The following excerpt comes from investigative reporter Katherine Stewart’s newest book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. The book explores how some Christians, many with tremendous wealth and power, have worked to make America a Christian nation.

This excerpt comes from the book’s tenth chapter, “Theocracy from the Bench, or How to Establish Religion in the Name of ‘Religious Liberty.’”

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Winter Garden seems a very unlikely place to have a religious war. A charming, family-friendly enclave just west of Orlando, the town has a population of 40,000 and is about 60 percent white, 25 percent of Latino origin and, as far as the eye can tell, moderately diverse in its religious and political perspectives. If you want to get certain things done through the city government, on the other hand, the peaceful appearance of religious pluralism dissipates quickly. Tim Grosshans and Joseph Richardson, two longtime residents with very different belief systems, know this aspect of life in Winter Garden very well.

Tim Grosshans, the senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Winter Garden, is a stout grandfather with a ready smile and a ruff of white hair encircling his bald pate. Notwithstanding his avuncular demeanor, Grosshans knows how to have a good time with the flashy and powerful. When Senator Marco Rubio, whose outreach director is a “personal friend,” invited Grosshans to President Trump’s State of the Union address, Grosshans apparently relished the opportunity to rub shoulders with local VIPs, including then reigning Miss America Cara Mund. “She was real chatty [and] having the time of her life,” Grosshans told a local newspaper. He also issued a favorable opinion on the physical attributes of the first lady: “She’s as good looking in person as she is on television.”

Joseph Richardson belongs to that group of Winter Garden residents who are unlikely to be found in churches like that of Pastor Grosshans. A software engineer in his mid-fifties, he identifies himself as a “freethinker” and is an active member of the Central Florida Freethought Community. A slim, pensive man, he left behind a childhood in the Assemblies of God church, a deeply conservative Pentecostal denomination; became an Episcopalian in college; and eventually made his departure from Christianity at forty-nine. His journey was prompted by his concerns about, among other things, the treatment of LGBT Americans. “The ‘love the sinner hate the sin’ language in the church never translated into action that made sense to me,” he says.

For several years Winter Garden has had a policy of opening certain official city meetings with an invocation or prayer. In the four years up through early 2019, the city opened eighty-four public meetings this way. One invocation came from a Jewish rabbi and one came from a Catholic priest. A third meeting commenced with a moment of silence, and in 2015, before the city adopted a restriction that invocators must represent a 501(c) (3) organization, a man who identifies as nonreligious was selected by the city commissioner to deliver an invocation that contained no reference to religion. The other eighty invocations were delivered by representatives of Protestant churches or religious groups, or by individuals or civic leaders delivering sectarian prayers.

Rev. Grosshans and Senator Rubio

Pastor Tim Grosshans alone accounted for three invocations, and other staff or members of his church contributed an additional five. Members of the First Baptist squad, like many of the other Protestant groups, seem proud of the explicitly sectarian character of their invocations. “It is in Jesus Christ’s name that we pray for our leadership. Amen,” said Jarian Felton, First Baptist Church’s director of worship.

Joseph Richardson first initiated a request for the opportunity to offer an invocation on May 9, 2014, four days after the Supreme Court issued its 5–4 decision in Town of Greece v. Galloway. The conservative majority in that case suggested that efforts to ban sectarian invocations at the start of official town meetings amounted to a violation of religious liberty, whereas such invocations posed no danger of establishing religion. Richardson’s experience over the subsequent four years could make a mockery of the Court’s reasoning. Indeed, it would be one of countless instances illustrating how Christian nationalists have gamed the American judicial system to advance an agenda of “religious liberty” that in reality serves to establish a very clear set of privileges for one variety of religion.

“I know they are sitting up there on that dais saying that what they’ve done is fair and equitable,” says Richardson. “But it’s obviously not. The spirit of the Greece v. Galloway decision was equal treatment. But the fact that the Supreme Court put their stamp of approval on sectarian invocation has made it so that legislators think they can insert their religious views into meetings and exclude the viewpoints of others who disagree with them.”

Religious activists outside the Supreme Court awaiting the Greece v. Galloway decision

Sectarian invocations before public meetings, like crosses placed on public lands, may appear to play a merely symbolic role in our governance and are therefore easily to dismiss. But they point to the broader privileging of conservative Christianity in America, including its superior access to sources of public money and the perversion of our most deeply held constitutional principles. They are part of the larger project to use the court system to “restore” a version of America that never was.

Not long after the election of Bill Clinton, Leonard Leo realized that the Christian right had little hope of winning the culture war at the ballot box. A Catholic ultraconservative, Leo was sure that the public, seduced by the shallow values of a liberalizing culture, would never voluntarily submit to the moral medicine needed to save the nation. The last best chance to rescue civilization, he concluded, was to take over the courts. If activists could funnel just enough true believers onto the bench, especially onto the Supreme Court, they just might be able to reverse the moral tide.

“He figured out twenty years ago that conservatives had lost the culture war,” said Leo’s former media relations director, Tom Carter. “Abortion, gay rights, contraception—conservatives didn’t have a chance if public opinion prevailed. So they needed to stack the courts.”

Leo founded a student chapter of the Federalist Society while studying law at Cornell. In 1991 he went to work for the organization’s national office in Washington, D.C. He set about building the conservative legal movement, forging alliances with prospective jurists and Republican leaders. The Federalist Society, which received some early funding from right-wing donors including the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Foundation, and the free-market think tank Institute for Economic Affairs, became a kind of career center for the conservative young ideologues of the legal world. Undistinguished academic records might be forgiven provided an unwavering commitment to the cause could be verified. The best of the young talent was meticulously groomed through a program of rotating internships, clerkships, and interim appointments to the welcoming offices of plutocrat-funded think tanks and legal advocacy groups—“the carefully manicured terrarium of the conservative legal community,” as the journalist Charles P. Pierce has described it. “Federalist Society member? Check. Clerkships for conservative Supreme Court Justices? Check . . . Wingnut culture-war bona fides? Check.”

When George W. Bush was elected president, Leo began working as an outside advisor. According to a 2003 email by a White House aide that was sent to, among others, Brett Kavanaugh, Leo was characterized as a point person for “all outside coalition activity regarding judicial nominations.” He became known as a moneyman who could be relied upon to drum up funding for promotional activities on behalf of judicial appointees, providing media training for key pundits or creating grassroots support through advertising campaigns and other means. He also joined the boards of various right-wing and conservative religious organizations, including the Catholic Association Foundation, which funded campaigns to oppose same-sex marriage, and Reclaim New York, whose directors included then Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon and his billionaire backer Rebekah Mercer.

The Mercer family became major Federalist Society backers, too, donating nearly $6 million over a span of several years, according to the Washington Post. But even these munificent gifts were dwarfed by other contributions, often from unknown donors. Leo has advised or helped run over two dozen nonprofits, including the Freedom and Opportunity Fund, the BH Fund, and America Engaged. In 2016 and 2017 those three nonprofits, all of which named Leo as president in their tax filings, took in approximately $33 million. Some of the money was spent on the lobbying arm of the National Rifle Association and groups in the Koch orbit, including FreedomWorks and the Center for Individual Freedom.

One of Leo’s guiding principles was a commitment to end abortion. The conservative legal activist Ed Whelan wrote, “No one has been more dedicated to the enterprise of building a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade than the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo.” At a 2017 presentation at the Acton Institute outlining the Federalist Society’s strategy to remake the federal judiciary, Leo said, “I would love to see the courts unrecognizable.” Trump, he commented, is “the change we’ve been waiting for.”

In addition to advising Trump on his judicial picks, Leo and his allies have raised hundreds of millions of dollars—over $250 million between 2014 and 2017 alone, according to the Washington Post—in part to promote conservative policies, provide funding for right-wing TV pundits, and coordinate and finance campaigns for their judicial picks, including Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.

Leo’s work builds on that of other great minds of the Christian right’s legal juggernaut. In 1994, the Alliance Defense Fund (now Alliance Defending Freedom) was launched with the support of some of the heaviest hitters of the new Christian Right, including D. James Kennedy, founder of Coral Ridge Ministries; James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ International (now Cru); Larry Burkett, president of Christian Financial Concepts; Donald Wildmon, president of the American Family Association; and radio host Marlin Maddoux. The group secures its backing from financial heavy-weights of the movement—among them the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, the Bill and Berniece Grewcock Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, and the Bolthouse Foundation. They also receive substantial funding from the National Christian Foundation, a “donor-advised fund” that reportedly raised over $1.5 billion in 2017.

Protest sponsored by the Alliance Defending Freedom

Today, with an annual revenue of over $50 million, the Alliance Defending Freedom is a mainstay of the movement’s plans for dismantling the wall of separation between church and state. The ADF is a key actor behind nearly every major case in the United States that is attempting to expand special privileges for conservative Christians. Its trophies include: Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission; Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.; Zubik v. Burwell; Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission; Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer; and, of course, Good News Club v. Milford Central School.

Katherine Stewart is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic. She is also the author of The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children.

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Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 7 of the Revealer podcast: “Christian Nationalism and the 2020 Election,” featuring a fascinating interview with Katherine Stewart.