This nostalgic reimagining of the past accomplished two strategic goals for the Christian right in the late 1970s and 1980s. First, by providing examples of past Christians who participated in worldly politics, it activated conservative Christians to vote and campaign at a grass-roots level. Their support proved crucial in the election and reelection of former president Ronald Reagan, and they became a key constituency of the Republican Party from that point forward.
Second, an important legal argument was embedded in this version of American history: the idea that Christianity and the American government were thoroughly entangled in the past, and that the courts had erred in attempting to fully separate church and state in the mid-20th century.
That legal argument, however, hinged on the notion that anyone could interpret the past, just as Protestants believed that anyone could interpret the Bible. Christian heritage proponents saw no need for specialized training or professional expertise, in part because they took the written records of the past at face value with little interrogation of context or the potential that narrators might be unreliable.
As the Christian legal movement emerged in the 1980s, its lawyers relied on this approach to history to gradually undo what they saw as the damage of the Supreme Court’s efforts to decenter Christianity in American law and policy. They tended to include long lists of quotes about Christianity from the Founders to support their arguments — typically failing to provide context for these quotes and ignoring the possibility that other contemporary Americans might have disagreed.
Over time, conservative Christian lawyers persuaded the court that if the Founders engaged in public displays of religion and directed government money to religious organizations, today’s government could do the same in any number of ways. States could display the Ten Commandments on state property, religious leaders could offer prayer at city council meetings, and government money could resurface a church playground or pay tuition to a private religious school. Who could argue against the precedent of history and traditions?
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and New York State Pistol and Rifle Association v. Bruen, Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, respectively, replicated the Christian heritage story, both in content and in method of inquiry. Like Christian heritage proponents, they located America’s moral standards in the past, primarily in the founding era. Any innovations since then are not progress but a sign of decline. And the simplistic past they described makes no room for contradictory sources, marginalized voices from that time period or errors that Americans should not want to replicate.