MORAL SQUINTS AND HEALING LEAVES: MY HISTORY WITH ROY BRANSON AND THE CENTER FOR LAW AND PUBLIC POLICY

By Dr. Nicholas Miller

Twenty-five years ago, when I was a young lawyer at a D.C. Corporate law firm, I invited Dr. Roy Branson, founder of the WAU Center for Law and Public Policy, out for lunch to discuss the possibility of my teaching a class on constitutional law. Who would have known that this connection would have led more than two decades later to my moving back to the D.C. area and joining WAU as a faculty member to help lead the Center that he founded?

Dr. Branson had me teach that constitutional law class, then invited me to help him establish WAU’s first moot court trial team. That first year was challenging, and we were not even able to join the national competition, as the tournament ran on Sabbath. But we trained a team and had an invitational match with the University of Maryland. As it was an informal competition, I did not think it necessary to declare winners and losers, but Roy thought that we should make it as natural as possible and have judges who would vote on the outcome. This is how we beat the University of Maryland team the same year that UMD won the national championship at the official tournament!

Within a few years, I transferred to my firm’s Los Angeles offices to be near family, so I could not continue working with WAU. But Roy had nourished the seeds of academic interest in me, and I began to look for opportunities to get a Ph.D. in church history. Not too much later, I was approached by

Andrews University to study for a Ph.D. in religious and legal history and open up a church/state study center. I completed the degree and spent more than fifteen years teaching in the church history department at the Seminary, where I established a presence and program in the international religious liberty community.

But running a religious liberty center from a small town in the midwest had its limitations, geographically and resource-wise. I began thinking about trying to reconnect with a location that would offer more in the way of law, public policy, and religious liberty connections and resources. A little over two years ago, Dr. Jonathan Scriven, with whom I had co-taught a class at WAU in the Roy Branson days, approached me about helping with the Center again. Seeing the hand of providence at work, I moved with my family to the Silver Spring area about a year ago, in the summer of 2022.

In the year that we have been in the D.C. area, I have been able to help re-establish the mock trial team after a COVID-19 break, seeing our students perform remarkably well at the national competition in Princeton, New Jersey. (Thankfully, accommodations are now made for Sabbath keepers!). We have had classes where students have been lectured to by church public affairs leaders, taken on visits to civil rights museums and visited a Congressman in his office on Capitol Hill. We have had webinar programs about Supreme Court cases involving the actual lawyers involved and had programs on issues from constitutional theory, the death penalty and assisted suicide, all with top scholars and practitioners.

Perhaps most importantly, we have experienced the generosity of the Adventist legal and public affairs community and raised significant funds to provide fellowship opportunities for talented WAU students to serve as the research and legislative policy aides to academic, church, and political leaders in the Washington area. This means that WAU, the Honors College and the Center for Law and Public Policy can serve as an educational and research center— not only for Adventist students — but also for church organizations that are seeking to understand and impact public affairs and policy in a positive, peacemaking, bridge-building way in our increasingly divisive times.

Roy Branson would be happy and proud of these developments. One of my clear memories of him was standing in the parking lot behind Richards Hall, where he talked to me about educating and inspiring a generation of public policy students willing to look at issues “through a moral squint in their eyes.” He was quoting from the movie “A Man for All Seasons,” which depicts the life of Sir Thomas More, who brought his moral and religious convictions to bear on the public policy issues of his day, especially the divorce and remarriage of Henry VIII.

Sir Thomas More famously lost his head for his convictions, and today, Roy is no longer with us. But the ethos of both, the desire to bring moral convictions and religious perspectives to bear on the great public questions of the day, will continue to guide the vision and practices of the Center. Of course, Roy came from a Protestant tradition that values the separation of church and state and would insist that moral and religious convictions should be directed toward genuinely civil purposes and goals in the public square, and we concur.

But there are plenty of these civil moral questions, as Roy himself demonstrated by his involvement in issues of racial justice (he famously marched with Martin Luther King at Selma), public health and welfare (he led political anti-tobacco campaigns) and advocacy for a morally and ethically informed health care and practices. Roy believed, and so do we, that Christians have a role and responsibility to bring a taste of Revelation’s “leaves ... for the healing of the nations” to our fallen, the conflicted world today. This redemptive and hopeful vision will help guide the activities of the Center in the years to come.

Nicholas Miller is the Honors College Professor of Law & Religion and the Co-Director of the Center for Law and Public Policy.