Christian nationalist leaders want to force Americans to live in accordance with their religious and political beliefs, and they have a plan to make it happen. They are demanding that future Republican presidents and senators consider only potential Supreme Court justices who meet the American Family Association’s “biblical worldview” standard.
Yes, it is that brazen. Religious-right leaders who have endorsed the project want to impose a de facto religious test on the Supreme Court, a violation of constitutional principles and the American values of religious freedom and pluralism.
Right Wing Watch broke the story about this Supreme Court scheme last year after Phillip Jauregui presented it during a breakout session at the Family Research Council’s 2023 Pray Vote Stand conference. Jauregui, a longtime activist in support of right-wing judges, now runs the Center for Judicial Renewal as a project of AFA Action, the American Family Association’s political advocacy arm.
At this year’s Pray Vote Stand conference on Saturday, Jauregui presented the Supreme Court plan from the main stage, with a giant screen showing the name of other religious-right leaders that have endorsed it, including FRC President Tony Perkins, former Rep. Michele Bachmann, First Liberty’s Kelly Shackelford, and relentless purveyor of false Christian nationalist history David Barton.
When it comes to the Supreme Court, it’s not good enough to get conservative justices, said Jauregui, they have to be “great.” So the Center for Judicial Renewal has spent “thousands of hours” evaluating people whose names have been floated as possible future justices. The first criteria Jauregui uses to evaluate a possible nominee’s potential for greatness as a “constitutionalist” justice is their “biblical worldview.”
Otherwise conservative judges who don’t meet AFA’s “worldview” are put on Jauregui’s “red list” of unacceptables. Jauregui suggested that he is publicizing AFA’s “red list” to try to keep Donald Trump from including any of the four judges on the list of potential Supreme Court nominees Trump has said he will release before the election.
Among the things that have landed conservative judges on that list are using a transgender person’s preferred pronouns. The dossier on Judge Neomi Rao characterizes her “faith and worldview” as problematic, noting that she was “raised in an immigrant family of Zoroastrian tradition and converted to Judaism when she got married.”
Jauregui explains on CJR’s website, “In my own experience of evaluating hundreds of judicial nominees and then observing their performance on the bench, I conclude that the greatest predicter of their faithful and constitutional performance on the bench is their ‘worldview’ or ‘Christian faith.’”
To be clear, this is not just a demand for only conservative Christian justices. It goes even further. “Worldview” is a hot topic on the religious right, and was the focus of its own breakout at Pray Vote Stand. The Family Research Council’s Center for Biblical Worldview, which employs evangelical pollster George Barna, makes it clear that a tiny fraction of Christians—even a small minority of church-going evangelicals—meet their exacting standards for having a “biblical worldview.” In a booklet distributed at Pray Vote Stand, FRC’s David Closson cites Barna’s conclusion that only four percent of Americans have a biblical worldview—and so do only 21 percent of those who regularly attend evangelical churches.
In June, AFA Action asked supporters for money to expand the project to include lower federal court judges, but at Pray Vote Stand, Jauregui kept the focus on the Supreme Court. Jauregui noted that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are the oldest sitting justices, which he said makes his team’s work even more important. “God’s done work at the court, and it’s not time to lose that ground.”
AFA’s list of acceptable potential justices includes three right-wing appeals court judges, along with Kristen Waggoner, president of the religious-right legal giant Alliance Defending Freedom, and Mark Martin, former dean of the law school at Pat Robertson’s Regent University and now dean of the law school at High Point University. Right Wing Watch has previously noted that one of those AFA-approved Judges, Fifth Circuit MAGA Judge James Ho, “has become notorious as a virtual parody of a right-wing activist, whose extreme opinions read like far-right ideological diatribes.”
Back in 2018, before Jauregui and his Judicial Action Group teamed up with AFA Action, Jauregui was convinced that God had anointed Amy Coney Barrett to be the next Supreme Court justice—so convinced, in fact, that when Trump chose Brett Kavanaugh instead, Jauregui denounced Kavanaugh as a “usurper.” On a call sponsored by the pro-Trump prayer warriors at Intercessors for American, Jauregui prayed, “That is the Father’s seat. It’s His court. It’s His place. He’s taking it back. It’s Your seat, Father.”