As Monica Goodling emerged as a figure in the current scandals at the U.S. Department of Justice, people who really ought to know better, were shocked, shocked, to learn that 150 graduates of Pat Robertson's Regent University have worked in the Bush administration, notably Goodling.  

Now, as people consider the legacy of religious right leader Jerry Falwell, suddenly people are discovering that Falwell's Liberty University also has a law school, and by golly it is actually committed to teaching according to its world view. One prominent blogger found a recent article about this in The Chicago Tribune to be

about the scariest article I have read in awhile.  It begins with Jerry Falwell and his Liberty University dream of "training a new generation of lawyers, judges, educators, policymakers and world leaders in law from the perspective of an explicitly Christian worldview."

Suddenly a major newspaper notices that there are -- gasp -- a growing number of evangelical law schools!  It is not exactly news, and it probably would not have even been much remarked upon if Falwell had not upped and died. But the strongest thing that the blogger could say was that it was "scary."

I don't mean to pick on anyone, and that is why I am not linking to the post, since this post at least picked-up on the story and underscored its importance. My point is that somehow we need to get better at talking about the major institutions of the relgious right -- instead of reacting like we just saw Jaws for the first time.

The Tribune reported:

...not just at Liberty, with its evangelical Baptist heritage, but at a growing number of conservative Christian law schools, such as the Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor, Mich., which graduated its first class in 2003; the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, which graduated its first class in 2004; and Barry University School of Law in Orlando, founded in 1999--all Catholic schools. Televangelist Pat Robertson's 21-year-old evangelical Regent University School of Law in Virginia Beach, Va., was one of the first of this new wave of schools, while Liberty is the youngest. All of them are either fully or provisionally accredited by the American Bar Association.

We can also add to the list the evangelical, but far smaller, Trinity Law School, founded as Simon Greenleaf School of Law, now part of Trinity International University.

While the country was otherwise occupied, Liberty University became the largest evangelical university in the country. Its law school was established in 2004, has a provisional accreditation from the ABA, and graduated its first class this year. Former U.S. House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, who is considering a run for president, was the graduation speaker in the days after Falwell's death, making national news. Gingrich invoked Christian nationalist themes in his speech, claiming, among other things, there exists

A growing culture of radical secularism [which] declares that the nation cannot publicly profess the truths on which it was founded.

It is worth noting that Pat Robertson's Regent University now has 4,000 students. The law school was established in 1986 and boasts former Attorney General John Ashcroft on the faculty. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made national news by giving the commencement address. (Do we see a trend here?)

The institutions created by the religious right will outlive their founders and will continue to train and deploy  ideologues into public life,just as their founders intended.  Nevertheless, the study of the religious right movement and the institutions it has created is still a rather marginal field, our best efforts here at Talk to Action, and such longstanding organizations as Political Research Associates, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and Theocracy Watch not withstanding. It is long past time that major religious right institutions, and groups of institutions like law schools, be treated as "news" when they are actually news -- not years after they were founded and already influencing public life. Although periodic stories about the role and impact of such institutions, individually and collectively, would make good news sense too.

Finally, I want to note that what is really "scary" about The Chicago Tribune article, at least to me, is that so many in the news media, academia, as well as political and religious leaders are so far behind the actual news -- that we are learning that they have been operating all these years as if these institutions did not exist.