The Trials and Tribulations of Hashmel Turner

In the last decade, Lynn says, Christian legal groups have succeeded in establishing the idea in courts that religious expression cases are freedom of speech cases. That is a seductive but fundamentally flawed argument, he says. The framers of the Constitution included the free exercise of religion clause and the principle of separation of church and state in the First Amendment because they wanted to make clear that religious speech is not like all other speech -- religion has to be protected but not promoted, Lynn argues.

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He believes the Christian legal movement's ultimate goal is to create a body of rulings that make non-Christians second-class citizens. "There is just a refusal to recognize how diverse the nation is and how seriously [non-Christians] take their faiths," says Lynn, who doesn't think Whitehead is all that different from his colleagues. "He has promoted the mythology that the federal government is taking away the rights of Christians especially, and all that is urban mythology," Lynn says. "Christians are in control in most places."

Groups like the ACLU would reject being characterized as hostile to religion. Religion, they argue, is more likely to flourish when it is not entangled with government -- when there is absolutely no question that government is endorsing or sponsoring religion. For the ACLU, that can sometimes mean advocating for more religious expression, not less. The group has supported a Muslim woman in Michigan who wanted to wear modest clothes in a public pool; a Wiccan in Chesterfield County, Va., who wanted to give the opening invocation at supervisors' meetings; and an elementary school student in New Jersey who was prohibited from singing "Awesome God" in a voluntary, after-school talent show.

"There has never been more religious expression in public places than there is now," says Kent Willis, executive director of the Virginia ACLU, who thinks the rise of Christian legal firms rests on a phony threat that religious speech is being suppressed. "They make an argument that I think is entirely specious, but it has a great deal of energy in the culture right now."

Whitehead has his own issues with the movement he helped found. He worries about the intense focus on Christians as victims. The real problem, he says, is creeping limits on religious speech in general, particularly at a time when America is becoming more religiously diverse. Court rulings are sketching out a bland, state-sponsored "civil religion," where God is welcome so long as he/she/it has no recognizable attributes or names and can be defined by an all-powerful state, he says. Whitehead views the big Christian law firms as too market-driven, afraid to take religious freedom cases defending Muslims or gays or anyone their contributors don't like.

Though the vast majority of Whitehead's clients are Christians, he says he's gone to court on behalf of Jews. He offered to represent a Wiccan woman who was fighting to put a Wiccan symbol on her husband's headstone at Arlington National Cemetery. (The Department of Veterans Affairs yielded to the request earlier this year.) She didn't hire him, but he wrote an article about her case in Christianity Today, an evangelical magazine, arguing: "Whatever one's opinion might be about the Wiccan faith, there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that the First Amendment to our U.S. Constitution provides for religious freedom for all individuals of all faiths -- whether they are Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, Wiccans and others."

Whitehead says his views have made him an outsider among Christian and separationist civil liberties litigators alike. "I feel like I'm in a valley," he says, "and people are shooting down on me from all sides."

In Turner, Whitehead sees someone else under attack. "He couldn't resist doing the right thing. He had to say Jesus's name. He could have just waltzed along," Whitehead says. "Most Christians I know cut bait and run, but he didn't."

THE ORIGINS OF HASHMEL C. TURNER JR. V. THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF FREDERICKSBURG lie in the spring of 1968, when an 18-year-old Turner was adrift in hopelessness. The eldest of 10 siblings, Turner had lost his mother the year before to cancer. Even before she became sick, she'd struggled to raise them on her own. Their father was mostly gone, working as a rigger in Washington.

In their simple Fredericksburg neighborhood of Mayfield, the Turners were known as "the poor family." Nearby churches would donate canned goods to the children, who sometimes put food coloring in water as a pretend snack. Turner tried to help out, contributing to the family's meager income by mowing lawns, selling newspapers and collecting bottles to recycle. After their mother died and the state scattered the younger siblings to foster homes, Turner became their advocate, monitoring their living conditions and, in one case, getting social services to yank a few from an abusive home.

But Turner, too, was desperate for direction. His mother had raised him as a Baptist, and his public school teachers encouraged him to recite a Bible verse and say a prayer each morning. Even so, Christianity felt more like a tradition than a deeply held faith. And with his mother's death, the bottom had dropped out of his world. That spring, he was uncertain he would even graduate from high school.

"I had kind of given up," he remembers. He was working at J.J. Newbury department store downtown when he heard that a revival called the Billy Graham Crusade was coming to Fredericksburg. Turner wasn't sure how he felt about God at that point, but he figured: Why not go?