The religious right goes to court - conservative Christian legal groups - Watch on the Right

Pat Robertson plumbed new depths of hyperbole recently when he sent out a fundraising letter claiming that a wave of "religious cleansing" has hit born-again believers in their workplaces, outside abortion clinics, and even within their homes. According to Robertson, Bible fellowships may face the wrath of zoning laws not invoked toward other private gatherings.) Robertson's insulting and opportunistic linkage of his flock's plight with the carnage unfolding in the Balkan republics came on behalf of the American Center for Law and Justice, the legal arm of his mega-organization in Virginia Beach. Religious Cleansing in the American Republic is the title of a new booklet by ACLJ Executive Director Keith Fournier, who writes of a conspiracy by anti-religionist "new-regime advocates" to "remove any religious influence from the public arena." Fournier's booklet tells stories of politically active Christians subjected to name-calling by pro-choice and pro - gay rights counterprotestors. He then uses such incidents to draw ominous but farfetched parallels between secularists' "intolerance" and "hostility" toward Christians and the Nazis who brought Hitler to power.

Started just three years ago, the ACLJ is the loudest of the Christian-right legal firms prepared to take evangelicals' political battles to court. Specializing in high-profile, precedent-setting cases, the ACLJ has already scored several major victories: a Supreme Court ruling that an anti-discrimination law may not be used to sue abortion-clinic blockaders in federal court; another Supreme Court ruling that public schools must provide church groups with "equal access" to after-school campus facilities; and a Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling allowing student-led prayers at high-school graduations.

In what more satisfying venue could the ACLJ and its clients now find themselves prevailing than in the courtroom? It was the 1924 trial of John Scopes - the Tennessee school-teacher who had violated that state's ban on teaching Darwinism - that made a national laughing-stock of intellectually backward fundamentalists and left them seeming politically irrelevant for decades to follow. But with the mobilization of the Christian right in the 1970s and 1980s came a burgeoning need for a sophisticated legal operation, especially as the evangelicals' worldly activities seemed destined to land many of them in legal trouble of one sort or another.

Among the first of the Christian-right law firms - and much less visible than Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice - was the Rutherford Institute, founded in 1982 by attorney John Whitehead. For years, Rutherford was the pioneer of Christian legal firms, specializing in a gamut of First Amendment-related cases: everything from protection of workers against religious discrimination to anti-abortionists' right to picket, "parents' rights" to home schooling and disciplining their children, and "free-speech" rights for public-school teachers and students who expressed their religious views openly.

Rutherford takes on cases that would strengthen the public role of conservative Christians, sometimes on civil-liberties principles that defy typical left/night ideological categories. Months before the persecution of Chamula Indians in Chiapas, Mexico, made national headlines, for example, the Rutherford Institute petitioned the Mexican government to redress land seizures and other violations of indigenous Protestants' rights by the dominant Catholic church. More controversially, Rutherford currently represents the Reverend Eugene Lumpkin in a suit against the mayor of San Francisco. Lumpkin is the African-American minister and former human-rights commissioner who was fired from his post, not for negligence in his duties, but following a public brouhaha that occurred when he admitted his belief in the Old Testament's condemnations of homosexuality.

With a current annual budget of about $11 million, a mailing list of 150,000, and nine staff attorneys stationed in five regional branches, the Rutherford Institute claims it takes on about 80 percent of all "religious liberties" cases across the country. Several other firms pick up most of the slack.

The much smaller Christian Legal Society, founded in 1975, files friend-of-the-court briefs for individual Christian attorneys. Out of court, CLS mediates disputes between evangelical leaders and churches. The Home School Legal Defense Association, headed by Michael Farris (who in 1993 ran unsuccessfully for Virginia's lieutenant governorship), provides specialized counsel and channels for parents inquiring into state-based Christian home-schooling associations.

The Western Center for Law and Religious Freedom, with offices in Washington, Oregon, and California, takes on local cases similar to those handled by the Rutherford Institute. The Western Center distributes a handy one-page sheet, "Political Guidelines for Pastors and Churches," advising activist churches on how to operate within the boundaries of their IRS tax-exempt status. For example, "nonpartisan" voter-registration tables inside the church are fine, but overt electioneering and legislative lobbying may not constitute more than 5 percent of a church's activity. A church can circulate candidates' voting records so long as printed materials include neither endorsements nor editorial comment, and churches may rent but not donate their mailing lists to specific candidates.