Although slightly less than half of contemporary Americans are Protestant, they enjoy virtually zero representation on the U.S. Supreme Court.

I learned this curious fact today while reading a 2017 HuffPost article on the court’s makeup at that time.

I say Protestants are “virtually” unrepresented on the court because it is now comprised of five Catholic justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts; three Jewish members; and one jurist — Neil Gorsuch — who is a bit of a religious enigma.

Although Gorsuch hasn’t publicly proclaimed what faith he actually follows, he and his family have long attended a local Episcopal church, which is a kind of Catholic-lite, quasi-Protestant denomination. Opiscopalism descends from an original branch of Catholicism in England that broke off from Rome to become the Church of England (aka, the Anglican Church) under King Henry VIII, when the monarch took umbrage at Pope Clement VII’s refusal to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he could marry another woman.

But it was a mostly symbolic revolution based on royal pique, not religious dogma. In 1534, when Henry formally separated English Catholicism from the church hierarchy in Rome and named himself the head of newly founded Church of England, not much changed in how the English worshipped.

“The monasteries were suppressed [in England], but few other changes were immediately made, since Henry intended that the English church would remain Catholic, though separated from Rome,” according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica article on the Church of England.

So, to call Gorsuch a “Protestant” is somewhat squishy and imprecise. Compared to most mainstream evangelical Protestants in America, he’s more Catholic than not. After all, even the Episcopal Church refers to itself as “Protestant, yet Catholic,” according to an article in the online news site Quartz. It’s also important to note that Gorsuch was raised Catholic, and his brother still attends Catholic mass.

That Protestants are now virtually absent on the Supreme Court reflects another interesting development in the nation’s religious and cultural evolution: the makeup of the court is now the opposite of what it used to be.

“Since the court’s inception in 1789, there have been 91 Protestant judges named out of 113 total justices [about 81 percent],” Quartz reported. “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.”

Indeed, Catholics and Jews have not only not been seated on the Supreme Court for the lion’s share of its history, those two sects were long and viciously hated and discriminated against by then-majority Protestants in America.

“The first Roman Catholic was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1836, but the second and third had to wait until 1894 and 1898. The first Jewish appointment was made in 1916,” Quartz reported in 2017. “Since the Constitution was ratified, there have been a grand total of 112 Supreme Court Justices. … Only 12 have been Roman Catholic (11 percent), and only 8 have been Jewish (7 percent). Seen in this light, it is pretty stunning that of only 20 Jewish and Roman Catholic Justices in all American history, almost half are now currently serving on the Supreme Court.”

The only difference for the court since 2017 is that Catholic-lite Gorsuch is a justice now, replacing the late Catholic-heavy Antonin Scalia. There are still no evangelical Protestants, who are ascendant politically at the moment and have insinuated their influence into the White House and gained the president’s ear.

Presently, here’s the religious makeup of the court: Catholics: Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh (who replaced retiring Catholic Anthony Kennedy), Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Sonia Sotomayor. Presumable quasi-Catholics: Gorsuch (who replaced the deceased Scalia). Jews: Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan.

This tilt on the court is very new. As late as the 1980s, “there was a clear de facto religious quota on the Supreme Court, with one Jew and one Roman Catholic sitting in what was called the ‘Jewish seat’ and the ‘Catholic seat.’ There was no law which compelled this, but it was a strong 20th-century political tradition — one eventually expanded to also include an ‘African-American seat’ and then a ‘woman’s seat,’” according to Quartz.

The court’s long-dominant Protestant presence first shrank to a minority in 1994 when Jewish jurist Stephen Breyer replaced Protestant Harry Blackman, a Methodist. After 2019, with death of John Paul Stevens (the last remaining Protestant justice), the court became exclusively Jewish and Roman Catholic.

All this is not to say that the Supreme Court is completely maleable religiously. For instance, no Othodox Christian, Mormon, Pentecostal, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist or Sikh justices have ever been seated on the court, or any from innumerable other non-Catholic, non-Jewish sects.

And, of particular relevance to this nontheist blog, no atheists have ever been appointed to the high court, either.

It might be a while yet before any of that happens, if the quirky pace of spiritual change on the court continues.

(NOTE: This article is revised, with corrections and clarifications regarding Justice Gorsuch’s religious affiliation. He attends an Episcopal, not Presbyterian, church.)

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