In the moments after the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision to end the constitutional right to an aborrtion, the director of a conservative Christian ministry connected to an influential right-wing legal group in Washington DC claimed that she prayed with the justices who struck down Roe v Wade.
A report from Rolling Stone reveals that a YouTube stream from outside the Supreme Court on 24 June captured the remarks made by Peggy Nienaber, the vice president of Faith & Liberty, an arm of the powerful legal group Liberty Counsel, which describes the organization as “Christian outreach to top-level government officials in Washington DC”.
“You actually pray with the Supreme Court justices?” the YouTube streamer can be heard asking.
“I do. They will pray with us, those that like us to pray with them,” Ms Nienaber can be heard responding. “We actually go in there.”
An amicus brief filed by Liberty Counsel in support of the state of Mississippi in the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women Health Organization – in which the court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v Wade – was cited in the final opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito.
Liberty Counsel also argued a case before the Supreme Court this term, involving the right to publicly display a “Christian” flag on government property. The group also filed a brief supporting a public high school football coach who kneeled in group prayer after games despite warnings from the school. The court ruled that his prayers were protected by the First Amendment.
Ms Nienaber can be heard saying in her comments on the stream that her admission is “totally off the record”.
In a statement to The Independent, Liberty Counsel founder Mathew Staver and vice president of media Holly Meade denied that the group has ministered with justices in person.
“Many people pray for them around the country and on the public area outside the Supreme Court,” the statement reads. “And since early 2020, the Supreme Court has essentially been on lockdown. Access to the Court is strictly regulated and limited. Many oral arguments by counsel have been remote. Even those that are in person require testing and allow only the arguing counsel and one other attorney. The client[s] on the case are not even permitted inside the Court. There is no way someone could enter the Court to get near the Justices, let alone pray with them. It is absolutely false to suggest that there is prayer with the Justices.”
Another statement to The Independent claims that the Rolling Stone story is “false” and the publication chose to “print the sensational story any way.”
“Since Liberty Counsel assumed the prayer ministry called Faith & Liberty in 2018, there has been no prayer with the Justices,” according to the statement. “This prayer ministry prays for the Justices, not with them. And the prayer ministry is not just for the Justices and the Court but includes all three branches of government, the nation, and also includes international prayer.”
The Independent has requested comment from the Supreme Court.
The ministry’s founder, Rob Schenck, who launched Faith and Action in the Nation’s Capital, told Rolling Stone that he prayed with conservative justices in their chambers from the late 1990s until his departure from the group in 2010.
Liberty Counsel assumed control of the ministry in 2018, after which a “number of changes were implemented,” according to Liberty Counsel’s statement to The Independent.
“Since that transition, Peggy Nienaber, the vice president of Faith & Liberty, has prayed for the justices and their staff, not with them,” according to Liberty Counsel.
“The instances referred to in the article go back many years prior to when Liberty Counsel assumed the Faith & Liberty prayer ministry,” the group told The Independent.
The Supreme Court has not been open to the public since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“There is no way anyone could have entered the Court to pray with the Justices or the staff over the past [two and a half] years. That fact alone completely discredits the article,” according to Liberty Counsel.
Mr Schneck told Rolling Stone that the prayer services were intended as a “spiritual conditioning”.
“The intention all along was to embolden the conservative justices by loaning them a kind of spiritual moral support – to give them an assurance that not only was there a large number of people behind them, but in fact, there was divine support for very strong and unapologetic opinions from them,” he told Rolling Stone.
Ms Nienaber’s claims have raised concerns about the depth of conservative Christian activist influence on the nation’s high court, following a series of rulings lauded by powerful right-wing legal groups and Christian organisations that have expressly pursued the dissolve of Roe v Wade in the decades after the ruling.
She claimed that she does not “socialise with the justices” but she has posed for photos with Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, who she called a “friend” in a Facebook post. She praised him for “passing by our ministry center to attend church and always taking time to say hello.”
Faith & Liberty’s ministry centre sits across the street from the Supreme Court.
Ms Nienaber told Rolling Stone that she did not recall making the statement on the livestream.
“My comment was referring to past history and not practice of the past several years,” she told Rolling Stone. “During most of the history up to early 2020, I met with many people who wanted or needed prayer … It has been many years since I prayed with a Justice.”
A so-called “pro-life” movement in concert with right-wing legal groups and influential Christian ministries has helped draft state-level legislation to restrict abortion access and promoted anti-abortion figures across the judicial system, cultivating a conservative majority on the Supreme Court to reverse the ruling at the centre of its agenda.
Alongside groups like the Federalist Society, the movement took aim at what it believed was the Supreme Court’s “judicial activism” and began a decades-long effort to reshape the federal judiciary and the lawmakers behind it.
Those groups pursued a legal strategy to strike down Roe v Wade under the court’s new conservative majority – with Donald Trump’s three appointments on the nine-member panel – by helping draft state laws that would prompt abortion rights advocates and providers to sue to block them, with their challenges eventually landing at the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court’s links to such groups have previously come under scrutiny during confirmation hearings for now-Justice Amy Coney Barrett in 2017.
She was pressed on her financial disclosures that revealed thousands of dollars from the Alliance for Defending Freedom, a Christian legal advocacy group that supports the criminalisation of LGBT+ people and denying access to contraception and abortion care, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Justice Barrett was paid for a series of presentations to the group’s Blackstone Legal Fellowship programme, which instructs Christian law students to bring a “distinctly Christian worldview in every area of law,” according to its tax filings.
