I pray that we see at least one evangelical among the nine black-robed judges at the U.S. Supreme Court sometime in the near future. Is that too much to ask? I mean, people who believed what evangelicals now do founded this country, and did most of the heavy lifting before 1920 or so in building it up. “You built it, you paid for it, it’s yours,” as I once told my evangelical friend Eric Metaxas.

Last time I checked, the Constitution does not allow religious tests for the purpose of excluding people from public office. Not even evangelicals. But you might not realize that if you’ve ever watched a Senate confirmation hearing, or if you look at the people who’ve served on the U.S. Supreme Court over the past 40 years or so. Our current court right now is made up of

a lapsed, irreligious Jew (Elena Kagan)

a lapsed, heretical Catholic (Sonia Sotomayor)

a nondenominational liberal Protestant who mutters about “God” occasionally and can’t define what a “woman” is (Ketanji Brown Jackson).
a pro-LGBTQ Episcopalian who believes in one God, at most (Neil Gorsuch)
“Originalist” Catholics who bind themselves to the Constitution and the actual teachings of our Church, thumbing their noses alike at the legal Zeitgeist and our lavender Vatican (Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas). And a sixth group, which is really the problem:

Bourgeois, assimilated Irish-American Catholics — that is to say, and I’ve got to be blunt, wannabe Episcopalians (John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett).

A third of our court, all sadly appointed by Republicans, comes from this last group. Younger, less ornery, and less interesting than Group 5, they grew up well after Vatican II, so they’re used to seeing bishops (and now a pope) treat Catholic tradition and doctrine like Scrubbing Bubbles Flushable Wipes. Why should the Constitution be any different? If the pope can shift from passing on (traditio) unchanged the apostolic Deposit of Faith to a “living Magisterium” which quotes the United Nations and itself instead of Scripture, why shouldn’t the Court do the same, via a “living Constitution” that just implements whatever the nice people currently at Harvard and on Park Avenue think is best?

The Lace Curtains on the Overton Window

There are many threads to unravel in the rat’s nest that forms this last group’s habits and worldview.

On the one hand, they come from a subculture of Catholic immigrants desperate to shake the taint of being ignorant, parochial shanty-dwellers. Such people will never remove the lace curtains from their Overton Windows — for instance, by admitting that Obamacare was unconstitutional, that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud, or that the lawfare against Donald Trump was lawless and ought to be shredded.

Can you imagine three judges appointed by a Democrat president conceivably voting — on the lame pretext of judicial “standing” — to shut down, unexamined, credible charges that a Republican had stolen an election from the Democrat who’d appointed two of them? No, of course you can’t — because only Republicans saw off their own limbs off like that, especially judges from the squishy, risk-averse social climbers of Group 6.

Group 6 also benefits from cronyism and tribalism. Donald Trump foolishly outsourced his choice of judges to the Federalist Society — the same group that would pile on and support the outrageous claim that he should be banned from the ballot as an “insurrectionist” under a novel (made-up) interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Want to know how the Federalist Society works? So do I. I heard an anecdote that gives me a hint, though. A good friend of mine who writes here at The Stream was already a pro-life leader back in 2003 when George W. Bush was looking for a SCOTUS nominee. A current leader of the Federalist Society told people, in my friend’s presence, that John Roberts was a solid pick for the U.S. Supreme Court because “he attends an Opus Dei evening of reflection once a month.” In other words, “He’s one of us” — that is, a Group 6 Catholic — and that should be enough.

Stop Outsourcing the Culture War to Catholics

Sadly, that has been enough for evangelicals for decades because they largely outsourced intellectual leadership of the pro-life and pro-family movements to us Catholics. That made a kind of sense when the mostly solid John Paul II was pope. We Catholics did start the pro-life movement, back when the Southern Baptist Convention was welcoming Roe v. Wade. More importantly, we have a sophisticated tradition of moral reasoning that rests on Natural Law, not proof-texts or other religious authority. We taught Protestant critics of abortion and same-sex “marriage” how to argue from “human flourishing” and human nature, rather than Leviticus and Galatians — which comes in handy, given the First Amendment and all.

But we also have some problems apart from the sociological drawbacks of Irish-American immigrants (such as my mother’s family). Catholics formed after Vatican II who didn’t rebel against its rainbows-and-unicorns claptrap are used to seeing authorities betray and subvert the principles and institutions they’re meant to protect. They have no model of faithful stewardship and principled leadership. And they’re all too tempted to outsource their consciences to those compromised authorities on the premise that God must be guiding them — even when they distort or compromise ancient Catholic teachings. If the Vatican can do that, why can’t the Court?

I pointed this problem out specifically back in 2019, when I warned against Trump nominating Amy Coney Barrett for the court. As I wrote at Human Events, after John Paul II upended papal support for capital punishment, which dates back 1,700 years and rests on the Covenant of Noah, Barrett coauthored a legal paper saying that it means Catholic judges couldn’t apply the death penalty and might have to recuse themselves from such cases.

It was bad enough that Barrett was willing to accept John Paul’s weak arguments for contradicting his predecessors. That spoke against her intellect. Much worse, she thought Catholic judges should follow the Vatican, rather than the U.S. Constitution. That speaks of a character flaw, a misunderstanding of her duties as a citizen and a jurist — one from which her fellow Catholics Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas never have suffered.

We’re Not Making Catholics Like Scalia Anymore

I just mentioned three great jurists from Group 5, described above. You might call them “trad” or “Originalist” Catholics because they don’t watch the Vatican’s Immemorial Apostolic Magisterium Ticker(TM) to see what they’re supposed to believe today, as opposed to yesterday. If I might paraphrase Kinky Friedman’s immortal song, “They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” we’re not making Catholics like Scalia anymore. Or at least not enough who can get into top-notch law schools, since they aren’t transgender Pacific Islanders.

So that brings me to a last-ditch, desperate solution: How about we get some representation on our nation’s highest court of the religious group that founded this country and still forms the core of its struggling conservative movement: evangelical Protestants? (We can call it a DEI appointment, if that makes people happy.)

Of course, there are no guarantees that the kind of evangelical who gets through law school and a legal career won’t at some point go squishy in the center the way Russell Moore, David French, and so many other Regime Christians did. Plenty of Baptists and Methodists smear themselves with White Guilt Sunscreen (SPF 15,000) in an effort to pass for Park Avenue Unitarians.

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Unless (this will sound pretty radical, and goes against my grain, but I think it’s the only answer) we find ourselves a Calvinist — maybe of the Reformed Baptist variety. Our Founding Fathers were 80-90% Calvinists themselves, with a few Deists and one Catholic thrown in for seasoning. The strict respect in which Calvinists hold Scripture ought to apply in the civic realm to the Constitution, too. Nobody in Rome (or even Moscow, Idaho) could monkey with black-letter law.

The suspicion of human nature, distrust of the world, and rigid rejection of sentimental innovation that comes with Calvinism might make for a gloomy creed — but it absolutely made America, full-stop.

Maybe now it could help make America lawful again.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First. 

The post As a Catholic, I Want an Evangelical on the Supreme Court. (Okay, I Want a Calvinist) appeared first on The Stream.



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