If Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens retires, and is replaced by Elena Kagan (the favorite), then the Supreme Court of the United States of America will have no Protestants on the bench. This in a nation which is 50% Protestant. Until after World War II the United States of America was in its self-identity fundamentally Protestant (see American Judaism and Catholicism and American Freedom for histories of how Jews & Catholics entered the American religious mainstream in the middle of the 20th century after a century of rejection by the Protestant establishment).* This is clear when you read about attempts to “Christianize” Roman Catholic Filipinos after the conquest of that nation from Spain in the early 20th century, or the reality that both American Catholicism and Judaism were often torn by conflicts between explicit assimilationists who wished to emulate the Protestant congregational model dominant in the United States, and those which argued for the perpetuation of a separate distinctive religious culture outside of the mainstream. And yet today this doesn’t matter much because the assimilationists won. Consider the fact that Stephen Breyer, who is Jewish, has a daughter who is an Episcopal priest (her mother is an English Anglican). Sonia Sotomayor is likely to be indistinguishable from the other Left-leaning justices, though she shares a Roman Catholic confession with the conservatives on the court. Religion in the United States by and large has become a personal label which serves as a marker toward one’s origins and one’s current loyalties, rather than a confession which indicates identity with a “thick” and exclusive subculture (the Amish, Hasidic Jews and Fundamentalist Mormons being exceptions). In this way the United States is like South Korea or many African nations, where religious pluralism and individual fluidity in choice and identity are the rule and not the exception.
The contrast with race and sex is notable. The predominance of males and whites on the bench is often commented on, but less so the fact that Roman Catholics are overrepresented by a factor of three, and Jews by nearly an order of magnitude. In fact, there seem to be a dearth of white Protestants at the pinnacles of American politics today. In the Congressional leadership Harry Reid is a Mormon, Nancy Pelosi & John Boehner are Roman Catholic. Steny Hoyer and Mitch McConnell “represent” for white Protestants, but the Vice President is a Roman Catholic.
* It is correct that many of the Founding Fathers, most famously Thomas Jefferson, were not orthodox Christians. But they were cultural Christians, more specifically cultural Protestants, and particularly of the denominations of their ancestors. Jefferson and George Washington were affiliated in some way throughout their life with the Episcopal Church of the Virginia gentry. John Adams was a Unitarian Christian whose outlook was shaped by the origins of Unitarianism in New England as a liberal reform movement within Congregational Calvinist Christianity. As such, the Founders shared Protestant suspicions of the Roman Catholic Church, whether it be due to Reform Christian antagonism of old or a newer Enlightenment anti-clericalism. Recall that one of the causa belli for colonial rebellion against the British crown was the toleration given to French Roman Catholics in Canada (this was later discretely removed from enumerations of causes because of the possibility that Quebec would join the rebellion, as well as the need for alliance with Roman Catholic France).
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