Christian Conservatives Go to Court:Religion and Legal Mobilization in the united States and Canada
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512104038165 |
| Published date | 01 January 2004 |
| Date | 01 January 2004 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Christian Conservatives Go to Court:
Religion and Legal Mobilization in the
United States and Canada
DENNIS R. HOOVER AND KEVIN R. DEN DULK
ABSTRACT. The American exceptionalism thesis holds that American
political culture produces an unusually litigious society. The US Christian
right has participated in litigation, especially in constitutional rights cases
dealing with issues such as religious schools and abortion. However, since
1982 Canada has had a constitutional Charter of Rights and an increas-
ingly active Christian right of its own. We compare data on Christian
right involvement in education, abortion, and “right to die” (euthanasia,
assisted suicide or mercy killing) cases at the Supreme Court level in
both countries. Among North America’s Christian conservatives, excep-
tionalism has eroded, but not disappeared. We employ interviews and
data on religious interest groups to analyze the sources of legal
mobilization, and find that it is a matter not just of political culture, but
also resource mobilization, political opportunity structures, and religious
worldviews.
Keywords:• American exceptionalism • Christian right • Legal
mobilization
In the USA, advocacy groups that speak for socially conservative Christians have
been pressing claims in the public square for more than two decades, re-
establishing themselves as important players in interest group pluralism. The most
prominent component of this mobilization is the Christian right (Bruce, 1988;
Smidt and Penning, 1997; Wald, 1997; Wilcox, 2000), a network of partially
overlapping associations, interest groups, and social movement organizations.
While it is composed largely of evangelical Protestants, like-minded Roman
Catholics have been active on a number of issues of common concern to their
evangelical brethren (see Welch and Leege, 1991). These developments have lent
support to theories of religious polarization and “culture wars” in US society and
International Political Science Review (2004), Vol 25, No. 1, 9–34
DOI: 10.1177/0192512104038165 © 2004 International Political Science Association
SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
politics (Hunter, 1991), where new cleavages pit religious and moral conservatives
against their liberal counterparts in ways that cut across traditional denomina-
tional divisions. To be sure, important political issues (for example, welfare policy)
continue to divide Roman Catholics (who tend to be more liberal) from
evangelical Protestants (Bendyna et al., 2001) and to limit prospects for any
wholesale “orthodox alliance” in politics (Barnes, 1995). Still, these religious
traditions increasingly recognize each other as allies in certain aspects of the social
conservative agenda, such as opposition to abortion and support for private
Christian schools. Likewise, they recognize some common threats such as,
principally, moral relativism and secularization (Colson and Neuhaus, 1995).
Christian conservatives view these threatening forces as having many elite allies
in public institutions and have therefore engaged these institutions with public
activism. Among these institutions are the federal courts in general and the
Supreme Court in particular. Indeed, the early waves of Christian right
mobilization were in part provoked by Supreme Court decisions regarding consti-
tutional rights (school prayer, abortion, and so on) that are anathema to many
theologically orthodox and socially conservative believers. It is perhaps unsurpris-
ing, therefore, that recent scholarship documents a dramatic increase in the level
of legal activism by conservative Christian organizations in the USA (Brown, 2002;
Den Dulk and Krishnan, 2001; Ivers, 1998).
These organizations have molded their activism to a classically American
pattern, one focused on the politics of rights. In contrast to most parliamentary
systems, in which courts do not have the power to declare constitutional rights and
invalidate legislation, the American courts are an important site for group politics
of all kinds. This development might be seen as simultaneously lending support
to two aspects of the “American exceptionalism” thesis (Lipset, 1996): that
American political culture is exceptionally litigious and exceptionally religious.
According to most versions of American exceptionalism, the USA has defied
expectations of secularization theory, maintaining from initial settlement to
the present day uniquely vibrant, organizationally resourceful, and politically
active Christian traditions. At the same time, American national identity and
values have always been individualistic and grounded in constitutional rights,
such that political litigation related to rights has been profoundly important to the
political development of the nation. On this view, the phenomenon of Christian
conservatives in court is simply the confluence of two peculiarly American
tendencies.
However intuitively appealing this argument may be, apart from careful cross-
national analysis, it should be regarded not as conventional wisdom, but as a
hypothesis to be tested. Is the choice to engage in legal activism a self-evident one
for Christian conservatives? Are the factors that condition this choice unique to
the USA? We investigate these questions via a comparative analysis of conservative
Christian legal activism in the USA and Canada. Canada is an appropriate case for
this cross-national inquiry, in part because its evangelical Christian community
experienced a social and political revitalization in the 1980s (Stackhouse, 1993,
2000), a resurgence that in some respects echoed developments in American
evangelicalism a decade earlier. More importantly, as part of its constitutional
repatriation in 1982, Canada adopted a constitutional bill of rights, the Charter of
Rights and Freedoms. With the advent of the charter, the institutional opportunity
structure for legal mobilization in Canada took a significant step toward the
American model. In this article, we ask: are exceptional cultural or organizational
10 International Political Science Review 25(1)
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