Tussling with the 'octogovernment': John Whitehead, the Rutherford Institute, and Christian legal advocacy.

摘要

John W. Whitehead founded The Rutherford Institute (TRI), a Christian legal advocacy endeavor, in 1982. Although parachurch organizations are familiar elements of American religious history, TRI was a unique creation of its own time and circumstance. Whitehead believed that twentieth-century America's cultural problems could be attributed largely to the hijacking of the nation's governmental institutions---especially the U.S. Supreme Court---by secular elites. In a series of books, especially The Separation Illusion (1977), he claimed that the nation's founders had intended for the First Amendment to provide wide latitude for Christianity to shape American life; the disestablishment provision had been intended solely to curtail the federal government's power. According to Whitehead, beginning in the 1940s the Supreme Court, in tandem with the sprawling federal "octogovernment," began to replace the nations religious foundation with a secularist one and thereby threaten individual liberties. Through public education and legal advocacy, Whitehead and TRI sought to rescue American culture from these secularist schemers.;Though always emphasizing its grassroots activism, TRI's advocates also spent considerable time filing amicus curiae briefs before the nation's highest courts. They pushed for an originalist understanding and application of the First Amendment's religion clauses, one which would entail much more accommodation of religious belief and practice than was currently allowed. They also argued that, in a truly free marketplace of ideas, religion should be treated no differently than other forms of constitutionally protected speech. In doing so, TRI undermined its originalist argument by diminishing the constitutional distinctiveness of religion. By the end of the twentieth century, Whitehead and TRI willfully remained apart from similar competing organizations while seeking to protect a broader range of individual liberties. As one voice in an increasingly crowded and confusing church-state arena, that institutional independence remained the only sure criterion by which to judge TRI a success.