The recent senate confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett, the newest member of SCOTUS, were festooned by a wealth of commentary on her judicial record, legal philosophy, and religious beliefs. All three dimensions have been picked apart relentlessly by a ravenous throng of journalists and opinion-makers. But it’s Coney Barrett’s conservative faith – particularly as it intersects with her public and professional life – that seems to have generated far more heat than light.
This is something of which progressives are frequently guilty. Indeed, reading self-identified leftists speak darkly about the alleged consequences of having yet another religious conservative on the supreme court is to be engulfed by a miasma of ignorance, predictable assumptions, conceptual sloppiness, and outright fearmongering.
A recent article from The Guardian illustrates the problem well. In it, writer Arwa Mahdawi takes aim at Coney Barrett’s ‘regressive’ faith and the allegedly baleful implications our intrepid pundit argues will flow from her role as a high court justice. Mahdawi’s tone is set early on. Striking a distinctly Atwoodian note, she decries the reality of a 6-3 conservative super-majority on the bench of SCOTUS: ‘Goodbye civil rights, hello Gilead’ is a pithy smear against Coney Barrett’s religious conservatism, as cheap as it is shallow. Mahdawi follows this up with a series of rhetorical questions, each one marking a step towards the summit of Mount Hysteria. The apogee of this frenzied panic is reached when she asks, with all the gravitas she can muster, ‘Are we going to look at The Handmaid’s Tale and realize it was a documentary?’
It’s easy to demonize traditionalists as would-be agents of a religiously totalitarian state. But what evidence does Mahdawi actually possess for these (implicit) claims? On what grounds does she justify her fears concerning the supposed emergence of a patriarchal dystopia — one where women are reduced to mere incubators and marital ornaments?
In all honesty, the evidence Mahdawi tries to marshal is rather inflated. Take her depiction of People of Praise, a charismatic, ecumenical (though largely Catholic) community of which Coney Barrett and her family are members. Mahdawi first attempts to draw a rather ominous relationship between Coney Barrett’s involvement in People of Praise and any future judicial rulings the learned legal scholar make. Seemingly convinced that People of Praise is really just a bizarre, fledgling Gilead, Mahdawi would have us believe that Coney Barrett is an agent for some kind of Christian dominionist agenda. At the very least, she apparently thinks that Coney Barrett’s personal spirituality will, of its nature, spill over into her professional life. That indeed is the insinuation, as one reads of Mahdawi’s doubts that Coney Barrett ‘would leave’ her personal faith ‘out of her work’. For our correspondent, this link bodes ill for (e.g.) free access to abortion and those concerned about LGBT rights.
What Coney Barrett’s confirmation will mean for these progressive articles of faith remains uncertain. But like other such broad-sides, Mahdawi’s argument is littered with a series of insults and caricatures, all held together by a wilful incuriosity about something with which she is obviously unfamiliar. A small aside offers a sharp glimpse of some of these flaws. Describing Coney Barrett’s faith commitments, Mahdawi sarcastically suggests that ‘handmaid’ – up until recently, a term used by People of Praise to denote female leaders – is ‘not-at-all creepy’. Little does she realize that this has nothing to do with the Margaret Atwood novel, but is rather a biblical reference to Mary’s declaration of servanthood before God in Luke 1:38 (It shouldn’t be forgotten that Luke’s Gospel esteems humble service, not simply for women, but for men as well [e.g., 2:29]. Additionally, the evangelist presents Jesus himself as the servant par excellence, whom all Christians are called to emulate [cf. 22:25-27; Phil 2:5ff] – hardly a blueprint for religious despotism.) This kind of well-poisoning tactic may delight tribal allies, but it does almost nothing to advance genuine understanding of the so-called Other.
It’s certainly true that People of Praise, as Mahdawi notes, prohibits both abortion and same-sex relationships among its members. Moreover, those covenanting with the group maintain traditional gender relationships, both within its institutional structure and their own marriages. But none of this should be surprising or unfamiliar; in fact, opposition to abortion and homosexual conduct is part of the warp and woof of Catholic dogma, having been elements in the church’s doctrinal architecture from its inception. And while the notion that men are to have authority over their wives is contested within Christian denominations, it has long been part of mainstream traditional belief. Such has been true whenever a practising, orthodox Catholic has been nominated for public office – and without the sort of nightmarish vision imagined by Mahdawi coming to pass.
Mahdawi’s lack of proportion leads her into other errors. Consider her seeming inability to distinguish between the nature and purpose of People of Praise (on the one hand), and the American body politic (on the other). One shouldn’t have to point this out, but I’ll do so anyway. There’s a key conceptual difference between a voluntary religious association composed of freely covenanting individuals, and a secular, pluralistic political community constituted by a diverse array of people. Mahdawi’s fears concerning the group’s preparedness to discipline any members found engaging in illicit sexual practices rest on a non sequitur. As with all such associations, the moral strictures that People of Praise upholds – and any disciplinary action that may follow a member’s failure to abide by them – apply only to those who have elected to submit themselves to the group’s covenant; they bear no relationship to broader American society, which functions according to a very different register of laws and obligations.
As such, while a judge may remain a committed member of a religious assembly, even a highly conservative one, it simply doesn’t follow that she will seek to impose the group’s values writ large across the country as a whole. In a liberal democratic state, this would signal a fundamental transgression of the private-public divide: that is, the illicit extrapolation of highly specific norms and principles to encompass the broader community. One might as well claim that because a certain judicial officer is an atheist and belongs to a humanist society, her views would see her try and prevent religious institutions from engaging in acts of worship. Any judge aspiring to complete impartiality before the law – and indeed, anyone with a modicum of legal competence – will reject such hypotheticals as anathema to the role and spirit of the law in a given society. Whatever judgements Coney Barrett makes from the bench of the supreme court, her lodestar will be the Constitution and its contents.
Mahdawi is likely to dispute that last claim, to be sure. But this would just reveal her own ignorance. While Mahdawi would have us believe that Coney Barret will allow her supposedly sinister personal convictions to guide her jurisprudence, the judicial record paints a rather different picture. Indeed, the available evidence suggests that her decisions are likely to be grounded in an originalist approach to the Constitution – not prior or extra-legal faith commitments.
Certainly, many progressives would be deeply unhappy with the conclusions originalists, including Coney Barrett, often reach. Some have criticised originalist methodology as ultimately incoherent or unachievable. It’s also true that Coney Barrett may decide upon the constitutionality of, say, Roe v Wade at some future point (should a challenge be brought against it) in a way that draws Mahdawi’s ire. But the point is that she will in all likelihood be guided by a time-honoured tradition of legal exegesis, independent of religious dogma or personal morality. Coney Barrett is, according to that tradition, bound above all by the text of the American national charter. Moreover, her own writings reveal a balanced, sensitive, nuanced approach to the question of conflict between a jurist’s personal views and the demands of the office they hold. For instance, on the issue of capital punishment – a penalty many Catholics reject, despite the Constitution tacitly permitting it – Coney Barrett has discussed in fine-grained detail the circumstances under which an observant Catholic would have to recuse herself from cases that may require cooperation with evil. Pace Mahdawi’s fearmongering, the supreme court’s newest member is evidently capable of restraining the reach and potency of her personal views as she applies the law.
There’s nothing wrong, of course, with interrogating someone’s deeply-held convictions, and whether (or how) they may shape her professional output – especially when that occurs in a position of great consequence. No justice approaches their profession as a tabula rasa, for such is impossible. Conservative or progressive, religious or irreligious, pro-life or pro-choice: all alike will bear the imprint of personal experiences, and will carry convictions that may incline them towards one decision or another. There is a very real sense in which everyone, supreme court justices included, adopts a ‘confessional’ stance to certain fundamental questions. For those charged with applying the law, their presuppositions will at some level frame their assessment of specific moral and legal questions. Indeed, as former Chief Justice William Rehnquist once noted, members of the court – who normally ‘come to the bench in their middle years’ – will have formed at least some ‘tentative notions’ which might influence the way they read the Constitution’s ‘sweeping’ pronouncements. Anything less would be evidence, not of a ‘lack of bias, but of a lack of qualification’.
Mahdawi is interested in none of this. She makes no effort in trying to charitably determine what orthodox Catholics like Coney Barrett believe, or why they believe it. Nor does one get the sense that the subject of Mahdawi’s diatribe is an esteemed legal expert, whose success is built in part on deft navigation between her personal and professional selves. No, our correspondent would rather try and discredit Coney Barrett by implying that the mere possession of a religiously conservative faith renders her incapable of fulfilling her role in a restrained and dispassionate manner. The implied double standard is telling: only traditionalists, it seems, struggle to impartially apply the law, hobbled as they are by the dogma that ‘lives loudly’ within them. By contrast, their liberal counterparts enjoy an objective, unvarnished view of both the Constitution and reality-at-large.
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Let’s adopt a wider lens for a moment. Mahdawi’s piece is a fairly recent entry in an increasingly large catalogue, one characterised by a malign assessment of religious conservatives and their convictions. But although Mahdawi portrays Coney Barrett’s elevation as a harbinger of religiously-sanctioned tyranny, the truth is quite the opposite. To the extent that one may speak of ‘sides’ in current cultural conflicts, the forces of secular progressivism probably have the upper hand. Churches and denominations of all stripes are haemorrhaging numbers, and in most of the Western world – the United States included – younger generations are identifying less and less with organized religion. Broad swathes of people already dismiss it as something bizarre and outmoded (at best), or pernicious and hateful (at worst). Furthermore, several recent events reveal an underlying antipathy towards conservative Christianity – part of a wider ‘cultural backlash’ against communities clinging to values condemned as recondite or regressive. Even where secularists hold to a more charitable view of traditional spirituality, they nevertheless approach it as one would a mere curiosity: a museum piece, fit for display in a glass cabinet, but hardly a vital phenomenon that one must strive to preserve.
And while the elevation of Coney Barrett to SCOTUS is far from insignificant, it has occurred amidst the ongoing revolution in values sweeping much of American society. Indeed, for the past two generations, the country has been drifting inexorably towards a more liberal outlook on such questions as divorce and homosexuality, which repudiates the distinguishing features of religious and moral conservatism. Meanwhile, as legal abortion continues to command majority support in the country, the incidence of pro-life convictions is falling among self-identified Christians. Despite the somewhat paradoxical fact that 15 of the last 19 supreme court justices have been nominated by Republican presidents, these trends persist unabated.
All this is to say that the cultural (as opposed to the merely political) influence of traditional religion is rapidly ebbing in the United States. For all her fretful hand-wringing, Mahdawi’s fears concerning Coney Barrett are therefore ultimately exaggerated. More than that, her article helps create the very conditions by which the broader ghettoization of religious conservatives may be authorised. Of course, it’s true that not all Mahdawi’s contemporaries share her stigmatizing views. But the ambient secularism by which they have been shaped – often issuing in a benign ambivalence towards organized religion – means that meaningful opposition to the kind of activist hostility she reflects is unlikely to materialize.
A Bagful of insights 