John Eidsmoe

Who is John Eidsmoe?

John Eidsmoe is an attorney and a professor of constitutional law and related subjects. He has previously taught at the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, Faulkner University, Montgomery, Alabama, and at the O. W. Coburn School of Law at Oral Roberts University. He served in the US Air Force as a Lt. Colonel and is an Alabama State Defense Force Colonel, Headquarters Judge Advocate, Deputy Chaplain and Training Officer. He earned his J.D. from the University of Iowa, M.A. from Dallas Theological Seminary, and M. Div. from Lutheran Brethren Seminary.

In a 2001 interview, Eidsmoe said "When Biblical law conflicted with American law, O.R.U. students were generally taught that 'the first thing you should try to do is work through legal means and political means to get it changed.'" In his 1987 book Christianity and the Constitution, Eidsmoe wrote that America “was and to a large extent still is a Christian nation,” and that “our culture should be permeated with a distinctively Christian flavoring.”

Eidsmoe has stirred some controversy in his outside lecturing. In 2005, he spoke to the national convention of the Council of Conservative Citizens and in 2010 he addressed an event commemorating Alabama's Secession Day where he told an interviewer that it was Alabama's “constitutional right to secede,” and that “Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun understood the Constitution better than did Abraham Lincoln and Daniel Webster.” In April, 2010, he was disinvited from a Tea Party rally in Wausau, Wisconsin, because of these statements and appearances. Eidsmoe said in 2011 that he deeply despises racism, but that he will "speak to anyone.”