At this year’s edition of Pray Vote Stand, the Christian right’s most influential political gathering, activists previewed their campaign to further cement Trump’s Christianization of the federal bench. The Center for Judicial Renewal, which is run by the political arm of the far-right American Family Association, presented a list of lawyers and judges who it says adhere to “Christian faith” and a “biblical worldview,” according to a report by Peter Montgomery at People For the American Way’s Right Wing Watch.
The list includes Kristen Waggoner, Supreme Court litigator and president of the Christian right legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom; current federal appellate judges James Ho, Kyle Duncan and Lawrence VanDyke; and current and former deans of the nation’s top evangelical law schools at Regent University and Liberty University. If Republicans regain the White House and the Senate in 2024, they will have additional opportunities to further one of Trump’s top achievements in the eyes of his loyal evangelical base: stacking the federal courts with Christian nationalist ideologues.
Trump’s openness to outside influence on his judicial nominees is well documented.
Even if the Supreme Court doesn’t have vacancies in the coming years, there will most certainly be lower court vacancies for which the nonjudges on the center’s list could be nominees, or at least models for other choices. Currently, there are 72 federal court vacancies, with only 31 nominees pending confirmation by the Senate.
Trump’s openness to outside influence on his judicial nominees is well documented. Federalist Society heavyweight and dark money enthusiast Leonard Leo notoriously gave his list of preferred judicial nominees directly to Trump, who then released it as his own to reassure skeptical Republicans. Leo’s interests, while also encompassing other issues, are identical to those of right-wing evangelical activists who work to mobilize the voters essential for Republicans to win elections. The end goal is the same: elevate religious rights of conservative Christians over the rights of others, eviscerate church-state separation, and restrict or eliminate abortion and LGBTQ rights. At the polls, the Christian right provides the electoral muscle to make the judicial takeover a possibility.
The impact of Supreme Court justices and lower court judges nominated by Trump and confirmed by the Republican Senate, led by now-Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, has been swift and severe. Most notably, the high court reversed Roe v. Wade, a goal Christian nationalist activists have sought for 50 years. It further undermined the separation of church and state, a long-standing project of the Christian right, spearheaded by the Alliance Defending Freedom. It ruled in favor of government funding of religious schools and coercive prayer in public schools. It expanded the rights of anti-LGBTQ Christians to evade compliance with laws protecting the rights of LGBTQ individuals.
According to a recent paper by legal scholars Stephen J. Choi, Mitu Gulati, and Eric A. Posner (no relation), who analyzed data regarding Trump judges’ religious affiliations and voting records on the bench, Trump-nominated judges have had a measurable impact on the judiciary. Compared to judges nominated by Democratic and even non-Trump Republican presidents, the Trump nominees have deeper affiliations with Christian organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom and have been more likely to rule for Christians in religious freedom cases and against litigants of minority religions.
Many on the Center for Judicial Renewal’s list have played a key role in shaping the legal landscape that has made these tectonic anti-democratic shifts in the law possible. Waggoner, president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, has successfully argued cases before the high court that have been critical to eroding LGBTQ rights in favor of those of conservative Christians who refuse to perform services for same-sex couples. Some of the sitting judges identified by the center have a past affiliation with the Alliance Defending Freedom, including VanDyke and Duncan.
And while working for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty (on whose board Leo serves), Duncan represented craft store chain Hobby Lobby before the Supreme Court in a landmark case granting the business a right to a religious exemption from federal regulations requiring employer-sponsored health insurance plans to cover contraception. When Trump nominated VanDyke to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2019, 25 LGBTQ rights groups opposed his confirmation based on his history of anti-LGBTQ statements and opposition to nondiscrimination laws protecting LGBTQ rights. But with Republicans controlling the Senate, he was of course confirmed. The Center for Judicial Renewal’s list of preferred judges demonstrates the Christian right leadership’s zeal to promote jurists who were once on the fringes of legal thought. James Ho, Duncan’s colleague on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, is alarming not only as a prospective Supreme Court justice, but also as a model jurist for the Christian right. A former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Ho has defended his former boss against a seemingly unending raft of ethics scandals. He also has called abortion “the immoral, tragic, and violent taking of innocent human life,” and has accused abortion-rights supporters of advocating eugenics. More recently, Ho, as a member of a three-judge panel that upheld restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone, wrote in a bizarre dissent that “Unborn babies are a source of profound joy for those who view them. Expectant parents eagerly share ultrasound photos with loved ones. Friends and family cheer at the sight of an unborn child. Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients — and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.” The Center for Judicial Renewal’s list of preferred judges demonstrates the Christian right leadership’s zeal to promote jurists who were once on the fringes of legal thought, but now represent the nerve center of the conservative legal movement. This is what is at stake regardless of whether Trump or someone else is the GOP nominee. Trump was the Christian right’s most revered champion of a Christian nationalist federal bench. It’s a legacy either he or his successor will aim to replicate to satisfy the GOP’s most electorally valuable base.
Sarah Posner
Sarah Posner is the author of "Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind." 
