Since at least 2010, the Christian reconstructionist preacher P. Andrew Sandlin has been a faculty member for the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom’s Blackstone Legal Fellowship. A review of articles written by Sandlin, who leads a Christian Reconstructionist organization named the Center for Cultural Leadership (CCL), shows a pattern of violent anti-abortion rhetoric and advocacy for imprecatory prayer — the controversial practice of praying divine curses on the perceived enemies of God — against judges.
In 2014, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) described the Blackstone program as a way for Christians to “recover the robust Christendomic theology of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries.” Since its inception, the program has trained nearly 3,000 law students, some of whom clerked for federal judges, and hosted lectures by prominent conservatives including Justice Amy Coney Barrett before her appointment to the Supreme Court.
ADF later framed Blackstone as a training program for Christian law students to “inspire them to reimagine their careers as a way of serving God.” The program still notes that its goal is for students to “join together with ADF and our allies to impact our legal system, safeguard our inalienable rights, and keep the door open for the Gospel.”
Writing and public comments by Sandlin and other former faculty members, including election denier John Eastman, raise questions about the Blackstone curriculum and how its instructors envision political change. While Eastman is appealing a determination that he is ineligible to practice law in California for his efforts to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election, Sandlin has advocated confrontational political tactics he calls “Christian counterpunching,” which includes support for “legally armed citizens” defending Confederate monuments.
In a 2020 article, Sandlin wrote: “The Bible doesn’t merely prohibit capitulation to evil: it demands opposition to evil. The Christian attitude may never be, ‘Abortion and statism and homosexuality and human trafficking and pornography and socialism and Black Lives Matter and Cultural Marxism and secular libertarianism are evil, and I won’t participate in them, but I can’t or won’t do anything to stop them.’ No. We’re called not just to avoid evil, but to expose it and oppose it. Evil packs a punch. We counterpunch.”
‘When we hate God’s enemies, we demonstrate our love for God’
Reflection and forgiveness are not the only things Christians should pray for, Sandlin has argued. In addition, he wrote in a 1994 article in the reconstructionist magazine-turned-blog The Forerunner, “A second aspect of supplication with which we must engage is imprecation, the invoking of divine curses upon God’s enemies.”
Sandlin bemoaned the lack of militancy in the prayers of contemporary Christians. “In our increasingly sentimental and syrupy Christianity, imprecatory prayers have all but disappeared,” he wrote. “Where are the earnest prayers for God to cast down the secularists from their seats, to unseat unjust judges, and to destroy abortionists?”
Hating God’s enemies and praying for their destruction shows how Christians love God, according to Sandlin. “When we hate God’s enemies (not our own [Mt. 5:44]), we demonstrate our love for God (Psalms 139:19-22),” Sandlin wrote. “We must be certain that it is God’s enemies, not our own whom we hate (Ps. 139:21,22); and we must be sure our own hearts are clean in the sight of God (vv. 23,24).”
In an endnote, Sandlin clarified what he meant by imprecations: “Imprecations are defined as: prayerfully uttered curses on God’s enemies.” He added, “Fortunately, imprecatory prayer is experiencing a revival among Bible-believers.”
The Forerunner is edited by Jay Rogers, a former member of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue who was arrested in 1988 for blockading the entrance to an abortion clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts. The activism of the outlet’s publisher is consistent with many of Sandlin’s imprecatory pronouncements: anti-abortion activism.
In a 2014 blog post for the CCL titled “A Curse on Aborticide,” Sandlin wrote: “All followers of Jesus Christ who, therefore, love his holy law and mercy and grace and justice must beg God to grant repentance to our blood-soaked nation — and level his wrath against those lawless judges and unrepentant aborticide providers who ‘set their teeth to Satan’s jaw and feed him our children.’”
According to Sandlin, praying for God’s wrath to consume the judges and doctors who enable abortion is “not merely appropriate, but imperative.” “To invoke God’s wrath on unrepentant murderers of judicially innocent children is to invoke his tender grace and mercy on the precious lives of preborn children whom they would, if unmolested, also snuff out. Alternatively, to shy from such imprecations under the motivation of sensitivity to butchers of babes is to twist the justice of God and turn his grace into lasciviousness (Jude 1:4),” Sandlin wrote.
The comments are consistent with Sandlin’s writings on the justification for violence to protect the “judicially innocent.” In 2015, Sandlin elaborated on this belief in a blog post for the CCL titled “Pistol Packin’ Jesus?”: “Love means defending, with lethal force if necessary, those unjustly drawn to death. Lovelessness means not defending them with lethal force. In that scenario, not to kill is not to love.”
Biblical law does not sanction personal vengeance, but according to Sandlin, there is “no reason to believe [Jesus] would not support the Second Amendment (framed, let us remember, by Christians or those shaped by Christian truth), and he would be quite happy for his disciples to carry firearms — and require them to use those firearms, if necessary, to defend judicially innocent life.”
Sandlin has also written about the distinction between metaphorical and physical violence. “When evil punches, righteousness punches back. But neither evil nor righteousness exists in abstraction,” Sandlin wrote in 2020. “Evil beings punch, and righteous beings punch back. This is Christian counterpunching, and there can be no authentic Christianity without it.”
Sandlin’s comments are also consistent with views other CCL leaders have expressed. In a 2000 article for Chalcedon Foundation’s magazine, CCL Vice President Craig Dumont characterized imprecatory prayers as a potential alternative to physical violence. “In the overwhelming number of cases, Christians must not pick up a rifle and revolt against a civil government, nor should they bomb an abortion clinic,” he wrote, “precisely because we have the assurance that we serve a supernatural God who hears the prayers of His saints.”
Imprecatory prayer, he wrote, was one supernatural weapon which “allow[s] us to prosecute, in Ray Sutton’s words, a covenant lawsuit against the wicked before the throne of God. Imprecatory prayers actively call for God to supernaturally judge the wicked and move to destroy them.” Sandlin was previously executive vice president of the anti-LGBTQ+ Chalcedon Foundation.
Sandlin did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Blackstone curriculum questions
The Blackstone program has trained nearly 3,000 lawyers since its inception in 2000. According to archived copies of the program’s website, Sandlin was listed as a faculty member between at least 2010 and 2016. As a Blackstone faculty member, Sandlin lectured on Christian culture and government, according to his 2023 edited volume titled Virtuous Liberty: A Christian Defense of Classical Liberalism and the Free Society Against Cultural Leftism and the New Right. His published works and profiles suggest that he remains a Blackstone faculty member.
Sandlin is not the only Blackstone faculty member whose advocacy calls into question the program’s curriculum and its instructors’ beliefs about political change. Sandlin’s tenure at Blackstone overlapped with John Eastman, the former attorney for President Donald Trump who is appealing disbarment and pleaded not guilty in 2024 to state charges related to his activity to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
According to CNN, Eastman “devised a multi-step plan for then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election and advised Trump on plots to disrupt Congress’ certification of the 2020 election results.” In 2025, the case in Arizona was sent back to a grand jury by a state judge with instructions that the jury should be shown the language of the Electoral Count Act and to reconsider “whether there is probable cause that the defendants committed the crimes,” according to a local news report.
Image at top: P. Andrew Sandlin has been a faculty member of the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Blackstone Legal Fellowship, which has trained thousands of lawyers in the last two decades. (Photo illustration by the SPLC)