Welcome to the world of the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, an annual program established in 2000 by the Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona-based nonprofit that is swiftly emerging as a major behind-the-scenes player in many of the nation’s most controversial legal cases involving reproductive rights, sexual justice, and a vast range of other moral and social disputes.

Suppose further that this plan had a scary simple strategy: Recruit bright, young law students; put them through an intensive indoctrination program; place them in plum internships across the country; and watch as they swim upstream until they reach the top of the legal system, where they can create, enforce, and interpret laws according to a legal philosophy infused with fundamentalist Christian theology.

Imagine that a little-known but increasingly powerful group of ideologues had hatched a plan to transform the United States into a Christian theocracy harkening back to the Dark Ages of Europe, a timewhen society was governed by the laws and officials of the Catholic Church.

Blackstone alumni have risen to positions of influence in state and federal courts, federal government agencies, and congressional committees and offices, as well as positions at the United Nations and other intergovernmental agencies, a review of public documents, online profiles, and public records requests by RH Reality Check shows.

In Missouri, a former Blackstone Fellow, Kevin Corlew, is running for the state’s 14th congressional district in this year’s elections. Another, Bradley Cowan, is the chief of the administrative law division at the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky,according to his profile on LinkedIn. And based on our review of public records, the offices of attorneys and solicitors general in at least eight states—Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, Texas, and Virginia—have hosted Blackstones as interns, jobs in which fellows help draft memos and pleadings for the most powerful lawmakers in their states and, more importantly, forge the contacts that will propel them to their own positions of power.

Advocates for the separation of church and state told RH Reality Check that placing Blackstones in secular positions with the power to write, enforce, and apply laws was worrisome, because “any attempt to merge church and state is dangerous because it leads us down the path to theocracy.”

“They [members of the Alliance] don’t want there to be any legal abortion because they say that violates the Bible. They don’t want gays and lesbians to have rights because they think that violates their interpretation of the Bible. … They want our public institutions, including our school system, to be saturated with their religious beliefs,” said Rob Boston, communications director for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, who researched the Alliance Defending Freedom for his recently published book. “When you add all that up, that, to me, looks like a church-state union. It looks like a Middle Ages nation with modern-day technology. And that scares me.