Neat trick
Wait a minute though.
Wait.
Religion is about beliefs. It’s also about practices, rituals and so on, but beliefs are important. Beliefs influence how people think, and what people think – high court justices included.
How can we evaluate Supreme Court nominees if we’re not allowed to evaluate their beliefs?
It’s a nice little racket the religions have worked out for themselves in the US: their freedom (of religion) is inscribed in the Bill of Rights, so Catholic bishops have the “freedom” to do their best to police women’s bodies while women do not have the freedom to say that a Catholic Supreme Court justice might have a Catholic view of abortion.
How can we evaluate potential justices’ beliefs if we can’t evaluate them?
Especially when we already have a court dominated by Catholics and evangelical Christians. It couldn’t hurt to make the court look more like the country, could it?
Taking religion into account is a sticky thing that requires a delicate touch. It can simultaneously be true that someone’s religion can provide insight into beliefs and attitudes, something which is useful when trying to predict how a candidate or nominee will execute their duties. On the other hand, if one’s view of that religion (or lack thereof) is warped in some way, then one potentially can be led to the wrong decision by considering religion.
The worst way to use religion is as a marker of tribe. “That person’s religion is not my religion.” Or, “That person’s religion is not one of the approved religions.”
To consider it in the first way is fallible, but that is no different from any other indicator. To consider religion in the second way is bad. When people speak of religious discrimination in this context, it really seems like they’re assuming that people always use the second mode. I don’t know if that’s true for most people, but it may be, especially in this Balkanized time.
The issue in judging is whether religious beliefs affect the believer’s view of the law. In other words, can the nominee truthfully take the oath of office, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution (a secular document) as the supreme governing law of the land.
I once read an interview of Antonin Scalia, in which he stated that he believed in an actual literal biblical devil. I think that would have been useful to know before he was appointed as a judge at any level. He didn’t believe that human actions are the only factual matters at issue in a case; he believed that there are extra, supernatural facts operative in a case, facts that appeared nowhere in any evidentiary record, and were thus hidden and unproven assumptions that influenced his views of the merits of cases. It’s important to know whether a nominee will or won’t allow such personal beliefs to shape judicial decisions.
Where do we stand now? I think we had SIX right-wing catholics out of nine justices. Not exactly representative.