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May 19th, 2010
08:58 AM ET
Do 6 Catholics + 3 Jews = 9 Protestants?
By Stephen Prothero, CNN Belief Blog contributor I think I might have done the math wrong. Shortly after President Obama nominated Elena Kagan (who is Jewish) to replace Justice John Paul Stevens (who is Protestant) on the Supreme Court, I was quoted in Boston Globe, Beliefnet, and CNN stories, saying that her nomination represented one giant step away from the not-so-good-old-days of Protestant parochialism. "I don't think this means Protestant America is over,” I told the AP, “but I do think it means the old way of thinking about Protestant America is over." On Monday morning in USA Today I argued, against bloggers like Beliefnet’s Rod Dreher, that the religious commitments of judges matter. I then called for a more religiously diverse Supreme Court. Why not an agnostic? An evangelical? A Muslim? In all these articles, I was doing the math like this: 6 Catholics + 3 Jews = 0 Protestants. I’m no longer sure that’s right. Shortly after I filed my USA Today piece, I had a conversation with Nora Rubel, a University of Rochester religion professor and an observant Jew. Professor Rubel said that most Catholics in America think pretty much like most Protestants, so the Supreme Court’s Protestant/Catholic mix doesn’t really matter. I then observed that many Reform Jews are equally Protestantized, which led us to wonder whether the Jewish/Christian mix doesn’t really matter either. The Protestant ethos has long ruled American political institutions. The current Congress is 55 percent Protestant, and every president except for John F. Kennedy has been an heir of the Reformation. But Protestantism also colors America’s religious institutions, and not always inside the lines of Protestant denominations. Today many U.S. Catholics and Jews think like Protestants. They believe that religion is something we choose as individuals rather than inherit as communities, and they view it primarily in terms of faith rather than practice. None of this comes from either the Catholic brain of Aquinas or the Jewish mind of Maimonides. The progenitor of this faith-based understanding of religion (who also happens to be the patron saint of religion rulings at the U.S. Supreme Court) is the American Protestant thinker William James, who famously defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” When Supreme Court justices genuflect before this subjective understanding of religion - and most, perhaps all, of today’s sitting justices do - they are thinking like Protestants. And there is little to suggest that Elena Kagan, whose bat mitzvah occurred in a Reconstructionist synagogue in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, would not go and do likewise. So if you do the math more carefully, it may go something like this: 6 Catholics + 3 Jews = 9 Protestants. Either way, we could use more religious diversity on the Supreme Court. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Stephen Prothero. |
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The CNN Belief Blog covers the faith angles of the day's biggest stories, from breaking news to politics to entertainment, fostering a global conversation about the role of religion and belief in readers' lives. It's edited by CNN's Daniel Burke with contributions from Eric Marrapodi and CNN's worldwide news gathering team. |
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I took the little 15 qusiteon online quiz that came with that story I only missed one, but I have to admit, it is only because our youth group did a study on the basics of other religions about 6 months ago. Prior to doing that study, I would have failed miserably.
The law schools attended by the Supreme Court Justices should eliminate any religious influence on their decisions??
To wit:
Harvard Law School
Harry Blackmun
Louis Brandeis
William J. Brennan, Jr.
Stephen Breyer – current
Harold Hitz Burton
Felix Frankfurter
Melville Fuller – did not graduate
Ruth Bader Ginsburg — graduated from Columbia Law School
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Anthony Kennedy – current
William Henry Moody – did not graduate
Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr.
John Roberts – current
Edward Terry Sanford
Antonin Scalia – current
David Hackett Souter – current
Yale Law School
Samuel Alito – current
Henry Baldwin
David Davis
Abe Fortas
George Shiras, Jr.
Sonia Sotomayor – current
Potter Stewart
William Strong
Clarence Thomas – current
Byron White
Columbia Law School
Benjamin N. Cardozo – completed two years, did not graduate
William O. Douglas
Ruth Bader Ginsburg – also attended Harvard Law School – current
Charles Evans Hughes
Joseph McKenna – studied at the law school, did not graduate
Stanley Forman Reed – also attended University of Virginia School of Law, did not graduate from either
Harlan Fiske Stone
Maybe we should be concerned that most of the current judges attended either Harvard or Yale law schools????
I disagree with the author that Catholics and Protestants think alike. In my experience, Catholics, even non-practicing Catholics, are used to the group telling the individual what to do, whereas Protestants are used to the Puritan ethic of individual self-determination (these used to be the underlying differences between the Democrats and the Republicans, and why Catholics and Labor Unions are generally part of the Democratic party). However, he's the expert and most likely has broader data than my anecdotal observations. My concern about the Supreme Court is not the individual justices' religious affiliation/cultural upbringing, or their political leanings, it's that some of the more recent justices don't appear to have superior legal minds needed for the Court.