ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the diverse, religious interests which scholarship has argued regularly utilize legislative advocacy as a lobbying strategy also frequently employ litigation as a form of political action. Group-sponsored and directed church-state litigation has taken on many of the same idiosyncratic qualities that have characterized the religion clause jurisprudence of the Court since 1969. A deeper look at the polarity of the Jewish, Catholic, and Christian lobbies reveals much about the limitations under which religious minorities labor in the political sphere. Contemporary scholars argued that the politics of religion and the state could best be understood by the competing groups that made the federal courts, particularly the Supreme Court, the locus of this conflict. The increase in political sophistication of religious conservatives was not just limited to electoral and legislative spheres of politics. Conservative religious lobbies also expanded their realm of political advocacy to include judicial intervention in Supreme Court religion cases.
