Conservatives are now using typically liberal arguments, promoting individual rights. Conservatives are wielding these rights arguments with increasing frequency in judicial courts and courts of public opinion. And religious conservatives, such as evangelical Protestants and some Catholics, are at the helm, winning political victories and gaining legal protection.

“ moral majority” of a generation ago emphasized communitar- ianism, while today’s religious minority emphasizes rights that seek protection, not domination. Despite the 2016 presidential election, this trend will continue

The Rights Shift3particularly the utilitarian, political version of individualism. Due to the changing demographics in America, with white Christians increasingly becom­ing less of a numerical and cultural majority, this is likely to persist. Diversity will foster pluralism and rights politics.In this book, I identify the epic shift in evangelicals’ approach to rights through some of the most pressing political issues - free speech, religious liberty, health care, capital punishment, and LGBT rights. I also trace the sources of this shift, identifying an under-appreciated cause - the politics of abortion.THE RIGHTS SHIFTOn some level, we should not be surprised that conservatives have come to utilize rights arguments. Individual rights are central to both American culture and American politics, profoundly affecting politics and law.6 Though there has been some debate about the nature of rights and individualism in the American Founding,7 the language of rights permeates American politics. While not exclusive values, individualism and liberty have also been prominent in American religious culture, influencing approaches to church-life, personal morality, and public policy.8The American rights culture, however, has long been the domain of liberals, especially as the role of rights has increased in law and politics over the past century in what has been called the “ rights revolution.” 9 Liberal legal organiza­tions developed sophisticated strategies to gain short and long-term victories,10 defeating conservatives with their rights-based arguments. These included vic­tories in civil rights and civil liberties. In the area of civil rights, for example, African Americans gained access to the ballot box, black and white children were required to attend public school together, women and men were to generally receive equal legal treatment, and restaurants and hotels were required to serve all races. Extending civil liberties, women gained access to the birth control pill and abortions, the criminally accused received state- funded lawyers and the right-to-remain silent, gay sex was decriminalized and gay marriage was legalized, and Muslims were able to retain their beards in prison.But even more, the secular and religious liberal successes in individual rights were largely responsible for activating the “ culture wars” in American politics,

Rather rights have the capacity to mediate the tension between divided understandings of those marked as different and to transform such understandings into new possibilities of inclu- sio

Rights need not oppose the desire for community; their effect on individual lives is not necessarily oppositional an

w, Americans increasingly look to the legal system to protect their ever expanding concept of "rights." Their expectation level is unrealistically-and dangerously-high (Glendon 1991:14):1 they expect nothing less than "total

It is this solidarity which repressive law expresses, at least whatever there is vital in it. The acts that it prohibits and qualifies as crimes are of two sorts. Either they directlymanifest very violent dissemblance between the agent who accomplishes them and the collective type, or else they offend the organ of the common conscience. In one case as inthe other, the force that is offended by the crime and which suppresses it is thus the same. It is a product of the most essential social likenesses, and it has for its effect themaintenance of the social cohesion which results from these likenesses. It is this force which penal law protects against all enfeeblement, both in demanding from each of us aminimum of resemblances without which the individual would be a menace to the unity of the social body, and in imposing upon us the respect for the symbol which expresses andsummarizes these resemblances at the same time that it guarantees them

Every written law has a double object: to prescribe certain obligations, and to define the sanctions which areattached to them. In civil law, and more generally in every type of law with restitutive sanctions, the legislator takes up and

Even when a criminal act is certainly harmful to society, it is not true that the amount of harm that it does is regularly related to the intensity of the repression which it calls forth. Inthe penal law of the most civilized people, murder is universally regarded as the greatest of crimes. However, an economic crisis, a stock-market crash, even a failure, candisorganize the social body more severely than an isolated homicide. No doubt murder is always an evil, but there is no proof that it is the greatest of evils. What is one man lessto society? What does one lost cell matter to the organism? We say that the future general security would be menaced if the act remained unpunished; but

All law is private in the sense that it is always about individuals who are present and acting; but so, too, all law is public, in the sense that it is a social function and thatall individuals are, whatever their varying titles, functionaries of society

The general life of society cannot extend its sway without juridical life extending its sway at the same time and indirect relation. We can thus be certain of finding reflected in law all the essential varieties of social solidarity.The objection may be raised, it is true, that social relations can fix themselves without assuming a juridical for