Supreme Court Justices by Religious Affiliation

[RINO Tom]

There are a lot of sources out there, but I wanted to get a bit more specific with this site.

OVERALL RELIGION
93.1% Christian
6.9% Jewish

RELIGIOUS CATEGORY
73.3% Protestant
12.1% Catholic
6.9% Non-Trinitarian Christian (all Unitarian)
6.9% Jewish
0.9% Unknown

SPECIFIC PROTESTANT DENOMINATION
73.3% Protestant
35.3% Episcopalian
18.1% Presbyterian
4.3% Methodist
3.4% Congregationalist
2.6% Baptist
1.7% Restorationist
1.7% Lutheran
0.9% Dutch Reformed
0.9% Quaker
0.9% Non-Denominational

FIRST YEAR ON SCOTUS BY DENOMINATION
Episcopalian - 1789
Congregationalist - 1789
Presbyterian - 1793
Unitarian - 1812
Methodist - 1830
Roman Catholic - 1836
Quaker - 1862
Dutch Reformed - 1872
Baptist - 1893
Lutheran - 1903
Restorationist - 1911
Jewish - 1916
Non-Denominational - 2022

MOST RECENT YEAR APPOINTED TO SCOTUS BY DENOMINATION
Non-Denominational - 2022
Roman Catholic - 2020
Episcopalian - 2017
Jewish - 2010
Presbyterian - 1972
Lutheran - 1972
Methodist - 1970
Unitarian - 1945
Baptist - 1937
Restorationist - 1916
Congregationalist - 1891
Dutch Reformed - 1872
Quaker - 1862

One interesting note is that we had already appointed four Roman Catholics to the Supreme Court before Al Smith ran for President.

[Skill and Chance]

Feels weird the Catholic percentage is so low overall given they are currently a supermajority of the court (conservatives - Gorsuch + Sotomayor)!

[RINO Tom]

Feels weird the Catholic percentage is so low overall given they are currently a supermajority of the court (conservatives - Gorsuch + Sotomayor)!

Yeah, from a historical perspective in this country, it's absolutely wild that Catholics comprise an outright majority of the Supreme Court and that there are only two Protestants ... and only one from a Classical Protestant denomination.  For reference, these are the years each Catholic got added using 50-year, half century intervals to display it a bit more chronologically:

1836

1894
1898

1923
1940

1956
1986
1988
1991

2005
2006
2009

2018
2020

So of the 14 Catholic Justices all-time, over half were appointed after 1985, and over 35% were appointed in the last 25 years.

[ꙮ]

In 2015 the Supreme Court was 7 Catholics and 2 Jews. 0 Protestants. It’s insane that it worked out like that. Some of it can be explained by demographics I guess, Justices tend to come from the northeast where there are more Catholics and Jews. Even then you’ve still got Clarence Thomas. What proportion of black people from rural Georgia are Catholic, 0.5%?

It hardly matters, but it is quite odd.

[Skill and Chance]

In 2015 the Supreme Court was 7 Catholics and 2 Jews. 0 Protestants. It’s insane that it worked out like that. Some of it can be explained by demographics I guess, Justices tend to come from the northeast where there are more Catholics and Jews. Even then you’ve still got Clarence Thomas. What proportion of black people from rural Georgia are Catholic, 0.5%?

It hardly matters, but it is quite odd.

TBH I would expect someone's religious views to have a much greater impact on their jurisprudence than their sex or especially skin color.  It's kind of shocking how much more attention the latter gets. 

[Skill and Chance]

The 2 most underrepresented groups by far are open atheists/agnostics and Evangelical Christians.  Regarding the 1st group there are many SCOTUS justices going quite far back who most likely were quietly atheist/agnostic, perhaps including some of the current ones.  However, if you told me in a vacuum that SCOTUS was now split 6R/3D, I would have guessed that about 3 of the R appointees would be Southern Evangelicals.  Instead it's 0!  And the one justice who comes closest to being in that group (Jackson, although she has never publicly claimed the label and likely never will) is a D appointee.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

In 2015 the Supreme Court was 7 Catholics and 2 Jews. 0 Protestants. It’s insane that it worked out like that. Some of it can be explained by demographics I guess, Justices tend to come from the northeast where there are more Catholics and Jews. Even then you’ve still got Clarence Thomas. What proportion of black people from rural Georgia are Catholic, 0.5%?

It hardly matters, but it is quite odd.

I'd always assumed that Clarence Thomas was a convert from Protestantism to Catholicism, but it actually appears that his grandfather (who he was living with) converted when he was a child or teenager.  So, he was raised Catholic from that point on.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

In 2015 the Supreme Court was 7 Catholics and 2 Jews. 0 Protestants. It’s insane that it worked out like that. Some of it can be explained by demographics I guess, Justices tend to come from the northeast where there are more Catholics and Jews. Even then you’ve still got Clarence Thomas. What proportion of black people from rural Georgia are Catholic, 0.5%?

It hardly matters, but it is quite odd.

6 Catholics and 3 Jews, surely? Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan vs. the entire right of the Court at the time plus Sotomayor.

[RINO Tom]

In 2015 the Supreme Court was 7 Catholics and 2 Jews. 0 Protestants. It’s insane that it worked out like that. Some of it can be explained by demographics I guess, Justices tend to come from the northeast where there are more Catholics and Jews. Even then you’ve still got Clarence Thomas. What proportion of black people from rural Georgia are Catholic, 0.5%?

It hardly matters, but it is quite odd.

Compared to the rest of the nation, sure.  However, there are still more Protestants than Catholics (and obviously Jews) in the Northeast, per Pew:

33% Protestant (15% Mainline, 13% Evangelical, 5% Historically Black)
30% Catholic
4% Jewish

I would also wager that among the truly "elite" groups in the Northeast that are likely to be most represented at Ivy League schools, you still have just as many Mainline Protestant families as Catholic ones.

[Irenaeus of Smyrna]

Great data and thanks for that website. Suprising amount of Unitarians but it has always been popular amoung the Elites thanks to John Adams.

[Associate Justice PiT]

In 2015 the Supreme Court was 7 Catholics and 2 Jews. 0 Protestants. It’s insane that it worked out like that. Some of it can be explained by demographics I guess, Justices tend to come from the northeast where there are more Catholics and Jews. Even then you’ve still got Clarence Thomas. What proportion of black people from rural Georgia are Catholic, 0.5%?

It hardly matters, but it is quite odd.

TBH I would expect someone's religious views to have a much greater impact on their jurisprudence than their sex or especially skin color.  It's kind of shocking how much more attention the latter gets. 

     Very much so, but in American culture it is still something of a taboo to discuss people's religious beliefs. Especially given the extent to which Dems rely on Latino voters to buoy their coalition, they are quite wise to stop mainstream voices from questioning the wisdom of letting a Catholic majority body adjudicate basic questions of Constitutional law. Of course the GOP won't care as long as it works in their favor. Thus the detente holds, for now at least.

[RINO Tom]

Great data and thanks for that website. Suprising amount of Unitarians but it has always been popular amoung the Elites thanks to John Adams.

It's also worth noting that it seems like Unitarians were mostly appointed during the years where it was a bit more of a fad:

1812
1858
1862
1882
1903
1921
1943
1945

While there were obviously Unitarians before this (within Protestant denominations), the American Unitarian Association (which largely spun out of Congregationalism) began in 1825 and lasted until 1961.  By the time it merged with the Universalist Church of America in 1961, it was more or less a pointless collection of extremely liberal churches that didn't have any real theological convictions ... hence it merging with a group that inherently actually has NOTHING to do with being Unitarian, haha; you can be a Trinitarian Universalist, of course.

I think Unitarianism was only especially popular in a society where you felt cultural pressure to be a part of an organized Christian denomination but you were extremely theologically liberal.  In an America after the World Wars, I think its days were extremely numbered, and you then of course see no more Unitarians on the Supreme Court in the second half of the Twentieth Century.

[Skill and Chance]

Great data and thanks for that website. Suprising amount of Unitarians but it has always been popular amoung the Elites thanks to John Adams.

It's also worth noting that it seems like Unitarians were mostly appointed during the years where it was a bit more of a fad:

1812
1858
1862
1882
1903
1921
1943
1945

While there were obviously Unitarians before this (within Protestant denominations), the American Unitarian Association (which largely spun out of Congregationalism) began in 1825 and lasted until 1961.  By the time it merged with the Universalist Church of America in 1961, it was more or less a pointless collection of extremely liberal churches that didn't have any real theological convictions ... hence it merging with a group that inherently actually has NOTHING to do with being Unitarian, haha; you can be a Trinitarian Universalist, of course.

I think Unitarianism was only especially popular in a society where you felt cultural pressure to be a part of an organized Christian denomination but you were extremely theologically liberal.  In an America after the World Wars, I think its days were extremely numbered, and you then of course see no more Unitarians on the Supreme Court in the second half of the Twentieth Century.

Yes, the bottom line is that Unitarian meant something fundamentally different in that era than it does now.