If Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens retires, and is replaced by Elena Kagan (the favorite), then the Supreme Court of the United States of America will have no Protestants on the bench. This in a nation which is 50% Protestant. Until after World War II the United States of America was in its self-identity fundamentally Protestant (see American Judaism and Catholicism and American Freedom for histories of how Jews & Catholics entered the American religious mainstream in the middle of the 20th century after a century of rejection by the Protestant establishment).* This is clear when you read about attempts to “Christianize” Roman Catholic Filipinos after the conquest of that nation from Spain in the early 20th century, or the reality that both American Catholicism and Judaism were often torn by conflicts between explicit assimilationists who wished to emulate the Protestant congregational model dominant in the United States, and those which argued for the perpetuation of a separate distinctive religious culture outside of the mainstream. And yet today this doesn’t matter much because the assimilationists won. Consider the fact that Stephen Breyer, who is Jewish, has a daughter who is an Episcopal priest (her mother is an English Anglican). Sonia Sotomayor is likely to be indistinguishable from the other Left-leaning justices, though she shares a Roman Catholic confession with the conservatives on the court. Religion in the United States by and large has become a personal label which serves as a marker toward one’s origins and one’s current loyalties, rather than a confession which indicates identity with a “thick” and exclusive subculture (the Amish, Hasidic Jews and Fundamentalist Mormons being exceptions). In this way the United States is like South Korea or many African nations, where religious pluralism and individual fluidity in choice and identity are the rule and not the exception.
The contrast with race and sex is notable. The predominance of males and whites on the bench is often commented on, but less so the fact that Roman Catholics are overrepresented by a factor of three, and Jews by nearly an order of magnitude. In fact, there seem to be a dearth of white Protestants at the pinnacles of American politics today. In the Congressional leadership Harry Reid is a Mormon, Nancy Pelosi & John Boehner are Roman Catholic. Steny Hoyer and Mitch McConnell “represent” for white Protestants, but the Vice President is a Roman Catholic.
* It is correct that many of the Founding Fathers, most famously Thomas Jefferson, were not orthodox Christians. But they were cultural Christians, more specifically cultural Protestants, and particularly of the denominations of their ancestors. Jefferson and George Washington were affiliated in some way throughout their life with the Episcopal Church of the Virginia gentry. John Adams was a Unitarian Christian whose outlook was shaped by the origins of Unitarianism in New England as a liberal reform movement within Congregational Calvinist Christianity. As such, the Founders shared Protestant suspicions of the Roman Catholic Church, whether it be due to Reform Christian antagonism of old or a newer Enlightenment anti-clericalism. Recall that one of the causa belli for colonial rebellion against the British crown was the toleration given to French Roman Catholics in Canada (this was later discretely removed from enumerations of causes because of the possibility that Quebec would join the rebellion, as well as the need for alliance with Roman Catholic France).
Razib Khan’s degrees are in biochemistry and biology. He has blogged about genetics since 2002, previously worked in software development, is an Unz Foundation Junior Fellow and lives in the western US. He loves habaneros.
April 6th, 2010 at 3:45 am
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by razib khan and Geoffrey Dyson, Al Poe. Al Poe said: America, 2010 | Gene Expression: If Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens retires, and is replaced by Elena Kaga… http://bit.ly/cNL6n2 [...]
April 6th, 2010 at 4:15 am
I wonder whether the composition of the Supreme Court reflects the makeup of top Law Schools (past and present). Looking at Wikipedia I see that everyone is Harvard or Yale, except for the 2 oldest (Stevens at Northwestern & Ginsburg at Columbia, both highly ranked schools as well).
April 6th, 2010 at 8:40 am
Danny called it. Razib, my comments don’t seem to be showing up…am I banned?
April 6th, 2010 at 10:05 am
[...] Khan writing at Discover Magazine, Gene Expression Blog: “If Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens retires, and is replaced by Elena Kagan (the [...]
April 6th, 2010 at 11:38 am
miko, not that i know. let me see if you’re in the spam filter.
April 6th, 2010 at 11:40 am
strange. you were in spam. i approved them. tell me if that happens again, i think i can proactively prevent your email address from being labelled spam….
April 6th, 2010 at 11:44 am
danny, i think that’s right for jews. but catholics? i think 9 is a small N so some of it is variance. fwiw, thomas returned to the catholic church after confirmation. he attended an episcopal church with his wife before that. the more interesting thing is the lack of note. just doesn’t matter for us.
it could be thought that very conservative lawyers with elite educations tend to be catholic. harriet miers would have represented for evangelicals, one of her positives. but she was mocked by some conservatives for being a graduate of southern methodist university.
April 6th, 2010 at 1:29 pm
very conservative lawyers with elite educations tend to be catholic
It’s not enough to be conservative, a Republican-appointed Supreme Court justice must 100% dependable on abortion, which would disqualify someone a conservative ideologue like Posner. Catholics are probably more dependable on this issue than Protestants of a similar educational background.
I see from the Wikipedia entries that most of the justices had been in various government positions after graduating from Law School; Kennedy & Stevens are the only one who spent a substantial length of time in private practice, so this contributes to an extra East Coast bias, which also helps explain the Catholic dominance.
[Miers] was mocked by some conservatives for being a graduate of southern methodist university
I’m sure it wasn’t just that – she flunked the Senate hearings at a time when the Republicans were in charge; she probably was comparatively a lightweight. What’s dumbfounding that 4 out of 9 justices who arose in such a hyper-meritocracy should have ruled the way they did on Ricci.
April 6th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
re: abortion, looked in the GSS for 1998-2008.
those with graduate degrees, yes to abortion for any reason:
protestant: 56%
catholic: 45%
wordsum 9 & 10:
protestant: 51%
catholic: 42%
April 6th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
***If Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens retires, and is replaced by Elena Kagan (the favorite), then the Supreme Court of the United States of America will have no Protestants on the bench. This in a nation which is 50% Protestant. ***
And 2.2% Jewish according to the 2008 census, but 3 out of 9 Justices will be Jewish if Kagan or Garland are appointed. Interesting article from Wall Street Journal on Racial Politics in Supreme Court:
“The 1,000-plus demonstrators were protesting the Supreme Court’s record in hiring black and Hispanic clerks. Of the clerks who have worked for the currently sitting justices, only 1.7% have been black and 1.2% have been Hispanic. “This is not ambiguous,” says Rep. Albert R. Wynn (D., Md.). “This is clear [discrimination]. The numbers speak for themselves.”
But do they?
Ethnic groups don’t distribute themselves evenly throughout the workforce. Asians occupy more than 40% of the freshman class at the University of California at Berkeley. Jews, 2% of the full-time working population, make up 26% of the nation’s law professors. Jews also tend to make up about 30% of the Supreme Court clerks, which means non-Jewish whites are underrepresented among th e clerks compared to the population at large. Asians are slightly overrepresented, at 4% of the clerks compared to 3% of the overall population. Yet surely this isn’t a result of vast pro-Asian, pro-Jewish or anti-Gentile bigotry. Disproportion does not prove discrimination.”
http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/clerks.htm
April 6th, 2010 at 6:00 pm
the census doesn’t do religious surveys, so i assume you’re talking about *the american religious identification survey* or *religious landscape survey*
April 6th, 2010 at 6:07 pm
interesting about al wynn, i recall liberals hated him for being a hack. anyway, you’d have to probably look at the representation at top-tier schools. can’t find that on google too easily, though probably findable.
April 7th, 2010 at 4:13 pm
[...] See Razib Khan’s April 6th post, recently linked at the ADF Alliance Alert, on this same issue: America, 2010 [...]
April 7th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
My main surprise is that Hindus are only 5% of the doctors and jews are only 7% of the doctors
April 7th, 2010 at 6:20 pm
med students, not doctors. i’ve never see a % higher than 5 for indian american doctors.
April 9th, 2010 at 3:08 pm
The issue is treated here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125641988
April 10th, 2010 at 9:13 pm
Ann Althouse asked why nobody was asking about it. Andrew Gelman thought she was joking.
April 11th, 2010 at 3:07 am
[...] Razib Khan – “America, 2010” [...]
April 11th, 2010 at 8:12 am
Conservatives support Catholics on the Court because they figure they will oppose abortion. Liberal support Catholics on the Court because it gives them cover on abortion: we figure that Catholics at least have given the question deep thought.
April 11th, 2010 at 10:11 am
Well, the president is Protestant. Doesn’t that count for something?
April 12th, 2010 at 2:05 am
The plural of “casus belli” is “casus belli”.
April 13th, 2010 at 10:35 am
[...] post on the religious make up of the Supreme Court is getting a bit of traffic spike due to current events. Specifically, John Paul Stevens, the high [...]