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Yesterday's Justice Sunday event had a potential audience of 61 million households in 44 states, and has been called "a watershed moment in an increasingly emotional conflict that is as much about the mixing of God and government as it is about who can serve on the federal bench."

The event, broadcasted from 6,000-member Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, featured Senator Bill Frist, James Dobson, Charles Colson, Al Mohler, and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, which organized the event.

The simulcast was shown in hundreds of churches, and it encouraged listeners to contact U.S. senators in order to stop filibusters aimed at blocking votes against President Bush's judicial nominees. "Tell [senators] to do what's right. Tell them to do what's fair. Tell them to do their job, give judicial nominees the up-or-down votes they deserve,'' Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said in a prerecorded address, according to The New York Times.

It's not "radical," Frist said, to vote on judicial nominees, responding to an accusation from minority leader Harry Reid.

"Only in the United States Senate could it be considered a devastating option to allow a vote. Most places call that democracy," Frist said, according to David D. Kirkpatrick, in one of the best of many stories on the event.

Of course, opponents say (as they did during the 2004 Presidential campaign) that it is a wrongful mixing of religion and politics to use churches to host such events while organizers accuse Democrats' tactics of being "against people of faith."

Frist "seems to be going out of his way to pander to the radical religious right leaders," said Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee sent a petition to Frist with 20,000 signatures asking him "to abandon such dishonest and irresponsible tactics that politicize faith, abuse power and drown out the voice of ordinary Americans."

Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat, said, " Frist's words today were less important than his giving the imprimatur to this conference, which clearly argues that people of one viewpoint have God on their side and all others are faithless."

Critics have a point. Democrats who support the filibuster to block conservative judicial nominations are not against all people of faith. Cue Jim Wallis: "When they say that people who disagree with their views and their strategy are not people of faith, they've crossed a line," Wallis said about conservative activists. "When they use faith as a weapon, as a wedge, it feels like instigation of a religious war. And the creation of a Republican theocracy."

Of course, here Wallis has crossed a line. Using freedom of speech to urge voters to contact their senators and let them know how they feel is far from a theocracy. No one is calling for the replacement of the Constitution with Leviticus.

In the hub-bub over judicial nominations, news reports have overlooked conservative Christians' main complaint: that a judge's conservative religious beliefs should not make her "outside the judicial mainstream" and disqualify her from the bench.

That is why the FRC Justice Sunday flier shows a man holding a gavel in one hand and the Bible in the other and says "he should not have to chose" between faith in Christ and public service. Should disagreeing with abortion on demand automatically disqualify a judge from the Supreme Court? Such disqualification is similar to those who say anyone opposed to the morning-after pill shouldn't become a pharmacist.

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April (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49