Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took a tumble at work last week and was hospitalized with three broken ribs. Widespread panic among liberals immediately broke out, with speculation that President Trump will soon be appointing another conservative justice, solidifying a 6-3 conservative majority on the high court.
Hollywood celebrities took to social media to volunteer to give her their ribs or internal organs, to keep her alive if necessary. What are they thinking? Do they believe if they hook Ginsburg’s brain up to wires in a jar to keep her “alive” that President Trump will never be able to fill her seat?
The fact that replacing a judge under the rules of the Constitution worries so many people to such a great extent shows that we have allowed the Supreme Court to grow too powerful. This is a function of laziness on the part of Americans, but it is also a function of religion, as we’ll explain below.
There is a lot of speculation that Justice Amy Coney Barrett, of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, will be President Trump’s next choice for the Supreme Court. (If Trump wins reelection in 2020, he will likely replace at least two more Supreme Court Justices between now and 2024.)
Barrett checks all of the right boxes when it comes to a conservative jurist: Pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, et cetera. Yet we could not help but feel a sense of disappointment when did some more research on Amy Coney Barrett.
Our disappointment was expressed very well by the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Before his death, Scalia lamented the lack of diversity on the Supreme Court. Scalia was not talking about racial diversity or even Republican/Democrat political diversity, but theological diversity.
Justice Scalia understood that if the Supreme Court was to be interpreting laws based on the Protestant US Constitution, at least some of the members of the court ought to be Protestants!
A society’s approach to the law is deeply rooted in theology – whether anyone wants to hear it or not. A majority Protestant nation like America has a very different approach to the law and individual rights than, say, a Hindu or Muslim majority country, or even a post-Christian nation like Germany or France. The theological approach to the law has a trickle-down effect on all aspects of a nation’s culture.
The atheist government in Communist China commissioned a years-long economic study of the United States about 20 years ago, to determine why America was so prosperous. When the Chinese economists came back with an answer – that the “Protestant business ethic and Christian approach to the law” was the reason behind America’s economic prosperity, the Communist Party quickly smothered the study (and possibly several of the economists).
At the time when Scalia expressed the lack of theological diversity on the court, it was made up of six Roman Catholics and three Jewish judges. Though Scalia was a Catholic himself, he was saddened that there was never a Protestant perspective present during deliberations of court cases.
Today there is one Protestant on the Supreme Court – Justice Neil Gorsuch. Amy Coney Barrett is Roman Catholic. Why is this lack of theological diversity on the Supreme Court a problem?
Because Roman Catholicism and Judaism have different approaches to the law than Protestantism. In Protestant Christianity, there is one mediator between man and God: Jesus Christ. Along with being personally responsible to God, you receive the blessings of individual rights from God. This the foundation of what is meant when we say that our rights do not stem from government – because the Christian God is higher in authority than the federal government.
In Roman Catholicism and Judaism, human priests and rabbis are your intermediary with God. You have no individual responsibility to God under those theologies. Take your sins to the priest or the rabbi. Ultimate authority under Catholicism and Judaism is therefore held by man and his institutions, personified in the government. Under such a system, individual rights will eventually be rendered non-existent, even with a full 9-0 majority “conservative” Supreme Court.
Little by little, power is shifting away from individual rights in America and toward an all-powerful government. Continuing to run away from our Protestant roots will only accelerate this process. Justice Antonin Scalia understood this. Sadly, many Protestants do not.
Amy Coney Barrett may turn out to be a decent judge on the Supreme Court. Scalia certainly was. But her eventual nomination will be a sign of a trend that has continued for many years, which has kept Protestant judges from interpreting American laws.
