Opinion | Christian law is dead. Religious law has killed it.

There were two competing stories about the rise of Christian law in the United States.

The first story is the one that we have told conservative evangelicals: religious conservatism emerged in response to hedonism of the sexual revolution, the cultural intolerance of the new left and the threat of the Soviet Union, an explicit atheistic, Marxist Empire.

According to this story, the decision of the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973 The pioneering domestic event that inspired Christian conservatism. It was a fatal corruption of our constitution in the service of a culture of sexual convenience in which human life was subordinate to sexual pleasure.

The reaction of Christian law was both politically and personally. This approach could be tied up on a single sentence: choose people with a good personal character who will defend human life and religious freedom.

The movement focused on constitutional loyalty and saw the constitution as a bulwark against authoritarian survival. And while Bill Clinton's presidency was the clearest reason for the personal character.

As the Southern Baptist Convention explained at its annual conference in 1998: “We ask all Americans to use the conviction and act that the character in the public office counts and choose these officials and candidates who show incompleteness, consistently honesty, moral purity and the highest character.”