Religious Schools Train Lawyers for Culture Wars

National Public Radio ^ | 5/06/05 | Barbara Bradley Haggarty

[Republicanprofessor]

In the past few years, religious conservatives have realized what their liberal counterparts saw long ago: The place where the culture wars are won or lost is in the courtroom. Some religious leaders, including Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, have set up schools to train their own battalion of lawyers.

Regent University School of Law: Founded by televangelist Pat Robertson, Regent University School of Law was established in 1986 as a full-time, three-year law program. It gained full accreditation from the American Bar Association (ABA) in 1996 -- the first religiously conservative law school to do so. Today, 500 students attend the school. Students come from 44 states, over 413 colleges and universities and numerous foreign countries.

"The number one distinction in our school is teaching from a religious perspective; faith impacts what we do in the classrooms." -- Dean Jeff Brauch

[Republicanprofessor]

NPR is examining Christian influence in the culture and in the "culture wars" in a series this week. This story was interesting. My response is "hurray." It's always fun to listen to NPR to detect their bias and how they communicate it. There are also stories here that I don't hear elsewhere.

[2banana]

Just wait until religiously conservative lawyers link up with religiously conservative judges...

[Mulch]

I'm heartened to see the religious conservatives finally actively engaging the opponent in the culture war after years of just playing defense. The liberals see the writing on the wall that they don't have much time left to push through their agenda and have now stepped up their attacks on our traditional values.

[gregwest]

Listening to NPR is like monitoring one's adversary in a war. You find out their intentions, capabilities and weaknesses to exploit.

The greatest weakness of the left is their closed-mindedness. A rational conservative can lay aside his own point-of-view briefly and examine other philosophies with the intent of seeking truth. He keeps what is good and discards error.

When you listen to NPR, you come to find out that the individuals on the other side are so fearful of being politically-incorrect, they don't permit themselves to look for truth. They are obliged to always follow the party line, no matter how blatantly erroneous it becomes. That's the whole Stalinist mentality.

Intelligent people on the left are in the unfortunate position of having to defend the indefensible, simply because they're scared to death of being "eaten" by their own kind. They'll "go to hell in a handbasket," but they'll never mention that it's getting warmer on the way down.

GW

[IronJack]

Hillsdale College in Michigan has been educating conservatives for decades. It is not a law school, but one of the finest ENTIRELY PRIVATE (no public "strings-attached" money) universities in the country.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

The horror...