About

Rev. Rob Schenck is a dissenting voice and a loving but fierce critic of American evangelicalism. He has spent nearly 50 years as a leading figure among U.S. evangelicals. An ordained evangelical minister, Rob was trained in evangelical institutions, has led national evangelical organizations, and is widely published in evangelical journals. For over 30 years, Rob was a Washington, DC-based religious right activist, meeting with U.S. presidents, congressional leaders, and, notoriously, behind the scenes with Supreme Court justices, seeking to persuade them to take extreme positions on social issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and church and state. In 2012, during late-in-life doctoral research, Rob undertook an exhaustive study of the World War II-era German evangelical church’s support of the Nazi Party, leading him to eventually break with his religious tribe over its similar support for an increasingly extremist Republican Party that would ultimately embrace Donald Trump. After being featured in Abigail Disney’s 2015 Emmy Award-winning film, The Armor of Light, examining evangelicals and gun culture, Rob was black-listed by his community. His later testimony before the U.S. Congress detailing the surreptitious influence of religious conservatives on certain Supreme Court justices sealed his fate as an outlier, an advantageous vantage point from which he writes at Patheos.