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

This new history of the Christian Right considers how conservative evangelicals in the modern American South forged a political identity.

Robert Daniel Rubin (Author)

9781107060555, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 March 2017

354 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.5 cm, 0.63 kg

'Judicial Review and American Conservatism tells a fascinating and timely story. In a wide-ranging and well-told tale about the battle between a parent and the Mobile, Alabama schools over prayer in the classroom, Robert Daniel Rubin insightfully chronicles the rise of legal conservatism in 1970s America.' Michael Grossberg, Indiana University

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.

Introduction. Conservatism and the Constitution
1. Massive resistance
2. The moral majority of Alabamians
3. Justice made political
4. Accommodation
5. Showdown
6. The trouble with secularism
7. Religion by any other name
Conclusion. The Constitution and the people.

Subject Areas: Law & society [LAQ], Political science & theory [JPA], Revolutions, uprisings, rebellions [HBTV], History of the Americas [HBJK]