelical turn to rights might portend. Here he takes a different tack than what Bennett's and others work suggests (Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse). Instead of being seen in wholly instrumental terms, or possibly leading to increasingly entrenched divisiveness and polarization between evangelicals and their political and cultural opponents, Lewis sees hope. “[E]vangelical rights politics have the potential to teach them about others’ rights … once individuals learn about rights and understanding their value in a pluralistic system, they may become likely to support the rights of those with whom they disagree” (166). The book's conclusion seeks to support this hope via a survey experiment which yields the qualified statement that, “When a religious elite presented evangelicals with a cue that supported their political position on a politically charged issue, evangelicals reacted with increased tolerance for outsiders” (169–170). The qualified hope given by the experiment, however, is diminished by the incorporation of examples from the far messier world of lived politics. The examples given by both Lewis and Bennett show an evangelical elite split on rights extension, and an evangelical public set against it.

The misleadingly-named “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy, for example, illustrates the conflicting lessons learned by the evangelical elite and, correspondingly, the conflicting messages they convey to their constituents. The CCLO Liberty Counsel may come out in favor of extending rights to Muslims by stating that, “The Constitution cuts both ways,” but the deeper thinking that this statement could prompt is undermined by the easier solution offered by the ACLJ, the nation's second largest CCLO. Instead of extending rights, the ACLJ marshaled its ample and well-established media resources to communicate to the evangelical public that Muslims were excluded from the categories of peoples deserving rights, and more subtly, that they may not be counted as Americans. To these ends, the “ACLJ shifted the frame through which the issue was presented to its audience, couching the construction of the center as insensitive to the families of 9/11 victims … the ACLJ explicitly stated, ‘This is not a religious freedom issue. It's an American Issue’” (Defending Faith, 61). Lewis is right in saying that, “[b]oth rights learning and rights extending are processes that play out in episodes and are best viewed longitudinally,” but the contrast between the controlled environment of an experiment and the cacophony of life is great (173, emphasis in original). If evangelical elites cannot arrive at unified, deep lessons of rights learning and extension, it is hard to see how the evangelical public can learn them amongst all of the noise.

The example of the ACLJ's othering of, as opposed to rights extending to, Muslims also leads to the final tension present in both of these books, and possibly in the political science research on religion and politics more generally. Bennett and Lewis both agree that the evangelical turn to courts and the politics of rights is linked to evangelicals now seeing themselves as an embattled minority group, a self-conception that they have periodically adopted in the past. As such, evangelicals have moved to employ the political tools and institutions that more traditionally marginalized groups — racial and ethnic minorities, women, the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) community, etc. — started successfully appealing to in the mid-20^th century. One significant factor that differentiates evangelicals from these other groups, however, is that evangelicals once saw themselves as the majority, possessing power, and thus able to successfully wage majoritarian political fights. As such, they clearly fit Corey Robin's definition of a conservative group as one that internalizes, “the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back” (4).

This feeling of losing power, control, and a sense of dominance likely goes far in explaining why white evangelicals have rallied to and continue to stand by President Trump (The End of White Christian America; McElwee, Sean, and Jason McDaniel. 2017. “Economic Anxiety Didn't Make People Vote Trump, Racism Did.” The Nation, May 8). Referring to American Politics as a whole, Lewis states that, “a general consensus is that racial politics drove the first phase of party realignment through the 1980s, while cultural politics contributed to partisan change in the second phase” (16). If anything, contemporary politics should show this to be a false dichotomy. Cultural politics regularly incorporate racial politics (e.g., “Contemporary Welfare Reform and the Public Identity of the ‘Welfare Queen.’” Race, Gender & Class 10:31–59; “How the Poor Became Black,” in Race and the Politics of Welfare).

Turning to evangelicals and their internalizing an embattled minority status, contemporary politics should remind us that as long as the construct of race existed, American religion has been racialized. As Jacobson and Wadsworth (Faith and Race in American Political Life) put it, the “racialization of religion developed because the dominant religion — first Protestant Christianity, later broadened to include any religion in the Judeo-Christian tradition — was, from the start, partnered with the dominant racial category, whiteness … [and that] a fear of growing minority power often occurs at the intersection of racial and religious minorities; the threat to the dominant white Christian majority is often perceived as an unknown amalgam of anti-Christian, brown-skinned forces” (2–3). Recognizing this unknown amalgam goes far in explaining behavior in the “Ground Zero” mosque conflict, just as unmasking the fusion of race and religion will in other social policy areas, and in the understanding of Trump's appeal to white evangelicals. Recognizing its longstanding power thus helps clarify a significant reason why all levels of the evangelical community will face difficulty in learning and internalizing the deeper liberal logic of rights.

While Bennet and Lewis's books suggest divergent paths ahead, they both do much to illuminate the state of contemporary Christian Right activism from the institutional leadership to the rank and file. More importantly, they both do what good books should do — simultaneously provide new data, draw attention to and make progress in explaining what has been poorly understood before, and then invite further discussion. As stated earlier, no book can cover all things, but as we move forward to not only better understand evangelicals, the Christian Right, and this overwhelmingly white movement's adoption of courts and the rights politics through and beyond the CCLM, we must ask how both race and the unintended effects of pursuing various strategies can be meaningfully accounted for.