The Christian Nationalist Group Mike Johnson Just Called “Home”

There is nothing subtle about the way power moves at this stage of the Trump regime. True, such displays may be clumsy or pathetic. They may simply fail. But however weak the administration may appear, there is still benefit to be had from proximity to the shit show, including for those who would prefer to seek control more quietly. That’s the case with Alliance Defending Freedom, the once-fringe legal group founded as the Christian right’s response to the ACLU, whose influence in Washington has been on unusually prominent display. Over the past week or so, Senator Ted Cruz quizzed the nominee for attorney general about the Victorian obscenity laws Alliance Defending Freedom thinks are enforceable. Aggressively advancing ADF’s mission to ban medication abortion, Senator Josh Hawley demanded a criminal investigation into an abortion access group. And the speaker of the house, Mike Johnson, gave a speech at the group’s annual summit in San Diego, crediting it for shaping how he does his job to this day.

The close bond between Washington and Alliance Defending Freedom was on full display in that speech. At the summit, themed to coincide with “America at 250” celebrations, Johnson was introduced as one of the faithful. “Before he ran for Congress, Speaker Johnson was one of us,” the host said. “ADF really is like home for us,” Johnson told attendees. “You’re like family.” It’s a “family” that Johnson first served more than 20 years ago. He was hired by ADF in 2002, and soon opened the group’s North Louisiana office. “ADF’s been so formative to us,” said Johnson, speaking of himself and his wife. “So much of what we do, we learned on the front lines of the culture war—keeping the door open for the spread of the gospel—and it informs still how we do our job today.” In his remarks, Johnson left out a key part of the group’s mission statement, one that seems to have been excised since he worked there: “to keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel by transforming the legal system.”

Back when Johnson first worked for Alliance Defending Freedom, as a young Christian lawyer, the group had a much lower profile. Unless you followed the Christian right closely, you were unlikely to have heard of it. Today, however, the group wields considerable influence over the law, and considerable power over the lives of nearly anyone who is not a straight, white, cisgender man in the United States. The Supreme Court docket over the last two decades can feel like ADF’s greatest-hits list: Hobby Lobby (which threatened contraception coverage), Masterpiece Cakeshop (which undermined anti-gay discrimination law), Dobbs (which allowed states to ban abortion), and Skrmetti (which allowed states to ban gender-affirming care for youth).

On its surface, ADF can sometimes resemble the reverse image of any number of progressive law projects focused on strategic litigation, but for the purpose of elevating cases on “the front lines of the culture war,” as Johnson put it. ADF is in near lockstep with the Trump administration in its efforts to end reproductive freedom, bodily autonomy, and gender justice. But ADF’s work goes further than what gets shorthanded and often diminished as “culture-war” issues: More than merely taking up Christian right political fights in the nation’s courts, it is engaged in a sweeping project to recast America as a Christian nation ruled by Christians.

Days after Johnson’s speech at the ADF summit, Senator Josh Hawley appealed to the Department of Justice, essentially on the group’s behalf. In a letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, released by Hawley on July 20, the senator wrote that he wanted the “entity called Plan C” investigated for a host of alleged crimes, all of which boil down to providing people with information about medication abortion and where to access pills. (Plan C is an informational resource for people seeking to self-manage abortion with pills.) Hawley’s claims are weak and not all that original: They expand on legal arguments made in a number of Alliance Defending Freedom cases, including one at the Supreme Court that was argued by Erin Hawley, the senator’s wife. (That case would have forced the FDA to reverse its guidance on mifepristone, substantially blocking access to medication abortion; ADF lost that one, and is now attempting to revive it.) Hawley has joined ADF’s broader anti–medication abortion campaign, searching for an avenue to marshal the law against people who send and receive pills through the mail; going after Plan C is just the latest avenue. In fact, Hawley is working on multiple ways to end mifepristone access. One plan is simply to have the Justice Department settle the suit because now the FDA could just do what the suit would force it to do.

In Hawley, ADF has an ally willing to prod the Justice Department in its direction, as well as an opportunity to direct DOJ from the top. The senator has pushed acting Attorney General Blanche to investigate Plan C at a moment when Blanche needs Hawley’s vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee to be confirmed as attorney general, making this Plan C “investigation” request, as Susan Rinkunas at independent news outlet Autonomy News writes, “nothing short of a shakedown.” Should Blanche be confirmed, it would be a victory not only for him but for ADF, as well, particularly if he takes up the group’s dubious legal argument that it’s already illegal to mail abortion pills.

While Hawley appears focused on one particular abortion information group, another senator on the committee is using the confirmation hearings to elevate ADF’s broader legal argument against medication abortion. It was Senator Ted Cruz who brought this argument before Blanche around the time of Hawley’s demand. At a July 15 hearing, Cruz wanted to know if Blanche would toss out an opinion issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2022, affirming that the law “does not prohibit the mailing of certain drugs that can be used to perform abortions where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully.” The law in question is the Comstock Act, which until recently was regarded as a Victorian artifact but has enjoyed a resurgence thanks to Alliance Defending Freedom.

ADF may have been able to get the Supreme Court to side with it on Dobbs, but the court has yet to bless its efforts to ban abortion pills. To fully block medication abortion access, the group is turning to an act of Congress so old it was signed into law by Ulysses S. Grant. It’s a wild reach, but not one fully unanticipated by the act’s namesake, Anthony Comstock, a Christian crusader who saw sex as a mortal threat to the United States and harnessed the power of the postal service to ban the circulation of “obscene” items, including information about or depicting sex, as well as any items that could be used for contraception or to have an abortion. Comstock has modern acolytes outside ADF, but so far, the group is the only one to get two Supreme Court justices on the record considering the application of Comstock in a modern American context. Comstock would not necessarily feel out of place in the twenty-first century, thanks to such pioneering legal minds. Whatever happens at the court, if, at Blanche’s direction, the Justice Department suddenly concludes that Comstock is still good law and federal prosecutors begin bringing Comstock cases over mailing abortion pills, ADF may have willed its national abortion ban into practice. Blanche has already said in hearings that he would review the existing Comstock opinion.

It’s chilling when ADF legal theories get a hearing in Congress or at the Supreme Court. It isn’t just an anti-LGBTQ group or an anti-abortion group, fighting with and through the law on behalf of aggrieved Christians. As the Idaho Statesman headlined an opinion piece on ADF, when it was representing the state in anti-abortion and anti-trans cases, “Alliance Defending Freedom isn’t representing you, but Christian Nationalism broadly.” Is ADF doing for the federal government what it did for Idaho? At the ADF summit this month, Speaker Johnson made clear how close to “home” ADF really was for his family. His daughter, he said, had been part of the group’s legal training program, the Blackstone Legal Fellowship. “Now she’s one of the lawyers for the Oversight Committee in Congress,” the speaker said. “So, pray for her.” That’s not unusual; Blackstone was apparently founded to win ADF influence in government by placing its fellows in useful positions. Today, former Blackstone fellow Amy Coney Barrett sits on the Supreme Court.

All this is quite an accomplishment for a group that has built Supreme Court cases out of imagined grievances and may have gotten the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the Southern Poverty Law Center, which investigated ADF and labeled it a hate group. Unlike in Idaho, ADF may not be offering its legal services to the government. The government doesn’t need it to—not when it’s already acting like ADF is a department of the government. ...