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Notes -
To me it seems very simple.
Conservatism in America is deeply connected to religious conservatives, especially Christians. Of those, excepting very small groups like Orthodox Jews, Orthodox Christians, and Anabaptists, you have essentially three subgroups: confessional Protestants, evangelical Protestants, and Roman Catholics.
Confessional Protestants are often very engaged in ideas (they love their long confessions full of them, of course), but they're, relatively speaking, a rather small group, even compared to the shrinking mainline Protestants with whom they have a shared history. Think the Presbyterian Church in America (not Presbyterian Church U.S.A.), the Lutheran Missouri and Wisconsin synods (not the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), and perhaps even the Anglican Church in North America (not the Episcopal Church). I'm not from the region of the country where this form of Christianity is very large, so I can't speak to their absolute numbers, but they're relatively small as far as I understand.
I have ancestors who were members of these churches, but in my family, which is pretty standard for the religious right, evangelical Protestantism predominates. Baptists, Pentecostals, and non-denominational Christians (who I consider, from personal experience, Baptists-in-denial) make up a majority of conservative Protestants in the United States.
So what is there to say about evangelical Protestants? Well, I'm very fond of them. They're a large part of my family. But they also -- and I say this just to be brutally honest -- have a very poor track record when it comes to fostering a culture that values higher education or elite status-seeking. They have much in common, I think, with the pietist movements of magisterial Protestantism, which stress direct experience of God and simplicity in faith, rather than scholasticism, education, and learning. Put more bluntly, their cultural and biological ancestors are mostly the Borderers (Scots-Irish), who never valued education and were associated with anything but book learning.
Today, you look at Pew Research's table of educational attainment by religious affiliation, and you find evangelical groups like Baptists and Pentecostals filling up the bottom. This is simply not a group that produces Supreme Court justices, who are universally elite and educated persons.
This leaves, of course, Roman Catholics. Catholicism has a long and storied history of higher learning, being associated with many of the major historical universities of Western Europe. It also has a strong focus, at least among conservative and traditionalist Catholics, on deep knowledge of faith and resistance to common patterns of behavior. It has institutes of higher education in the United States, like Notre Dame (which another poster discussed), which are considered elite enough to possibly matriculate a future federal judge. And, as others have pointed out, Catholicism has a long history of legal scholarship and a rigorous tradition of religious law that makes legal interpretation a rather natural choice for a smart Catholic to study.
While as a whole, Catholics are middling in their education attainment, this is largely determined by the large numbers of Latino immigrants. Native-born, white Catholics (if I understand correctly), have rather high educational attainment, even if most are liberal or lapsed Catholics. But those who remain in a conservative understanding of their faith -- like Harrison Butker noted above, often have a well-developed and intellectual understanding of their religion and a desire to put it into practice in broader society. This is the right combination to produce elite jurists.
You could of course ask, what about non-religious conservatives? And I would simply respond: "who?" While I have a great deal of affinity for right-wing atheists and know some, this is not a large group by any stretch of imagination. I am inclined to believe there are more Jews keeping the strictest interpretation of Torah in the United States than there are atheists who would even consider voting for a Republican.
So, if Republicans are going to appoint justices to the Supreme Court, and they've gotten to do that quite a lot lately, they've got to be Catholics. It's the only group in the United States that produces large enough numbers of educated, elite, status-seeking, but traditional and conservative, people.
It also helps, of course, that a large ethnic minority in the United States are Latinos who are often Catholic, which means that Democrats also have a reason to appoint certain kinds of Catholics to the Court, as they did with Sotomayor. It's notable also that the one clear, life-long Protestant on the Court is Ketanji Brown Jackson, who identifies as a non-denominational Protestant but doesn't seem to have a strong connection to her faith. There are, as far as I'm concerned, no committed evangelical Protestants on the Court, and plausibly there have never been.
That generally makes sense as an explanation - I would take it as related to the collapse of mainline Protestantism, and more generally the end of the WASP class. Historically the supreme court is almost entirely what we would call 'mainline Protestant', but in the last few decades mainline Protestantism has firstly almost entirely collapsed and secondly gone quite liberal in terms of politics. Religious conservatives, bar a small handful of impressively stubborn confessional types, are almost entirely either evangelicals or Catholics. Evangelical Christianity in the US began as a movement against an intellectual establishment that they perceived as having succumbed to heresy. There may be many good things about evangelicalism, but it has inherited a certain anti-intellectual streak, and it has never managed to reconcile with cultural elites. It was and remains low-class.
So as you say, that leaves Catholics. The Republicans have made heavy use of them.
Yup, I think that’s exactly what’s going on. The mainlines have collapsed.
I also would add that Catholicism, unlike mainline Protestantism, forms a strong cultural block unlike other forms of Christianity. I’ve known many Catholics who hate the Church and are essentially apostate, but if you ask for their religion, they’d say “Catholic.” What’s funny is the only person on the Court known for attending mainline Protestant services is Gorsuch — who was raised Catholic and is often still called Catholic, despite being lapsed and attending Episcopal services!
There’s a line in Leo DiCaprio’s Catch Me If You Can, where the main character, who repeatedly creates false identities, is caught by his fiance, whose immediate response to realizing her life had been totally manipulated was to ask, in tears, “You’re not a Lutheran?” Such a thing is unthinkable today, and was played for laughs in the 2000s even.
So it’s no wonder the court is considered made up largely of Catholics and Jews — they’re both faiths with a large cultural/ethnic component. That means the identification outlives the practice. The other member of the court is a Black Protestant, which is its own ethnic/religious fusion.
Yes, I think this is true. 'Catholic' can continue to function as an identity even in the near-total absence of believe. 'Jew' and 'Muslim' both do the same thing to an extent as well, where they come to denote an ethnic or cultural background or upbringing. Protestantism largely does not do this. If you stop believing, you are no longer a Protestant or even a Christian.
Thus anecdotally I do often run into Catholics whose response to anything about doctrine or practice is roughly, "Oh, no one pays attention to that, don't worry." Catholicism can be grounded in something other than genuine, sincere belief. Protestantism cannot be.
(As a Protestant I'm inclined to see this as good, or at least, as not wholly bad. But that's a value judgement that could certainly be argued.)
I wonder how the supreme court looks if you track it, not by formally stated religious identity, but by actual practice? If we trust NCR, Roberts, Thomas, Kavanaugh, and certainly Barrett all seem to be practicing Catholics. Kagan is Jewish but it doesn't sound like like she's practicing? Gorsuch attends an Episcopalian church, and Jackson is very reticent on the subject, so I don't think I can tell how pious she is. At a glance it sounds like maybe a bit over half of the supreme court is meaningfully religious, in terms of personal practice?
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