Evangelical General: Ed Meese and the Religious Right’s Influence on the Reagan DOJ

In the summer of 1985, Attorney General Edwin Meese III began a two-pronged effort to remake the American judiciary. The first prong was his now-infamous annunciation before the American Bar Association of a new “jurisprudence of original intention” to serve as the guiding legal philosophy for the Department of Justice. Few scholars of constitutional originalism have neglected to analyze Meese’s important speech. The second prong was a planned nomination of Meese’s fundamentalist Pentecostal friend Herbert Ellingwood to head the Office of Legal Policy—in charge of vetting the judges who would enforce originalism. When news broke of Ellingwood’s connections with evangelical activist Timothy LaHaye, the American Coalition for Traditional Values, and a “Christian talent bank” for government jobs, Norman Lear’s People for the American Way announced plans to fight the nomination. Amidst ongoing Administration scandal, Meese scrapped the planned nomination. The Ellingwood episode received extensive press coverage at the time, but it has since fallen out of scholarly accounts of originalism’s origins. However, it is crucial to recovering the particular influence of evangelicalism on the Reagan DOJ and the conservative turn to constitutional originalism. This paper argues that Meese himself should be considered the ranking evangelical in the Reagan Administration. Meese was a member of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod a “respectable” denomination but one that hewed to biblical inerrancy during the 1970s “Battle for the Bible.” During Reagan’s campaign and Presidency, Meese served as both Reagan’s liaison to the Religious Right and the evangelical liaison to the White House (often with the help of his friend Ellingwood), pushing an evangelical agenda from a national “Year of the Bible” to regulation of pornography to, most significantly, a constitutional originalist jurisprudence that conformed to both the textualist rhetoric and religious freedom policy goals of the evangelical right.