Evangelicals have gotten all the attention, but it is the Catholics that are reshaping American life.
By Catholics, I mean the six Roman Catholics that comprise the conservative super-majority on the United States Supreme Court: John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barret.
How a series of Protestant presidents created a Supreme Court without a single Protestant, Pentecostal, Orthodox, Evangelical, Muslim or even agnostic justice is itself a remarkable and mysterious thing. But how these six Catholic justices are hell-bent on changing the law in these United States is even more astounding.
Dwight Moody
It began, of course, with Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 decision to force public school integration in places where racial segregation had been the norm for centuries. This was the first in a series of court decisions that empowered the federal government to enforce legal norms upon people who did not like it. Deep in the resistance to integration was nurtured the regional affection for an old loyalty: states’ rights.
The Supreme Court (leading other federal agencies) pushed their values of equality and opportunity to every corner of the country: public schools could not force their religion on students (through public prayer and Bible reading); states could not prevent people who wished to marry across racial boundaries; states could not prevent a woman from securing contraception or an abortion; states could not erect barriers to voting by minority people; and finally, states could not prevent same-sex couples from getting married or getting a job.
Suffice it to say that none of these changes in the law of the land would have occurred in the first place had Chief Justice John Roberts and his band of Catholic justices been in place during the 1950s and subsequent decades.
These new legal and moral rules over the last 70 years made people mad, people who did not want to live or learn with racial minorities, people who wanted to pray Christian prayers in public settings; people who thought a fetus was the same as a person; people who wanted to keep minorities (especially Blacks) under the thumb of white authorities; and people who detested gay and lesbian people. Mostly, it was people who did not want the federal government to tell them what was legal, what was moral, what was acceptable.
The movement to resist all this gathered steam. The first three efforts were the creation of the Moral Majority in 1979 by white, fundamentalist preachers like Jerry Falwell, the launch of the Federalist Society in 1982, and the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention beginning in 1979 and culminating in 1993.
The Moral Majority broadened into a grassroots, populist movement to save the United States from its internal enemies (such as Democrats, liberals and the federal government). The Federalist Society created an intellectual culture to support states’ rights; all six of the aforementioned Supreme Court justices came up through the Federalist Society. The religiously fueled movement that toppled the SBC has now captured the Republican Party, the Supreme Court and a dozen state capitols (such as Missouri, Florida and Alabama). For four years, they even occupied the White House.
Donald Trump is just one, temporary expression of this grassroots, religion-fueled pushback against what many of us would call progress toward a more perfect union. We support the full integration of people of color; we like the wall of separation between church and state; we welcome the LGBTQ community and celebrate their participation in American society; and we resist the instinct of these would be saviors of America to get between people, their families and their doctors.
“The evangelicals (including Pentecostals) are getting all the attention, all the credit and all the blame for what is happening in the country, but it is the Catholic Court that is doing the damage.”
But this Catholic Court, embracing worldviews, legal theories (like “originalism”), and moral judgments, some of which are at odds with even their own Catholic faith (including Pope Francis), is bound and determined to unravel all of this. Little by little, year by year, case by case, they are on a course to push all these advances back to state houses that have proved, over centuries, unable and unwilling to establish justice and let righteousness roll down like a mighty river (to quote one of the great prophets of biblical religion, one they never seem to read).
States’ rights was the banner carried by Confederate states as they rebelled against the United States and launched the Civil War of 1861 to 1865. Many living in these same regions are again arming themselves, organizing into militias and talking openly about war, rebellion and secession. The armed invasion of the United States Capitol on January 6 is but an example of what they are willing and waiting to do.
Yes, the evangelicals (including Pentecostals) are getting all the attention, all the credit and all the blame for what is happening in the country, but it is the Catholic Court that is doing the damage. Not in my lifetime will any of us see the triumph of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” over this conservative, religious and white vision of common life shaped according to the standards of the 18th century.
God, help us endure.
Dwight A. Moody is an author, minister, scholar and host of the media site The Meeting House.
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