15 thoughts on “Protestants, Catholics, and Jews on the Supreme Court”
I don't buy your argument.
Actually, I'm not even sure you are making an argument. If you are, I can't quite find it.
Why would historical under-respresentation of Catholics excuse such over-representation? In a context where a nominees ability to add diversity of background to the court is seen as one of her qualifications, why is it inapporiate to ask about diminshing the diversity of their childhood moral instruction?
Religion is not like hair color. It generally presumes to offer a worldview and moral code. The historical composition of the court is germane to the question, but not decisive. The fact that there have been only two women in the court's history does not make it appropriate to have 8 women and just 1 man on the court in 15 years?
Can you lay out your thinking here? That is, are some forms of diverisity fair game, and others not? Do histororical imbalances in one direction excuse the reverse (and if so, why?)? Why doesn't your graph suggest that we really ought to be looking for one of the last two categories?
I don't mean to be snarky or rude. I just don't understand why you called that question "silly" and "a joke."
There are several additional issues.
1. Protestant is a wide designation and can mean anything from a temperance Baptist to a Congregationalist or Unitarian. To be more precise, you'd have to delve into the specific sects.
2. One can argue that it wasn't until we had some religious diversity on the Court that we had major decisions which reflected the realities of a post-Civil War America. For example, by the time Brown was decided, we'd had 3 Jewish justices – with one, Frankfurter, then on the Court.
3. As a counter argument (perhaps), the Court had Catholic justices during the era of completely racist decisions which are indefensible by any view today. Notably, the first Catholic justice was Roger Taney, the author of the Dred Scott decision. BTW, that decision not only returned runaway slaves but ruled that blacks could never be citizens of the US.
4. To continue, the issue with Catholicism is twofold. First, there is only one Catholic Church so the justices are all members of a single sect, not various Protestant ones with different practices and beliefs. Second, the Catholic Church imposes restrictions on its practitioners, notably threatening those who advocate for "pro-choice" with excommunication.
(That raises a question: "Judge Sotomayor, if threatened with excommunication for voting to uphold Roe, what would you do?") This was an issue with JFK: how much does Rome control your behavior? Are you a big enough person to override your own religious beliefs?
5. The sad truth is that Catholics are generally brought forward as nominees by the GOP because Evangelical Protestants would not be confirmed but Catholics are also presumed – until this judge – to be anti-choice. In other words, there is a religious reason for these nominations – how else to explain Alito, a non-entity as a jurist but very reliably Catholic? This means the reason for nominating has flipped: instead of nominating Protestants because society didn't accept other sects or religions, they nominate Catholics to get at abortion.
Ceolaf:
First off, I do think the historical record is relevant and, yes, I don't think it would be so inappropriate to have 8 women and 1 man on the court for a few years.
But the reason I thought the question was "silly" was that it seemed to show no historical perspective. If the questioner had said something like: "Protestants used to be overrepresented but now Catholics are, whassup with that?", that I would understand. But it seems a little silly to say to Sotomayor that, because she's the first Hispanic, she's suddenly supposed to address a religious balance question that hasn't been addressed for 200 years–that seems sort of silly. It's as if, by being Hispanic, Sotomayor is now responsible for all diversity questions. Where were these questions when Charles Evans Hughes was being nominated? I think questions about diversity are quite reasonable; what I see as silly is to present them in no historical context.
There have been Unitarians on the Supreme Court? I didn't know that.
Sorry Andrew, but I think you're being disingenuous. Althouse's question was certainly considered legitimate under the last administration. Have a look at this column from 2007 (no mention of the once-universal Protestant majority there either, by the way). If Bush had nominated one more Catholic — even a Hispanic Catholic — this quesiton would definitely be raised. Why is it off limits now?
Your answer to Althouse's question is along the lines of "it's always been this way". But the Times column suggests a much wiser response, one Sotomayor herself might consider if any Senators raise it: Catholics are not monolithic in their opinions.
John:
1. I had to look up "disingenuous" in the dictionary to be sure of its meaning. Having looked it up, I can assure you that I'm not being disingenuous.
2. Interesting news article by Robin Toner from 2007. I was amused by the guy who wrote, “We need more, not fewer, Catholics on the Supreme Court.” Maybe 6 will be enough for him, though. I agree that the article puts the issue in a historical context nicely.
3. I don't think the question about Catholics is "off limits." I just think it's silly to bring it up without historical context, and I don't think it makes a lot of sense to tie it to Sotomayor's ethnicity, any more than it would make sense to tie it to the ethnicity of a white nominee.
(1) The Supreme Court, with 9 members, runs into the Law of Small Numbers rapidly.
This means there are going to be skews all over the place. Some of them are going to be intentional (notably schooling), some are going to be accidental, but just as strong. It's hard to see some sort of Papist conspiracy at work here.
(2) How religious are most of these people? Recall the long arguments as to whether the Founding Fathers were god-fearing men, or whether they were 1 step away from agnostics who just threw in the deity's name occasionally for style.
I still don't understand why this is answering her question. Clearly, it all comes from the whole "diversity of [life experiences/etc] helps create better judicial opinions", yeah? At least, that's where I see it coming from.
And clearly, one would suppose that since Catholics have a strong intellectual tradition, having many of them on at once would narrow that diversity of opinion. It doesn't matter one whit what the history of the court is; what matters is the diversity of the court here and now, so that they can make those opinions. Simply pointing out that we used to have a lot of Protestants doesn't effect that at all, does it?
Also, I agree with the other commenters that it is inappropriate, or at least uninformative, to group all protestants together. Presbyterians are nothing like Baptists are nothing like Lutherans are nothing like other evangelicals, etc.
Prof. Gelman,
I am trying to clarify what you said, what you are saying, and what you mean.
On FiveThirtyEight, you labeled the question "silly" and "a joke."
I would understand if you meant that it is silly to ask such a question without acknowledging the historical record. I would understand that if you thought that the question was worded poorly. But it didn't — and still doesn't — appear to me that you have a problem with the wording or presentation of the question as much as the ideas that the question is getting at.
I think that the question is trying to ask about the status of different forms of diversity in the context of her nomination and that current composition of the court. I don't have a problem with that? Do you?
I understand that you think that such a question should acknowledge a long history of over-representation of Protestants. Why is that? Does do you think that the question pre-supposes that the alternative to a Catholic nominee is a protestant nominee? Or do you draw more from the fact that Catholics have been historically underrepresented on the court, even if they are not now?
Heck, I just realized that I not even sure if you are trying to make a point about over-representation, or simply the dominance of a particular group (even if it was not actually wildly over-represented). (That is, Protestants have been in majority in this country since the beginning, even if it has been a shrinking majority. Surely, non-Protestants were less than 1/6 of the population in 1789. Were they even 1/9 of the population by the civil war?).
I certainly don't understand why the perhaps-problematic absence of historical context in the question is sufficient a problem to turn it into "a joke."
How much would the question need to be altered to pass muster for you? Surely, you don't think that the issue of religious diversity (the only protected class in the body of the Constitution itself) is off limits, do you?
"If a diverse array of justices is desirable, should we not be concerned that if you are confirmed, six out of the nine justices will be Roman Catholics, or is it somehow wrong to start paying attention to the extreme overrepresentation of Catholicism on the court at the moment when we have our first Hispanic nominee?"
I would also say that this is not simply a matter of any particular religion. As others have said, the Catholic church is not like Protestantism. The Catholic church has one voice with a single set of positions — many of them claimed to be infallible positions — on many of the most contentious matters of the day. So, while all religions offer moral codes, Catholicism offers among the most convergent and dogmatic one. Without addressing whether or which of those positions one might agree with, given the positioning of this question as one about diversity, wouldn't Catholicism, therefore, raise particular concern.
I mean, most of them have gone to Harvard Law School, right? That might be a concern. But the Dean of HLS does not get to declare that his/her positions on contentious issues are infallible. In fact, a certain amount of disagreements and lively debate is encouraged in academia — as the recent NYU law dust up makes especially clear. There is a tradition of differing opinions among Jewish and Muslim legal scholars and religious leaders — as we have seen so importantly with clerics in Iran these past few weeks. But the Pope is — at times of his choosing — considered infallible.
So, this is not a matter of whether the Catholic view belongs on the court or not. Rather, it is a question of whether a group Catholics — in this case more than a bare majority — can/will bring the kind of diversity of background, thinking and opinion that is already so widely accepted as beneficial. Protestants, as a group, do not present that kind of theologically-based problem, do they?
Do you think that is question smacked of anti-Catholic bigotry? (Do you think that my observations and questions smack of anti-Catholic bigotry?)
In fact, both of Prof. Althouse's questions addressed the issue of diversity, and neither of them made any reference to the history of diversity (or lack thereof) on the court. Why is it that you labelled this one "a joke" and "silly" and not the other one?
Ceolaf:
I was not trying to be rude in suggesting that Althouse's question was a joke. It struck me as a silly question, and my best guess is that she was joking. The key reason I thought it was silly was the juxtaposition of Sotomayor's ethnicity with the Catholic question. It seemed silly to me that 80 or so white Protestant judges can come up for nomination and neither ethnic nor religious diversity is considered a big deal, and then, when the shoe is on the other foot, we're suddenly hearing about "extreme overrepresentation."
My guess was that Althouse was amused by the juxtaposition and that she did not seriously think that Sotomayor is supposed to answer a question about why she would be the sixth Catholic justice, any more than all those many Protestants were expected to explain the overrepresentation of WASPs in their time.
I don't think that asking about religious diversity is off limits; I just think it's funny for it to come up now, after about 200 years. That's the historical context I'm talking about.
And, no, I don't think that having six Catholic judges is a "theologically-based problem." Lots of countries are predominantly Catholic: France, Belgium, Mexico, etc etc. If the Pope is telling them all what to do, that's news to me.
But I don't want to overdo this. I have no problem with you, or others, coming to different conclusions than I do. My point was to show the data. That's my contribution. From there, feel free to draw your own interpretation!
Just to add, Brazil is predominantily Catholic, and of couse people do not follow everything the Pot (or the church) says.
And I think it is pretty funny that, despite we (brazilians) are catholic, we don't see any public (neither private) school which does not allow evolution thoery to be teached. Whereas in US, we see things like this due to protestants views.
So, I agree with prof. Gelman that you guys are overating the problem of catholic overepresentation. Why (almost) no one brought questions like this about other types of overepresentation?
Hi Manoel,
I'm a Brazilian who currently lives in US and I've to tell you that being a Catholic here is a totally different experience than it is in Brazil. In short, Catholics here seems even more conservative than the average Americans while in Brazil I believe protestants (mostly evangelicals) are much more conservatives. Actually, controlling for income and education my (vague) impression is that Brazilian Catholics are much more liberal than US protestants, which doesn't mean a lot (this is also probably true for a comparison between US and Argentina or Europe and US). But this is just my own personal experience: I don't have any data on it.
Isn't the real problem that supreme court judges have so much power for too long rather than what their cultural affiliations are?
If one person was rotated in each year and one person out then it wouldn't be such a problem. The weight of numbers would mean diversity would increase. And no alignments could take a stranglehold. (Although 7 judges would be better than 9 so that a two-term president would be rotating some of his own choices out.)
There must be some importance to having judges stay in that court so long (or else why do it) e.g. supreme court experience is important, cases take a long time to move through the court. But I am sure there are work arounds – a year of apprenticeship with a reduced case load, call backs judges who have specialised in a long case.
Of all the reasons there are for an imbalanced Supreme Court, the one explanation we can send to the rubbish can without further ado is the one about Catholic education. The lay Catholic school system is atrocious wherever it exists, see Quebec, Ireland and Belgium as notorious examples. If it were about the excellence of primary and secondary educations, the Supreme Court would consist entirely of graduates from Quaker schools and Episcopal academies.
The fact that the Supreme Court used to be heavily weighted, or exclusively Protestant has no bearing on the current imbalance. The proportion of Catholics in the population was insignificant until the turn of the 20th century, and the number of Catholics with the educational credentials, or professional attainments necessary to sit on SCOTUS was smaller still. It was natural for SCOTUS to be uniformly Protestant 100-years ago. But in a country where Catholics make up less than 25% of the population, (and are generally less educated at that) the incidence of that many Catholics on the Court is not an accident.
Those numbers are interesting, but tracking SCOTUS justices religious identities through such a long time period is misleading, because of the amount that religious denominations evolve and their placement in the American scheme of things evolves.
As a Unitarian Universalist, I hardly think we count as "protestant" this day in age. Walk into a UU church with Wiccan religious symbols and Buddhist Prayer Flags hanging from the rafters and you know what I'm talking about. Unitarian Universalists are farther from Catholics and Protestants alike than Catholics and Protestants are from each other!
I understand that the Unitarian identity has evolved and is more liberal now than it was. I'd classify Unitarians and Universalists (which merged in the 1960s) as a protestant denominations till, perhaps, 1940, in which case they both become something much more vague.
I'd also classify Protestants and Evangelicals as two separate categories after 1975. They are no longer culturally indistinguishable as they were before.
I think this all lends itself to the fact that the American religious identity is an evolving thing, and groups of outsiders easily shift to become insiders and vice versa. (I don't think we'd have a Unitarian president nowadays, even though we have had several in the past.)
Unitiarian Univeralists have no Christian identity, nor do they even have a creed. They are officially agnostic and could just as easily be ethnically Jewish – and nonpracticing – with identical religious beliefs.
I'd be interested to see if any Unitarian Supreme Court justices come from the second half of the 20th century, in which case it would be harder to pin down how they fit in religiously. Same for Quakers, and all the really old-fashioned American religious identities like Deist and Theosophical.
I don't buy your argument.
Actually, I'm not even sure you are making an argument. If you are, I can't quite find it.
Why would historical under-respresentation of Catholics excuse such over-representation? In a context where a nominees ability to add diversity of background to the court is seen as one of her qualifications, why is it inapporiate to ask about diminshing the diversity of their childhood moral instruction?
Religion is not like hair color. It generally presumes to offer a worldview and moral code. The historical composition of the court is germane to the question, but not decisive. The fact that there have been only two women in the court's history does not make it appropriate to have 8 women and just 1 man on the court in 15 years?
Can you lay out your thinking here? That is, are some forms of diverisity fair game, and others not? Do histororical imbalances in one direction excuse the reverse (and if so, why?)? Why doesn't your graph suggest that we really ought to be looking for one of the last two categories?
I don't mean to be snarky or rude. I just don't understand why you called that question "silly" and "a joke."
There are several additional issues.
1. Protestant is a wide designation and can mean anything from a temperance Baptist to a Congregationalist or Unitarian. To be more precise, you'd have to delve into the specific sects.
2. One can argue that it wasn't until we had some religious diversity on the Court that we had major decisions which reflected the realities of a post-Civil War America. For example, by the time Brown was decided, we'd had 3 Jewish justices – with one, Frankfurter, then on the Court.
3. As a counter argument (perhaps), the Court had Catholic justices during the era of completely racist decisions which are indefensible by any view today. Notably, the first Catholic justice was Roger Taney, the author of the Dred Scott decision. BTW, that decision not only returned runaway slaves but ruled that blacks could never be citizens of the US.
4. To continue, the issue with Catholicism is twofold. First, there is only one Catholic Church so the justices are all members of a single sect, not various Protestant ones with different practices and beliefs. Second, the Catholic Church imposes restrictions on its practitioners, notably threatening those who advocate for "pro-choice" with excommunication.
(That raises a question: "Judge Sotomayor, if threatened with excommunication for voting to uphold Roe, what would you do?") This was an issue with JFK: how much does Rome control your behavior? Are you a big enough person to override your own religious beliefs?
5. The sad truth is that Catholics are generally brought forward as nominees by the GOP because Evangelical Protestants would not be confirmed but Catholics are also presumed – until this judge – to be anti-choice. In other words, there is a religious reason for these nominations – how else to explain Alito, a non-entity as a jurist but very reliably Catholic? This means the reason for nominating has flipped: instead of nominating Protestants because society didn't accept other sects or religions, they nominate Catholics to get at abortion.
Ceolaf:
First off, I do think the historical record is relevant and, yes, I don't think it would be so inappropriate to have 8 women and 1 man on the court for a few years.
But the reason I thought the question was "silly" was that it seemed to show no historical perspective. If the questioner had said something like: "Protestants used to be overrepresented but now Catholics are, whassup with that?", that I would understand. But it seems a little silly to say to Sotomayor that, because she's the first Hispanic, she's suddenly supposed to address a religious balance question that hasn't been addressed for 200 years–that seems sort of silly. It's as if, by being Hispanic, Sotomayor is now responsible for all diversity questions. Where were these questions when Charles Evans Hughes was being nominated? I think questions about diversity are quite reasonable; what I see as silly is to present them in no historical context.
There have been Unitarians on the Supreme Court? I didn't know that.
Sorry Andrew, but I think you're being disingenuous. Althouse's question was certainly considered legitimate under the last administration. Have a look at this column from 2007 (no mention of the once-universal Protestant majority there either, by the way). If Bush had nominated one more Catholic — even a Hispanic Catholic — this quesiton would definitely be raised. Why is it off limits now?
Your answer to Althouse's question is along the lines of "it's always been this way". But the Times column suggests a much wiser response, one Sotomayor herself might consider if any Senators raise it: Catholics are not monolithic in their opinions.
John:
1. I had to look up "disingenuous" in the dictionary to be sure of its meaning. Having looked it up, I can assure you that I'm not being disingenuous.
2. Interesting news article by Robin Toner from 2007. I was amused by the guy who wrote, “We need more, not fewer, Catholics on the Supreme Court.” Maybe 6 will be enough for him, though. I agree that the article puts the issue in a historical context nicely.
3. I don't think the question about Catholics is "off limits." I just think it's silly to bring it up without historical context, and I don't think it makes a lot of sense to tie it to Sotomayor's ethnicity, any more than it would make sense to tie it to the ethnicity of a white nominee.
(1) The Supreme Court, with 9 members, runs into the Law of Small Numbers rapidly.
This means there are going to be skews all over the place. Some of them are going to be intentional (notably schooling), some are going to be accidental, but just as strong. It's hard to see some sort of Papist conspiracy at work here.
(2) How religious are most of these people? Recall the long arguments as to whether the Founding Fathers were god-fearing men, or whether they were 1 step away from agnostics who just threw in the deity's name occasionally for style.
I still don't understand why this is answering her question. Clearly, it all comes from the whole "diversity of [life experiences/etc] helps create better judicial opinions", yeah? At least, that's where I see it coming from.
And clearly, one would suppose that since Catholics have a strong intellectual tradition, having many of them on at once would narrow that diversity of opinion. It doesn't matter one whit what the history of the court is; what matters is the diversity of the court here and now, so that they can make those opinions. Simply pointing out that we used to have a lot of Protestants doesn't effect that at all, does it?
Also, I agree with the other commenters that it is inappropriate, or at least uninformative, to group all protestants together. Presbyterians are nothing like Baptists are nothing like Lutherans are nothing like other evangelicals, etc.
Prof. Gelman,
I am trying to clarify what you said, what you are saying, and what you mean.
On FiveThirtyEight, you labeled the question "silly" and "a joke."
I would understand if you meant that it is silly to ask such a question without acknowledging the historical record. I would understand that if you thought that the question was worded poorly. But it didn't — and still doesn't — appear to me that you have a problem with the wording or presentation of the question as much as the ideas that the question is getting at.
I think that the question is trying to ask about the status of different forms of diversity in the context of her nomination and that current composition of the court. I don't have a problem with that? Do you?
I understand that you think that such a question should acknowledge a long history of over-representation of Protestants. Why is that? Does do you think that the question pre-supposes that the alternative to a Catholic nominee is a protestant nominee? Or do you draw more from the fact that Catholics have been historically underrepresented on the court, even if they are not now?
Heck, I just realized that I not even sure if you are trying to make a point about over-representation, or simply the dominance of a particular group (even if it was not actually wildly over-represented). (That is, Protestants have been in majority in this country since the beginning, even if it has been a shrinking majority. Surely, non-Protestants were less than 1/6 of the population in 1789. Were they even 1/9 of the population by the civil war?).
I certainly don't understand why the perhaps-problematic absence of historical context in the question is sufficient a problem to turn it into "a joke."
How much would the question need to be altered to pass muster for you? Surely, you don't think that the issue of religious diversity (the only protected class in the body of the Constitution itself) is off limits, do you?
"If a diverse array of justices is desirable, should we not be concerned that if you are confirmed, six out of the nine justices will be Roman Catholics, or is it somehow wrong to start paying attention to the extreme overrepresentation of Catholicism on the court at the moment when we have our first Hispanic nominee?"
I would also say that this is not simply a matter of any particular religion. As others have said, the Catholic church is not like Protestantism. The Catholic church has one voice with a single set of positions — many of them claimed to be infallible positions — on many of the most contentious matters of the day. So, while all religions offer moral codes, Catholicism offers among the most convergent and dogmatic one. Without addressing whether or which of those positions one might agree with, given the positioning of this question as one about diversity, wouldn't Catholicism, therefore, raise particular concern.
I mean, most of them have gone to Harvard Law School, right? That might be a concern. But the Dean of HLS does not get to declare that his/her positions on contentious issues are infallible. In fact, a certain amount of disagreements and lively debate is encouraged in academia — as the recent NYU law dust up makes especially clear. There is a tradition of differing opinions among Jewish and Muslim legal scholars and religious leaders — as we have seen so importantly with clerics in Iran these past few weeks. But the Pope is — at times of his choosing — considered infallible.
So, this is not a matter of whether the Catholic view belongs on the court or not. Rather, it is a question of whether a group Catholics — in this case more than a bare majority — can/will bring the kind of diversity of background, thinking and opinion that is already so widely accepted as beneficial. Protestants, as a group, do not present that kind of theologically-based problem, do they?
Do you think that is question smacked of anti-Catholic bigotry? (Do you think that my observations and questions smack of anti-Catholic bigotry?)
In fact, both of Prof. Althouse's questions addressed the issue of diversity, and neither of them made any reference to the history of diversity (or lack thereof) on the court. Why is it that you labelled this one "a joke" and "silly" and not the other one?
Ceolaf:
I was not trying to be rude in suggesting that Althouse's question was a joke. It struck me as a silly question, and my best guess is that she was joking. The key reason I thought it was silly was the juxtaposition of Sotomayor's ethnicity with the Catholic question. It seemed silly to me that 80 or so white Protestant judges can come up for nomination and neither ethnic nor religious diversity is considered a big deal, and then, when the shoe is on the other foot, we're suddenly hearing about "extreme overrepresentation."
My guess was that Althouse was amused by the juxtaposition and that she did not seriously think that Sotomayor is supposed to answer a question about why she would be the sixth Catholic justice, any more than all those many Protestants were expected to explain the overrepresentation of WASPs in their time.
I don't think that asking about religious diversity is off limits; I just think it's funny for it to come up now, after about 200 years. That's the historical context I'm talking about.
And, no, I don't think that having six Catholic judges is a "theologically-based problem." Lots of countries are predominantly Catholic: France, Belgium, Mexico, etc etc. If the Pope is telling them all what to do, that's news to me.
But I don't want to overdo this. I have no problem with you, or others, coming to different conclusions than I do. My point was to show the data. That's my contribution. From there, feel free to draw your own interpretation!
Just to add, Brazil is predominantily Catholic, and of couse people do not follow everything the Pot (or the church) says.
And I think it is pretty funny that, despite we (brazilians) are catholic, we don't see any public (neither private) school which does not allow evolution thoery to be teached. Whereas in US, we see things like this due to protestants views.
So, I agree with prof. Gelman that you guys are overating the problem of catholic overepresentation. Why (almost) no one brought questions like this about other types of overepresentation?
Hi Manoel,
I'm a Brazilian who currently lives in US and I've to tell you that being a Catholic here is a totally different experience than it is in Brazil. In short, Catholics here seems even more conservative than the average Americans while in Brazil I believe protestants (mostly evangelicals) are much more conservatives. Actually, controlling for income and education my (vague) impression is that Brazilian Catholics are much more liberal than US protestants, which doesn't mean a lot (this is also probably true for a comparison between US and Argentina or Europe and US). But this is just my own personal experience: I don't have any data on it.
Isn't the real problem that supreme court judges have so much power for too long rather than what their cultural affiliations are?
If one person was rotated in each year and one person out then it wouldn't be such a problem. The weight of numbers would mean diversity would increase. And no alignments could take a stranglehold. (Although 7 judges would be better than 9 so that a two-term president would be rotating some of his own choices out.)
There must be some importance to having judges stay in that court so long (or else why do it) e.g. supreme court experience is important, cases take a long time to move through the court. But I am sure there are work arounds – a year of apprenticeship with a reduced case load, call backs judges who have specialised in a long case.
Of all the reasons there are for an imbalanced Supreme Court, the one explanation we can send to the rubbish can without further ado is the one about Catholic education. The lay Catholic school system is atrocious wherever it exists, see Quebec, Ireland and Belgium as notorious examples. If it were about the excellence of primary and secondary educations, the Supreme Court would consist entirely of graduates from Quaker schools and Episcopal academies.
The fact that the Supreme Court used to be heavily weighted, or exclusively Protestant has no bearing on the current imbalance. The proportion of Catholics in the population was insignificant until the turn of the 20th century, and the number of Catholics with the educational credentials, or professional attainments necessary to sit on SCOTUS was smaller still. It was natural for SCOTUS to be uniformly Protestant 100-years ago. But in a country where Catholics make up less than 25% of the population, (and are generally less educated at that) the incidence of that many Catholics on the Court is not an accident.
Those numbers are interesting, but tracking SCOTUS justices religious identities through such a long time period is misleading, because of the amount that religious denominations evolve and their placement in the American scheme of things evolves.
As a Unitarian Universalist, I hardly think we count as "protestant" this day in age. Walk into a UU church with Wiccan religious symbols and Buddhist Prayer Flags hanging from the rafters and you know what I'm talking about. Unitarian Universalists are farther from Catholics and Protestants alike than Catholics and Protestants are from each other!
I understand that the Unitarian identity has evolved and is more liberal now than it was. I'd classify Unitarians and Universalists (which merged in the 1960s) as a protestant denominations till, perhaps, 1940, in which case they both become something much more vague.
I'd also classify Protestants and Evangelicals as two separate categories after 1975. They are no longer culturally indistinguishable as they were before.
I think this all lends itself to the fact that the American religious identity is an evolving thing, and groups of outsiders easily shift to become insiders and vice versa. (I don't think we'd have a Unitarian president nowadays, even though we have had several in the past.)
Unitiarian Univeralists have no Christian identity, nor do they even have a creed. They are officially agnostic and could just as easily be ethnically Jewish – and nonpracticing – with identical religious beliefs.
I'd be interested to see if any Unitarian Supreme Court justices come from the second half of the 20th century, in which case it would be harder to pin down how they fit in religiously. Same for Quakers, and all the really old-fashioned American religious identities like Deist and Theosophical.