ONWARD CHRISTIAN LAWYERS

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

The scene resembles that in many a law-school classroom: two dozen earnest third-year students in jeans and flannel shirts sit at desks, their notebooks open in front of them. Behind the podium where assistant professor Lynne Marie Kohm stands, a sign on the blackboard advertises a bar-exam cram course. But the discussion of the topic at hand, divorce, is not limited to the standard legalisms of family law-custody, property, visitation. Instead, the students here at the Regent University School of Law in Virginia Beach, Virginia, return, again and again, to the spiritual consequences for parents and children. "We can act as healers," one student points out. Kohm agrees, then adds, "One of the things we can do as Christ's attorneys is be the guardian ad litem for the children."

One, but certainly not all. For suddenly it seems that Christ's attorneys are turning up everywhere, from school-board meetings to the Supreme Court, which last week heard a major case on the separation of church and state. Rosenberger v. University of Virginia, which involves the denial of student-activity funds to Wide Awake, a Christian magazine, attracted a slew of amicus briefs on both sides. One of those supporting Ronald Rosenberger and his fellow Christian students was filed by a legal foundation, housed at Regent Law School, called the American Center for Law and Justice, or ACLJ. It is one of a rapidly growing network of Christian legal organizations around the country that have adopted the techniques of liberal activism developed by such groups as the ACLU and the naacp Legal Defense and Educational Fund to do the Lord's work. They are fed by a much smaller number of law schools that teach jurisprudence with what Pat Robertson, founder of Regent and ACLJ, calls "biblical underpinnings.''

The Regent Law School, which opened in 1987, is the largest. This year a crop of 335 students is being trained in what the catalog describes as "God's perspective on law"-an informal mix of traditional scholarship, Bible study and evangelical strategy. Regent students may not be getting the best legal education available-the percentage of the school's students who passed the July 1994 Virginia bar exam was the lowest in the state, and the institution is still only provisionally accredited by the American Bar Association-but they are receiving training that Robertson believes is essential. Himself a 1955 graduate of Yale Law School who failed the New York bar exam and never practiced, Robertson says the problem with his legal education was that "I wasn't sure what the purpose of life was, or what I could do with the truths I was learning." At the Regent Law School (one of seven graduate schools that make up Robertson's 17-year-old Regent University) "students are highly motivated to contribute to mankind, thanks to a deep faith in God.''

Already, across the country nonprofit Christian legal groups funded by televangelists and direct-mail appeals are pursuing a broad range of cases, pioneering a savvy brand of First Amendment fundamentalism. "Christians from the 1960s on have taken a major beating in the legal arena and have lost a lot of their liberties," argues Mathew Staver, president of the six-year-old Liberty Counsel in Orlando, Florida. "In the '80s we discovered we must enter the mainstream to assert those liberties." Along with a number of school-prayer cases, the Liberty Counsel has advocated free speech in an amicus Supreme Court brief on behalf of the Ku Klux Klan, which wants to erect a cross on the Ohio statehouse grounds. Other legal groups focus on defending antiabortion activists, while the Rutherford Institute, established in 1982, concentrates on what founder John Whitehead calls "legitimate civil liberties cases," such as school prayer and home schooling.

"We just want to see a level playing field for people of all faiths," says Robertson, whose own ACLJ sports the motto "To defend the rights of believers." The handsome suite of 20 ACLJ offices, in the new Regent Law School building dedicated by Dan Quayle in 1994, looks like any other prosperous law firm, with leather couches and Daumier prints. The desk of ACLJ's executive director, Keith Fournier, bears a sign that reads FAITHFULNESS NOT SUCCESS, yet the center's chief council, Jay Sekulow, has gone an impressive three for three arguing religious-speech cases before the Supreme Court. "We have learned a lot from watching other public interest groups utilize the courts,'' says Fournier.

Like the ACLU, the ACLJ relies substantially on direct-mail efforts to meet its $10 million annual budget. The group is also about to launch the Human Life and Reproduction Project, clearly modeled on what was once the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project and is now the Center for Reproductive Law & Policy. Unlike the ACLU, however, the ACLJ also has a group of 1,500 nuns, ministers and lay people organized to pray for it around the clock, and ACLJ lawyers are paid handsomely.

"We're moving from our adolescence to our adulthood,'' says Fournier, whose organization has five branch offices and 500 affiliated lawyers who do volunteer work around the country. "We want to institutionalize our work so we'll be here in 50 years.'' Increasingly too, the Christian-law groups are beginning to act in concert, most notably on a religion amendment to the Constitution, which they plan to unveil this month. Representative Ernest Jim Ishtook, a Republican from Oklahoma who will sponsor it in the House, expects the measure to have broad support. "Too many people have tried to create a new standard based on whether a single person gets their feelings hurt," Ishtook says. "What about the emotional injury suffered by the vaster number of people who wish to be able to express their faith freely?"

Though the exact wording is still being hashed out, the amendment will attempt to reinforce freedom for religious activity in the public sphere. "The purpose should not be to promote religion in general or Christianity in particular," says University of Chicago law professor Michael McConnell, an adviser to the cause. "The purpose should be to ensure that religious citizens and religious speech are permitted to play a role in American life equal to any other ideology, philosophy, or persuasion."

This is what McConnell argued last week before the Supreme Court in the Rosenberger case, pointing out to the court that U.Va. had given student-activity money to 118 other groups, including a Muslim publication and a gay-and-lesbian organization. The ACLU, the National Council of Churches and the National School Boards Association, among others, filed briefs supporting the university's argument that funding Wide Awake would have violated the First Amendment's establishment-of-religion clause. ACLJ, the Southern Baptist Convention, the National Association of Evangelicals and the Christian Legal Society backed the Christian students, whose appeal was bankrolled in part by the Alliance Defense Fund, a coalition of leading evangelists and broadcasters that aims to build a $25 million fund to aid Christian litigators.

"Rosenberger draws together some of the most important issues for religious citizens, namely government funding, free religious speech by private individuals, and equality,'' says Steven McFarland, an Episcopal lawyer who runs the Center for Law and Religious Freedom, a 20-year-old Christian-advocacy organization. But he has harsh words for some of the scare tactics used by some of the more militant Christian-law groups. "We don't need a Christian ACLU," he says. "The ACLU gets most of its results from bluster, saber rattling and intimidation. Any organization that claims to serve a God of truth should not be about any of that business." McFarland points out that he has been able to resolve many of his cases with a phone call or letter to a local attorney general or school board.

Moreover, the new Christian law, as taught at Regent University can fall far outside the mainstream. The heavily footnoted articles in the Regent University Law Review cite Scripture as well as legal precedent. And one of them, at least, crossed the line between legal and criminal opinion. In 1994 ACLJ lawyer Michael Hirsh, who was representing antiabortion activist Paul Hill in an abortion-protest case, submitted an article to the review that justified killing abortion doctors. The piece was approved and scheduled for publication--until the day Hill murdered two people outside a Pensacola, Florida, abortion clinic; then the article was yanked, and Hirsh was fired several months later. The uproar caught Regent Law School dean J. Nelson Happy by surprise: "If the student editors decided to publish this, I didn't feel it was appropriate to stop them. It didn't strike me as something inherently mischievous. Then I got a call from the New York Times."

"These religious-right legal groups have done a very effective job of convincing people there is a war against religion in this country when there is not," says Barry Lynn, a lawyer and clergyman who is executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "In most parts of this country, institutions like public schools are getting along fine with religious people. In Texas alone there are 500 Bible clubs meeting before and after school. If we saw children being arrested for praying-a phrase they always use-or denied the right to carry a Bible on the school bus, we'd see it in newspapers coast to coast. In actuality we see it only in fund-raising letters." And as long as the funds keep coming in, we will see these Christian soldiers in court.

--Reported by Richard N. Ostling/Charlottesville and Andrea Sachs/Virginia Beach