People of Praise

What role does religion play in U.S. Supreme Court justices' nominations and decisions?

THE QUESTION:

What role does religion play in Supreme Court justices’ nominations and decisions?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

By a thin margin, Amy Coney Barrett won confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court without the quizzing about her devout Catholicism — like Senate Democrats Diane Feinstein raised with Barrett’s lower-court nomination and Kamala Harris with another judicial nominee.

Nevertheless, the media pushed this theme, including her involvement with People of Praise, a close-knit community of “charismatic” Catholic families.

This was perhaps the most intense discussion of a nominee’s religion since Louis Brandeis (a justice 1916-39) became the Court’s first Jew following the agony of history’s longest confirmation process, with 19 hearings. Ostensibly, critics questioned his entanglements as a Boston lawyer, but Democratic stockbroker William F. Fitzgerald gave the game away by regretting the nomination of a “slimy fellow” with a “Jewish instinct.”

A smaller dustup involved Democratic nominee Hugo Black (on the Court 1937-71). He was denied the usual automatic deference granted a fellow U.S. Senator when reports emerged that as a young lawyer he joined the Ku Klux Klan, with its hatred of African-Americans, Catholics and Jews. Journalists only proved his KKK membership after a strong Senate vote for confirmation.

The Brandeis breakthrough launched an unwritten tradition of the Court’s “Jewish seat,” also filled by the religiously agnostic Benjamin Cardozo, who overlapped with Brandeis (1932-38), Felix Frankfurter (1939-62), Arthur Goldberg (1962-65) and the unfortunate Abe Fortas (1965-69). After a long gap, Ruth Bader Ginsburg began her celebrated tenure (1993-2020). There was also a “Catholic seat” line with Pierce Butler (1923-39), Frank Murphy 1940-49), William Brennan (1956-90) and Antonin Scalia (1986-2016).

The first Catholic on the Court was Chief Justice Roger Taney (1836-1864), who is not loudly hailed because he wrote the Dred Scott decision that’s widely blamed for precipitating the Civil War.


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Today's Associated Press: Why cover both sides of an important Amy Coney Barrett story?

Dear editors at the Associated Press:

Let’s discuss a few issues behind your recent feature that was sent to newspapers everywhere with this headline: “Barrett was trustee at private school with anti-gay policies.”

The key, of course, is “policies” — a vague term that way too many mainstream journalists consistently use in place of the simple word “doctrines.”

Yes, of course, traditional Catholic schools have “policies” that affect students, faculty and staff. However, these policies are almost always attempts to teach and defend the doctrines of the church. It’s significant that the word “doctrine” does not appear anywhere in this long AP piece and the same goes for the word “catechism.” Also, “scripture” is used once — by a progressive Catholic stressing that conservative Catholics are “literalists” when reading the Bible.

Anyone who has covered Catholic education for a decade or two knows what is going on here. Yes, Democrats are furious about Amy Coney Barrett’s arrival on the high court. But this Associated Press story is built on divisions inside the American Catholic church, both on moral theology linked to LGBTQ issues and fights over the goals of Catholic education in colleges, universities, seminaries and private schools such as the ones linked to Barrett and People of Praise.

With that in mind, let’s add two other factors to this case that are ignored (or all but ignored) by AP.

First of all, once upon a time there was a man named St. Pope John Paul II. In 1990, this pope issued a document entitled “Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church)” focusing on issues in Catholic education. You could tell that it was a controversial document (a) because it said Catholic doctrines should be taught and defended in Catholic schools, (b) progressive Catholics, speaking through the press, went ballistic and (c) it took almost a decade of fighting for American Catholic church leaders to act (sort of) on the pope’s guidelines.

This fight was primarily about colleges and universities, but the principals in Ex Corde are relevant to fights, these days, about classroom and student-life issues in Catholic schools at all levels. So what was John Paul II saying?


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Plug-in: What spiritual ramifications of the fly that landed on Mike Pence's head?

My journalist son Keaton and I were watching the vice presidential debate Wednesday night when he burst out laughing.

“Is that a fly on Mike Pence’s head?” my 23-year-old son wondered out loud.

I glanced up from the Words With Friends game on my iPad and squinted at the TV.

“It sure looks like it,” I said.

We both rushed to check Twitter. Confirmation of our suspicion came quickly. And suddenly, a nation weighted down by too much heavy news had a reason to giggle again.

The New York Times dutifully reported:

Vice President Mike Pence, his hair perfectly coiffed, never reacted to the fly’s appearance on the right side of his head. It stood out against his bright white hair, standing still for the most part but moving around slightly before, well, flying away.

A local TV news reporter from California clocked the fly’s screen time on Mr. Pence’s head at 2 minutes, 3 seconds.

Despite the buzz that it created, the fly did not respond to an interview request. However, America’s most famous insect did start a viral social media account.

Please don’t whack me with a fly swatter, but that “spiritual ramifications” title at the top of this week’s column was clickbait.

If that bugs you, though, Sojourners’ Jenna Barnett has you covered with “5 Bible verses about flies.” See, there’s always a religion angle. Even with Flygate.

Concerning the actual debate, Pence and California Sen. Kamala Harris clashed briefly over religious belief. Religion Unplugged’s Timothy Nerozzi delves into the specifics.


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Brace for SCOTUS wars: Three big questions people keep asking about Amy Coney Barrett's faith

It’s been two weeks since President Donald Trump officially nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Right on cue, Barrett’s Catholic faith and religious life became the focal point of news coverage, particularly by the secular press.

What has ensued is an exercise among journalists — particularly in elite newsrooms — to question Barrett’s fitness for the lifetime position, particularly because of her religious beliefs.

For many people in elite zip codes, this is life-and-death territory, since Barrett would give the Supreme Court a solid 6-3 conservative majority on some issues.

The nomination — taking place just weeks before the Nov. 3 presidential election — has already triggered a nasty tug-of-war between Republicans and Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has pledged to hold a vote, leaving Democrats with very few options to halt it. In retaliation, Democrats have threatened to pack the Supreme Court with as many as 15 members (from the current nine) should Joe Biden win the race and his party gain a Senate majority in 2021.

Barrett, 48, currently serves on the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, a position she attained after being nominated to the bench by Trump. Barrett, who also teaches at Notre Dame Law School, was one of Trump’s finalists for the Supreme Court two years ago, but he instead went with Brett Kavanaugh.

As Election Day draws near in an atmosphere of near chaos, both the Trump and Biden campaigns have made appeals to communities of faith — particularly Catholic voters in the Rust Belt states of Ohio and Pennsylvania — by highlighting issues they believe resonate with them. In Pennsylvania, Biden has seen his lead widen in recent weeks. It remains a key battleground state with a very large Catholic voting bloc that Trump needs to win.

Overall, Catholics, according to recent polling, favor Biden — but traditional Catholics do plan to join evangelicals and vote for the president. Trump’s pick will certainly serve as an overture to faith voters like evangelicals and a segment of white Catholics who tend to be politically conservative.

With religion so crucial to this campaign season, here are three things you need to know about Barrett’s faith:


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A 40-year history of People of Praise that many journalists might like to know

Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination has brought renewed attention to a part of the American charismatic movement that has been a source of controversy for 40 years. Sadly, very few journalists understand “intentional Christian communities,” or “covenant communities,” which were major fixtures on the American religious scene from the late 1960s to the early 1990s.

Barrett grew up in a family affiliated with one such community -- called People of Praise -- in South Bend. Before her name came to the fore a few years ago as possible Supreme Court material, the only people who knew about these groups were religion reporters who were plying their trade more than 30 years ago.

Even then, People of Praise wasn’t making headlines. You had to be a specialist in Pentecostal-charismatic movements (as I am) to know what they were.

Today, reporters struggle to explain a type of Christianity that was cutting edge during Jesus Movement days but feels very foreign now. And so you get a mishmash of reportage and opinion ranging from the Wall Street Journal’s guest editorial on the benefits of People of Praise to Newsweek’s truly awful story that had to be corrected. There are too many other examples to even survey them.

So, we’re going to get a brief history.

Before I do that, I want to spotlight two outlets that have done a good job of reporting on Barrett, starting with a Vox piece by Constance Grady that correctly explained why the nominee has erroneously been connected to the “handmaids” in People of Hope, a Catholic charismatic group in New Jersey. Grady writes:

One of the weirder ways this debate has played out since Barrett was first discussed as a potential Supreme Court nominee is the fight over whether or not People of Praise, the group she belongs to, is also one of the inspirations for The Handmaid’s Tale. In Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel (and its recent TV adaptation), fertile women are forced to live as childbearing slaves called handmaids. The group isn’t an established inspiration for the book — but the story has developed legs anyway.

Do read the whole of it, because it explains how several publications made stupid mistakes when covering the People of Praise/People of Hope mixup.

The other is a Politico story that takes one on a tour of People of Praise education and ministry sites in South Bend.


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Plug-in: Press handles religion differently in news coverage of Ginsburg and Barrett

The big news this past week was, of course, the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the furor over President Donald Trump’s intention to nominate a replacement before the election.

There were faith angles galore and — for added intrigue — questions over whether journalists applied different standards to the religion of Ginsburg, the liberal icon, and that of 7th Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the justice’s possible conservative successor.

For example, Religion News Service extolled Ginsburg as “passionate about Judaism’s concern for justice,” while characterizing Barrett as a “controversial Catholic” — a designation questioned by Religion Unplugged’s own Clemente Lisi. (P.S. Don’t miss Lisi’s fact check on Barrett’s faith.)

“Yes RBG’s religion shaped her approach,” RNS’ Bob Smietana said on Twitter. “And yes if (Barrett) is nominee it will be controversial. We can report both things.”

A Reuters story about “a self-described charismatic Christian community” to which Barrett purportedly belongs also drew scrutiny. At the conservative National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out a series of edits to the wire service’s original report.

“We all know what this means, in terms of press coverage,” GetReligion’s Terry Mattingly argued in a post in which he singled out praise for a story by New York Times religion writer Elizabeth Dias and her colleague Adam Liptak. “Many of the same reporters who are perfectly comfortable calling Joe Biden a ‘devout’ Catholic — while his actions clash with church doctrines on marriage and sex — are going to spill oceans of digital ink warning readers about the dangerous dogmas that dwell loudly in the heart and mind of Barrett.”

However, the focus on religion in the battle over the Supreme Court concerns Ira Rifkin Of GetReligion.org, a former RNS national correspondent who has covered domestic and foreign religious issues since the 1980s.

“It should not be about Amy Coney Barrett’s traditional Catholicism any more than Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s key attribute was that she was an ultra-liberal Jew. Or Martin Luther King Jr.’s liberal liberation Protestantism,” Rifkin said on Facebook.

“It should not be about ‘bad’ religion vs ‘good’ religion,” he added.


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New podcast: Why is the 'handmaid' image so important in Amy Coney Barrett coverage?

The question for the week appears to be: Are you now, or have you ever been, a charismatic Catholic?

In a land in which citizens are divided just as much by entertainment as they are by their religious and political choices, that question leads directly to cable television and a certain blue-zip-code hit focusing on, to quote IMDB, this story hook: “Set in a dystopian future, a woman is forced to live as a concubine under a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship.”

This leads us to the word “handmaid” and strained efforts by some — repeat “some” — journalists to attach it to the life and faith of Judge Amy Coney Barrett. This topic was, of course, discussed at length during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). How could we avoid it?

It’s crucial to know that the word “handmaid” has radically different meanings for members of two radically different flocks of Americans.

For Catholics and other traditional Christians, this term is defined by its use in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke, during this encounter between Mary and the Angel Gabriel. This is long, but essential:

… The angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.

Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?

And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. …For with God nothing shall be impossible.

And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.

In this context, the word refers to a “female servant.” However, its use in Christian tradition has, for 2,000 years, been linked directly to St. Mary, the mother of Jesus.

Now, let’s move to mass media, where the Urban Dictionary defines the term as:


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Speaking of people being praised: New York Times offered solid, old-school story about Barrett

Guess what? Judge Amy Coney Barrett is being considered, once again, for an open chair at the Supreme Court, the only branch of the United States government that seems to matter in this tense and divided land.

The odds are good that you have read about this development in the national press or even in the few remaining pages of your local newspaper.

We all know what this means, in terms of press coverage. Many of the same reporters who are perfectly comfortable calling Joe Biden a “devout” Catholic — while his actions clash with church doctrines on marriage and sex — are going to spill oceans of digital ink warning readers about the dangerous dogmas that dwell loudly in the heart and mind of Barrett. I am following all of that in social media and elsewhere.

However, let me start these discussions with a post that might surprise many readers. I would like to praise the recent New York Times story that ran with this headline: “To Conservatives, Barrett Has ‘Perfect Combination’ of Attributes for Supreme Court.” Also, I think it was wise to have a religion-beat professional take part in reporting and writing this story.

I am sure that combatants on both sides of this debate will find some sections in this story rather troubling. But here is the key point I want to make: Unlike many Times stories in recent years, almost all of this material comes from qualified sources (left and right) whose names are attached to their opinions and the information they provided. There are attribution clauses all over the place, just like in Times of old.

Near the top there is this short summary:

“She is the perfect combination of brilliant jurist and a woman who brings the argument to the court that is potentially the contrary to the views of the sitting women justices,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion political group, who has praised Mr. Trump’s entire shortlist.

The nomination of a judge whom Mr. Trump was quoted last year as “saving” to be Justice Ginsburg’s replacement would almost surely plunge the nation into a bitter and divisive debate over the future of abortion rights, made even more pointed because Judge Barrett would replace a justice who was an unequivocal supporter of those rights. That is a debate Mr. Trump has not shied away from as president, as his judicial appointments and efforts to court conservatives have repeatedly shown.

As you would expect, Barrett’s critics are given plenty of space to respond — which is totally appropriate. It is also good that these voices are clearly identified, along with information about their organizations.

In other words, the story contains evidence of debate on a serious topic in the news.


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Tick, tick, tick: Will Donald Trump play the 'handmaiden' card, lighting a SCOTUS fuse?

Tick, tick, tick: Will Donald Trump play the 'handmaiden' card, lighting a SCOTUS fuse?

The clock is ticking and the news coverage is heating up. At this point, for religion-beat pros, there's only one question that matters: Will Donald Trump GO THERE? Will he nominate the "loud dogma" candidate who will make heads explode in the liberal Catholic and secular politicos camps? We are, of course, talking about Judge Amy Coney Barrett. 

However, there is a rather cynical possibility linked to this story, an angle explored in this week's "Crossroads" podcast. Click here to tune that in.

You see, Trump needs to fire up voters for the midterm elections. In particular, he needs evangelical Protestants and pro-Catechism Catholics to turn out in droves, to help rescue the GOP from, well, Trump's unique ability in infuriate half of America (especially in elite zip codes and newsrooms).

So what if he nominated Barrett and let the blue-culture masses go crazy?

What if he unleashed that storm, knowing that the moral, cultural and religious left will not be able to restrain itself?

What a scene! Remember the hearings long ago for Justice Robert Bork -- the SCOTUS seat eventually taken by one Judge Anthony Kennedy -- and this famous speech by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, speaking for the Catholic left and cultural liberals everywhere?

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

So what would that sound like today, if Barrett has to face her critics once again?

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin has already prepared that script, in a piece for The New Yorker, describing this future nightmare court:

It will overrule Roe v. Wade, allowing states to ban abortions and to criminally prosecute any physicians and nurses who perform them. It will allow shopkeepers, restaurateurs, and hotel owners to refuse service to gay customers on religious grounds.


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