John W. Whitehead, the evangelical lawyer who founded the Rutherford Institute in 1982, now believes the Christian legal movement he helped build has “gone astray,” telling The Washington Post in a feature published last week that the cause has “become dangerously politicized and intertwined with right-wing politics” and has “wrongly elevated the rights of conservative Christians over those of religious minorities.”
His complaint, as The Federalist frames it, amounts to a leader lamenting that his movement is doing too much winning.
From Bible-reading cases to Trump’s White House
Whitehead’s early work looked very different. A University of Arkansas School of Law graduate, he wrote a 1982 book arguing the United States “should be an explicitly Christian nation.” Through the Rutherford Institute, he took on cases defending Christian children barred from reading their Bibles at school or on the bus, or from praying. In the 1980s, he defended Georgia’s anti-sodomy law and warned about the dangers he saw in the LGBT movement.
Three decades later, Whitehead’s view of the same cause has shifted sharply. “We started out trying to protect the little people,” he told the Post. Christian legal leaders are now, in his words, “sitting in the White House with Trump. They’re now part of the nationalist movement. Religious liberty is a constitutional principle, not a political program.”
His break with the movement began in the 1990s, according to the Post, when he opposed a Colorado constitutional amendment that “barred communities from passing laws to prohibit discrimination against gay and transgender people.” Since then he has advocated for illegal aliens deported by the Trump administration and for universities that lost funding over their promotion of DEI.
“If the government is acting as a Christian nationalist organization as opposed to one representing the Constitution and all Americans, there is a problem,” Whitehead said. He warned that when religious freedom organizations “begin aligning themselves with those in power, or framing their work in partisan or ideological terms, they risk weakening the very principle they are trying to defend.”
Scholars back Whitehead — though the Post leaves out their records
Some academics share Whitehead’s concerns. Religious freedom scholar Douglas Laycock told the Post, “It’s become a partisan issue. Religious liberty is for everyone. Making it partisan is not good.” The Federalist notes that Laycock once submitted a brief supporting same-sex unions in Obergefell v. Hodges, has bragged about protesting a Christmas event at his high school, and said of his career, “I could just as well have been a gay-rights lawyer as a religious liberty lawyer.”
Political scientist Daniel Bennett criticized Christian legal firms for promoting “outright hostile advocacy against non-Christians,” pointing to Muslims as purported victims. Religious liberty scholar Marci Hamilton said the movement had become “extreme.”
The Federalist’s counterargument: religious liberty is a Christian inheritance
The Federalist’s response is that Whitehead and his allies misunderstand where religious liberty came from. The concept, the outlet argues, rests on a Western and specifically Christian worldview — traceable to the third-century apologist Tertullian, who wrote that “it is only just and a privilege inherent in human nature that every person should be able to worship according to his own convictions,” and who warned the Romans not to foster irreligion “by taking away freedom of religion.”
That idea, the piece continues, was carried forward by figures including Gregory the Great and Thomas Aquinas, and later by Virginia founders George Mason, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. The late historian Robert Louis Wilken, in his book Liberty in the Things of God, noted that Jefferson kept a copy of Tertullian’s works and cited them in marginalia. For the founders, The Federalist argues, religious liberty shielded traditions they knew and saw as morally beneficial — chiefly Christian denominations, along with Judaism, as reflected in George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island.
Outside the West, the outlet contends, support for religious liberty has been thin. It points to apostasy laws in 21 Muslim-majority countries and argues that non-Christian nations offering some legal protection for the faith — Japan, India and Thailand among them — largely do so because of Western influence. Where Christianity remains small and culturally weak, it suggests, the faith is tolerated mainly because it can be marginalized or controlled.
The Federalist argues the real change is not the movement’s corruption but the stakes. When Whitehead started the Rutherford Institute in 1982, roughly 85 percent of Americans identified as Christian and the culture was demonstrably Christian. Today, fewer than two-thirds self-identify as Christian, while non-Christian immigrant communities have grown — a combination the outlet calls an existential threat to American Christians.
The piece credits the movement with concrete wins: without it, it argues, Roe v. Wade would not have been overturned, pregnancy resource centers would be targeted or shut down, and parents would have far less recourse against LGBT ideology being presented to their children in public schools. It compares the cause to the pro-life movement’s calculus — if the work results in one less abortion, or dissuades even one child from what the outlet calls life-altering self-immolation, the effort is worth it.
Whitehead’s criticisms, The Federalist concludes, say less about any alleged hypocrisy inside the Christian legal movement than about his own naivete and a long-running need to play the contrarian spoiler.
Source: thefederalist.com — https://thefederalist.com/2026/09/22/architect-of-christian-legal-movement-complains-its-now-doing-too-much-winning/