They can have voluntary silent prayer in public schools, for example, but not the Ten Commandments. Still, this isn't an assault on religious people. It is instead an expression of the limited power any single religion can command in a liberal society. Like all true believers, the advocates of conservative religious causes can experience the satisfactions of concrete limited accomplishments, or they can embrace the more immediate gratifications of emotionalism and extremism and give no quarter to liberals, secularists, homosexuals, and others who have a different way of joining faith to citizenship. In a pluralistic and secular society like ours, the best, if not the easiest, choices are the former.
Rutherford chooses the latter.
The Rutherford Institute was founded in 1982, nine years before Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice. So far Rutherford hasn't attracted the media attention that Robertson's center has. John Whitehead, its founder and president, doesn't have a million-dollar ministry like Robertson's or a vivid public persona like Phyllis Schlafly's. But in 14 years Rutherford has grown out of the basement of a suburban Virginia home and into six regional and three international offices. It now has more than 200 cases before the courts.