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Law should be a service profession, Christian reformers say, offering help and counsel in every community, large or small, and in every realm of society. Christian lawyers have extraordinary opportunities to provide salt and light, serving people facing great problems or significant decisions. Legal counselors can't do that with a view of law as an arbitrary instrument of power, however; they need to understand law's intended role as an instrument of God's righteousness, justice, and mercy.

At most law schools, cls chapters connect students with faculty and mentors who can help them understand their profession in Christian terms. University of Georgia professor Randy Beck, a cls mentor, teaches a seminar on Christian thought and the law. He and a former student founded a nonprofit legal clinic for students to apply one way of Christian service through law. He reckons that religious schools serve a valuable role, but it's "also valuable to have people thinking about these issues in the context of secular institutions." And they do. Journals, blogs, institutes, and conferences on law and religion have now proliferated in both secular and religious schools.

The 29 contributors to an outstanding Yale University Press volume, Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought (edited by Cochran, among others), come from a variety of prestigious law schools, most of which have no Christian mission. Beck notes, "There was a period of time when religious voices were not welcomed in the legal academy. Part of the response to that was to go set up alternative institutions. But even in the secular academy, there has been more willingness to allow Christianity as one of the voices at the table."

Others see the rise of Christian law more confrontationally. "We want to infiltrate the culture with men and women of God who are skilled in the legal profession," Jerry Falwell told the Associated Press upon opening Liberty University School of Law in 2004. "We'll be as far to the Right as Harvard is to the Left." Now four years old, Liberty remains strongly identified with the Religious Right. Housed in a gigantic refurbished factory, the Lynchburg, Virginia, school looms over its parking lots like a stamping mill for culture warriors.

But appearances are deceiving. Inside the factory's walls are well-appointed, high-tech classrooms and offices. Students and faculty estimate that somewhere between a fourth and a third of the school's 165 students see their future as culture warriors. But that leaves the majority thinking of something more pedestrian. Students praise the warmly supportive community they experience at Liberty. They praise the 89 percent bar pass rate in their first graduating class.

Liberty emphasizes the nuts and bolts of lawyering. Dean Mathew Staver, himself a culture warrior who founded the Liberty Counsel, a religious-rights advocacy group, sees the school's potential impact broadly, in business and medicine and intellectual property as well as in politics. "Law is so pervasive," Staver says. "It's strategic at every level."

Across the state at the more elegantly styled Regent University School of Law, the vision is similarly broad. The institution has been around since 1986, when Oral Roberts University's law school closed and gave Regent its library. Associate dean Doug Cook is at pains to point out the religious diversity of the faculty, which includes Catholics, and says that "not all are right-wing Republicans." He says, "We probably have more graduates doing estate planning than constitutional law."

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August 2008, Vol. 52, No. 8