The historic shift in the US Supreme Courts religious makeup (plus or minus a Gorsuch)
Ephrat Livni
27 mins ago
US Supreme Court justices are secular clerics of the highest order. The Constitution is their guiding document—a set of basic commandments—and textual analysis is their practice, used to dissect thorny moral issues. All share a reverence for the law: It would be impossible to get the gig without a religious devotion to its rule.
Still, a shift in the religious backgrounds of justices in recent years arguably represents a dramatic change in American culture. There is no religious test for Supreme Court justices, nor any requirement that the bench represent the makeup of the nation. Yet it’s notable that court has gone from all-Protestant origins to now mostly-Catholic, with one third of the bench Jewish.
This may indicate the great rise of the latter two minority faiths overcoming discrimination, as noted by the Huffington Post in 2014. It may also be indicative of a takeover of the nation’s most powerful institutions by liberal elites—or the fact that Judaism and Catholicism have a long tradition of legal reasoning, unlike Protestantism, as Christianity Today said in 2010.
Since the court’s inception in 1789, there have been 91 Protestant judges named out of 113 total justices. When the high court was established, justices were chosen from the ranks of the Founding Fathers, who were overwhelmingly Protestant. Of these, 33 have been Episcopalian.
In recent decades, the tables have turned completely. Currently, there are five Catholics, three Jews, and one unknown on the bench. The Catholics are chief justice John Roberts, and justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Sonia Sotomayor. The Jewish justices are Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan. The latest to join the high court, Neil Gorsuch, is possibly a Protestant—specifically Episcopalian. But he hasn’t actually specified his faith.
https://qz.com/972686/the-religions-of-the-us-supreme-court-justices-tell-the-tale-of-a-changing-nation/