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      Alarm as US supreme court takes a hatchet to church-state separation

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      Alarm as US supreme court takes a hatchet to church-state separation A series of court decisions has raised fears that the conservative majority are forcing religion back into the US political systemWhen America’s highest court ended the constitutional right to abortion after half a century, Jeff Landry, the attorney general of Louisiana, knew whom he wanted to thank.“This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice in it and be glad,” he said in an official statement. “Today, along with millions across Louisiana and America, I rejoice with my departed mom and the unborn children with her in Heaven!”The US supreme court is letting prayer back in public schools. This is unsettling | Moira DoneganRead moreThe southern state’s top law enforcement official was not the only Republican to reference God while taking a victory lap. Nor was he alone in rooting for the supreme court to continue a pattern of forcing religion back into the US political system and tearing down the wall that separates church from state.The court – said to be more pro-religion than at any time since the 1950s – wrapped up one of its most consequential and divisive terms this week. Critics lamented a string of decisions that they say undermine legal traditions that prevent government officials from promoting any particular faith.In May the conservative majority ruled in favor of a Christian group that wanted to fly a flag emblazoned with a cross at Boston city hall under a programme aimed at promoting diversity and tolerance among the city’s various communities.Last month they endorsed taxpayer money paying for students to attend religious schools under a Maine tuition assistance programme in rural areas lacking nearby public high schools.Then they backed an American football coach at a Washington state public high school who was suspended by a local school district for refusing to stop leading Christian prayers with players on the field after games. This ruling cast aside a 1971 precedent, known as the Lemon test, which took into account factors such as whether the challenged government practice has a secular purpose.In all three cases, the court decided against government officials whose policies and actions were taken to avoid violating the constitution’s first amendment prohibition on government endorsement of religion, known as the “establishment clause”.In addition, although their decision last week to overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that legalised abortion nationwide did not involve the establishment clause, it was celebrated as a seminal victory by religious conservatives. Mike Pence, the former vice-president and a born again Christian, called for a national ban on the procedure.Paradoxically, the trend comes against the backdrop of an increasingly diverse and secular nation.Last year a Gallup survey revealed that Americans’ membership in houses of worship dropped below 50% for the first time, and last month Gallup found that the share of US adults who believe in God – 81% – was the lowest since it first asked the question in 1944.White Christians represented 54% of the population when Barack Obama first ran for president in 2008 but now make up only 45%. Former president Donald Trump’s appointment of three rightwing justices, however, helped put the court on a very different track. And the nature of its rulings have been unusually radical and sweeping.Robert P Jones, founder and chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute thinktank in Washington, said: “What we’re seeing is a desperate power grab as the sun is setting on white Christian America. In the courts, instead of moving slowly and systematically, it’s a lurch.”Jones added: “In the meantime we’re going to be left with essentially an apartheid situation in the US where we’re going to have minority rule by this shrinking group that’s been able to seize the levers of power, even as their cultural democratic representation in the country shrinks.”The establishment clause prevents the government from establishing a state religion and bars it from favoring one faith over another. Thomas Jefferson, the third president, said in an 1802 letter the provision should represent a “wall of separation” between church and state.Some far-right Republicans now brazenly challenge that premise. The Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert reportedly told a church service last Sunday: “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk that’s not in the constitution. It was in a stinking letter, and it means nothing like what they say it does.”In its trio of provocative decisions over the past two months, the supreme court decided that government actions intended to maintain a separation of church and state had instead infringed separate rights to free speech or the free exercise of religion, also protected by the first amendment.In the ruling on school football coach Joseph Kennedy, the conservative justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the court’s aim was to prevent public officials from being hostile to religion as they navigate the establishment clause. “In no world may a government entity’s concerns about phantom violations justify actual violations of an individual’s first amendment rights,” Gorsuch opined.Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which represented the school board in the case, said the separation was “under complete attack” by the supreme court as it favours the free exercise clause at the expense of the establishment clause, thereby raising the specter of religious favoritism.“We are at risk of taking away the religious freedom of vast numbers of Americans, which should make the founders of our country be doing somersaults in their grave and I’m sure is alarming to the world as a whole, because they see America as a beacon of light when it comes to religious freedom.”The line between church and state has been crucial, Laser argues, to advances in LGBTQ equality, racial justice, reproductive freedom, protecting religious minorities, the teaching of science in schools and safeguarding democracy itself. But all this is suddenly precarious because of the court’s 6-3 conservative majority.She added: “The court pandered to a religious extremist agenda and implemented it by forcing one set of religious views on all of us and taking away the right of a woman to do with her body what her religious and moral views dictate, or taking away the right of a Maine taxpayer to not fund the teaching of a religion or religious discrimination that they disagree with, or taking away the right of a Jewish or Muslim or an atheist or a Buddhist public school student not to feel pressured to pray to play and be included in public school.”Like Jones, Laser perceives in the court’s opinions a backlash against America’s religious pluralism, racial diversity, an increase in women’s power in society and the advent of marriage equality and progress on LGBTQ equality.“This is a backlash that is meant to reinforce and cement existing power structures into our law, and it panders to a white Christian right extremist agenda. It’s incredibly divisive. It’s dangerous to our democracy in that regard.”Unusually, the nine-member supreme court currently includes six Catholics: Chief Justice John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, all appointed by Republican presidents, and Sonia Sotomayor, seated by a Democrat. Last year the court ruled that a Catholic social services agency in Philadelphia could ignore city rules and refuse to work with same-sex couples who apply to take in foster children.But although most of the court’s religious rights decisions in recent years involved Christian plaintiffs, it has also backed followers of other religions. These included a Muslim woman in 2015 denied a retail sales job because she wore a headscarf for religious reasons and a Buddhist death row inmate in 2019 who wanted a spiritual adviser present at his execution in Texas.The court also sided with both Christian and Jewish congregations in challenges based on religious rights to governmental restrictions such as limits on public gatherings imposed as public safety measures during the coronavirus pandemic.The New York Times reported recently: “Since John Roberts became chief justice in 2005, the court has ruled in favor of religious organizations in orally argued cases 83% [now 85%] of the time. That is far more than any court in the past seven decades – all of which were led by chief justices who, like Roberts, were appointed by Republican presidents.”The shift has been welcomed by conservative pressure groups. Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, said: “The court’s recent pro-religious liberty streak shows how far it has come from earlier decades. A majority of the justices continue to demonstrate a clear record of protecting religious liberty and expression, something the constitution explicitly guarantees.”Activists and academic experts, however, warn that the emboldened supermajority of six justices is out of kilter with the will of the people on government endorsement of religion and other issues. Amanda Hollis-Brusky, an associate professor of politics at Pomona College in Claremont, California, said: “It’s paradoxical but it’s also a function of our system that creates so many avenues for minority rule and that’s something that we as Americans need to really reckon with: whether this 18th-century system still works for us in the 21st century.”TopicsUS constitution and civil libertiesUS politicsUS supreme courtChristianityReligionLaw (US)featuresReuse this content More

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      How the Christian right took over the judiciary and changed America

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      How the Christian right took over the judiciary and changed America Leaders of the movement understood very well that if you can capture the courts, you can change societyThe supreme court decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which reverses the constitutional abortion rights that American women have enjoyed over the past 50 years, has come as a surprise to many voters. A majority, after all, support reproductive rights and regard their abolition as regressive and barbaric.Understood in the context of the movement that created the supreme court in its current incarnation, however, there is nothing surprising about it. In fact, it marks the beginning rather than the endpoint of the agenda this movement has in mind.At the core of the Dobbs decision lies the conviction that the power of government can and should be used to impose a certain moral and religious vision – a supposedly biblical and regressive understanding of the Christian religion – on the population at large.How did this conviction come to have such influence in the courts, given America’s longstanding principle of church-state separation? To understand why this is happening now, it’s important to know something about the Christian nationalist movement’s history, how its leaders chose the issue of abortion as a means of creating single-issue voters, and how they united conservatives across denominational barriers by, in effect, inventing a new form of intensely political religion.Christian nationalists often claim their movement got its start as a grassroots reaction to Roe v Wade in 1973. But the movement actually gelled several years later with a crucial assist from a group calling itself the “New Right”.Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, Phyllis Schlafly and other leaders of this movement were dissatisfied with the direction of the Republican party and the culture at large. “We are radicals who want to change the existing power structure. We are not conservatives in the sense that conservative means accepting the status quo,” Paul Weyrich said. “We want change – we are the forces of change.”They were angry at liberals, who they believed threatened to undermine national security with their softness on communism. They were angry at establishment conservatives – the “Rockefeller Republicans” – for siding with the liberals; they were angry about the rising tide of feminism, which they saw as a menace to the social order, and about the civil rights movement and the danger it posed to segregation. One thing that they were not particularly angry about, at least initially, was the matter of abortion rights.New Right leaders formed common cause with a handful of conservative Catholics, including George Weigel and Richard John Neuhaus, who shared their concerns, and drew in powerful conservative preachers such as Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones Sr. They were determined to ignite a hyper-conservative counter-revolution. All they needed now was an issue that could be used to unify its disparate elements and draw in the rank and file.Among their core concerns was the fear that the supreme court might end tax exemptions for segregated Christian schools. Jerry Falwell and many of his fellow southern, white, conservative pastors were closely involved with segregated schools and universities – Jones went so far as to call segregation “God’s established order” and referred to desegregationists as “Satanic propagandists” who were “leading colored Christians astray”. As far as these pastors were concerned, they had the right not just to separate people on the basis of race but to also receive federal money for the purpose.They knew, however, that “Stop the tax on segregation!” wasn’t going to be an effective rallying cry for their new movement. As the historian and author Randall Balmer wrote, “It wasn’t until 1979 – a full six years after Roe – that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools.”In many respects abortion was an unlikely choice, because when the Roe v Wade decision was issued, most Protestant Republicans supported it. The Southern Baptist Convention passed resolutions in 1971 and 1974 expressing support for the liberalization of abortion law, and an editorial in their wire service hailed the passage of Roe v Wade, declaring that “religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.” As governor of California, Ronald Reagan passed the most liberal abortion law in the country in 1967. Conservative icon Barry Goldwater supported abortion law liberalization too, at least early in his career, and his wife Peggy was a cofounder of Planned Parenthood in Arizona.Yet abortion turned out to be the critical unifying issue for two fundamentally political reasons. First, it brought together conservative Catholics who supplied much of the intellectual leadership of the movement with conservative Protestants and evangelicals. Second, by tying abortion to the perceived social ills of the age – the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, and women’s liberation – the issue became a focal point for the anxieties about social change welling up from the base.Over time, pro-choice voices were purged from the Republican party. In her 2016 book, How the Republican Party Became Pro-Life, Phyllis Schlafly details the considerable effort it took, over several decades, to force the Republican party to change its views on the issue. What her book and the history shows is that the “pro-life religion” that we see today, which cuts across denominational boundaries on the political right, is a modern creation.In recent decades, the religious right has invested many hundreds of millions of dollars developing a complex and coordinated infrastructure, whose features include rightwing policy groups, networking organizations, data initiatives and media. A critical component of this infrastructure is its sophisticated legal sphere.Movement leaders understood very well that if you can capture the courts, you can change society. Leading organizations include the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is involved in many of the recent cases intended to degrade the principle of church-state separation; First Liberty; Becket, formerly known as the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty; and the Federalist Society, a networking and support organization for rightwing jurists and their allies whose leader, Leonard Leo, has directed hundreds of millions of dollars to a network of affiliated organizations. This infrastructure has created a pipeline to funnel ideologues to important judicial positions at the national and federal level. Nearly 90% of Trump’s appellate court nominees were or are Federalist Society members, according to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, and all six conservative justices on the supreme court are current or former members.The rightwing legal movement has spent several decades establishing a new regime in which “religious liberty” is reframed as an exemption from the law, one enjoyed by a certain preferred category of religion. LGBT advocacy groups are concerned that the supreme court’s willingness, in the next session, to hear the case of a Colorado website designer who wishes to refuse services to same-sex couples is a critical step to overturning a broad range of anti-discrimination laws that protect LGBT Americans along with women, members of religious minority groups and others.The legal powerhouses of the Christian right have also recognized that their efforts can be turned into a gravy train of public money. That is one of the reasons a recent supreme court decision, which ruled Maine must fund religious schools as part of a state tuition program, was predicted by observers of this movement. This decision forces the state to fund religious schools no matter how discriminatory their practices and sectarian their teachings. “This court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent.This supreme court has already made clear how swiftly our Christian nationalist judiciary will change the law to suit this vision of a society ruled by a reactionary elite, a society with a preferred religion and a prescribed code of sexual behavior, all backed by the coercive power of the state. The idea that they will stop with overturning Roe v Wade is a delusion.TopicsAbortionRoe v WadeUS supreme courtLaw (US)US politicsReligionChristianityfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Roger Stone and Michael Flynn under fire over rallies ‘distorting Christianity’

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      Roger Stone and Michael Flynn under fire over rallies ‘distorting Christianity’Prominent Christian leaders accuse Trump allies of spreading misinformation about 2020 election and Covid, while distorting Christian teachings at ReAwaken America events A growing number of prominent Christian leaders are sounding alarms about threats to democracy posed by ReAwaken America rallies where Donald Trump loyalists Michael Flynn and Roger Stone and rightwing pastors have spread misinformation about the 2020 elections and Covid-19 vaccines, and distorted Christian teachings.The falsehoods pushed at ReAwaken gatherings have prompted some Christian leaders to warn that America’s political and spiritual health is threatened by a toxic mix of Christian nationalism, lies about Trump’s loss to Joe Biden, and ahistorical views of the nation’s founding principle of the separation of church and state.The backlash against rightwing evangelicals is reshaping American politics and faith | Ruth BraunsteinRead moreSeveral well-known Christian leaders, including the president of the Christian social justice group Sojourners and the executive director of a major Baptist group, have called on American churches to speak out against the messages promoted at ReAwaken America rallies that have been held in Oklahoma, Arizona, Texas, California, South Carolina and other states.Other tour rallies, some of which have been held in religious spaces, are slated for New York and Virginia this summer and some local Christian leaders are being encouraged to publicly voice concerns about the dangerous rhetoric and messages they convey.“This ReAwaken tour is peddling dangerous lies about both the election and the pandemic,” Adam Russell Taylor, the president of Sojourners, told the Guardian. “Jesus taught us that the truth will set us free, and these lies hold people captive to these dangerous falsehoods. They also exacerbate the toxic polarization we’re seeing in both the church and the wider society.”Taylor added he was deeply concerned about “a conflation between Christianity and a nationalistic form of patriotism” at the “tour rallies which are promoting a more overt form of Christian nationalism”.Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which has organized Christians against Christian nationalism, said: “Christian nationalism is a threat to the church because those peddling it wrap this ideology in biblical language and imagery. Christian nationalism is wrong as a matter of Christian ethics. The Bible is not confined to a nation much less a party or list of policy positions.”She added: “The ReAwaken America tour is a gross distortion of Christianity and it’s up to Christian leaders in the areas the tour visits to speak out against this ideology.”The ReAwaken tour’s pro-Trump political messages mixed with Christian nationalism was on display at a two-day gathering in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in May that drew Flynn, Stone, Eric Trump and the rightwing pastor Mark Burns, who is running for a House seat in the state.Stone revved up the crowd with at times bizarre conspiratorial claims. “There is a satanic portal above the White House, you can see day and night. It exists. It is real. And it must be closed. And it will be closed by prayer,” he said.The “portal”, Stone told a rapt crowd, first appeared after Joe Biden “became president and it will be closed before he leaves”. Stone, a longtime Trump confidant, was convicted on three counts including obstruction during the Russia meddling investigations, but he was pardoned in late 2020 by Trump, who had earlier commuted his sentence.Burns, an ardent Trump backer, drew applause at the rally with blistering attacks on the LGBTQ community, top congressional Democrats, and even the GOP senator Lindsey Graham, a strong Trump ally.Known for his penchant for mixing religious messages with politics, Burns told another ReAwaken meeting in Ohio in February that God would “raise up armies” to help conservatives “shut down” Democratic-run America.“Are you ready to fight with me? Shout yeah!” Burns loudly exhorted the crowd. “Are you ready to stand with me? Shout yeah!”But retired Lt Gen Flynn, a staunch ally of Trump’s who told the rightwing network Newsmax in December 2020 that Trump should deploy the military to “rerun the election” in swing states Biden won, is the tour’s most highly promoted draw.At a ReAwaken event in Texas in November, for instance, Flynn sparked strong criticism by claiming that America should have just “one religion”.“If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion,” Flynn said. “One nation under God and one religion under God, right? All of us, working together.”At the South Carolina rally, Flynn proclaimed that the US has a “biblical destiny”, and posited that the US was built on a “set of Judeo-Christian principles”.Flynn’s views alarm Taylor of Sojourners. “Flynn has a warped understanding of religion and American history,” Taylor said.The ReAwaken tour was launched by a conservative Oklahoma talkshow host and entrepreneur named Clay Clark in tandem with Flynn, who briefly served as Trump’s first national security adviser. Flynn pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI about contacts he had with Russia’s ambassador before Trump took office, but in late 2020 Trump pardoned him.The Trump loyalist and multimillionaire Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock, told the Guardian last year the America Project, an advocacy group he founded that boasts Flynn as a special adviser and spokesman, put up “tens of thousands of dollars” to help launch the rallies in 2021, and that he has attended some himself.Flynn’s central role at the ReAwaken events was cited in a hard-hitting April op-ed in the Times of San Diego by the Rev Melinda Teter Dodge.“Tragically, late last month, proclaimed church leaders and religious zealots descended upon San Diego county, and twisted this scriptural truth for specific political purposes. In speaking to thousands of vulnerable attendees, this group spewed dangerous falsehood after falsehood about Covid-19 and the 2020 election,” she wrote.“The event at a church in San Marcos was the latest stop on disgraced, retired General Michael Flynn’s ‘ReAwaken America Tour,’ a nationwide series of megachurch engagements featuring a who’s who of far-right religious extremists, Trump aides, QAnon conspiracy theorists, and other reckless figures. At every stop along the way, the Christian nationalist tour has left in its wake a trail of dangerous disinformation that leads to bigotry, hate, and, at its most extreme, violence.”Teter Dodge added that a “staple” of the tours has been Pastor Greg Locke, “who has made a name for himself by peddling QAnon conspiracy theories from his pulpit, and even kicking people out of his church if they wore a mask. More recently, Locke has taken up the latest cause célèbre among the radical far-right – book burning.”Looking ahead to the fall elections, Taylor of Sojourners worries that the rhetoric of the ReAwaken events threatens voting rights.Taylor said he was “particularly alarmed by the ways this tour is promulgating and providing religious cover to the big lie that the last election was stolen. This big lie is eroding trust in elections and being exploited to justify and fuel efforts to erect new barriers across the country that restrict the right to vote.”TopicsUS politicsChristianityMichael FlynnReligionRoger StonenewsReuse this content More

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      The backlash against rightwing evangelicals is reshaping American politics and faith | Ruth Braunstein

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      The backlash against rightwing evangelicals is reshaping American politics and faithRuth BraunsteinSome sociologists believe that the rising number of non-religious Americans is a reaction against rightwing evangelicals. But that’s just part of the story What if I were to tell you that the following trends in American religion were all connected: rising numbers of people who are religiously unaffiliated (“nones”) or identify as “spiritual but not religious”; a spike in positive attention to the “religious left”; the depoliticization of liberal religion; and the purification and radicalization of the religious right? As a sociologist who has studied American religion and politics for many years, I have often struggled to make sense of these dramatic but seemingly disconnected changes. I now believe they all can all be explained, at least in part, as products of a backlash to the religious right.Since the religious right rose to national prominence in the 1980s, the movement’s insertion of religion in public debate and uncompromising style of public discourse has alienated many non-adherents and members of the larger public. As its critics often note, the movement promotes policies – such as bans on same-sex marriage and abortion – that are viewed by growing numbers of Americans as intolerant and radical.In a 2002 article, sociologists Michael Hout and Claude S Fischer argued that a significant trend in American religion – the skyrocketing number of people disaffiliating from religion – could be partly explained as a political backlash against the religious right. In the two decades since this article was published, a wealth of additional evidence has emerged to support its general argument. Sociologists Joseph O Baker and Buster G Smith summarize the sentiment driving this backlash: “If that’s what it means to be religious, then I’m not religious.”While pathbreaking, this research has been relatively narrow in its focus. This is because it has typically started with the puzzle of the rising “nones” and worked backward in search of a cause, landing on backlash against the religious right. I wondered what would happen if we flipped this question around, and started with the rise of the religious right and public concerns about its radicalism. We could then consider the varied ways that backlash against it has manifested, including but not limited to the rise of the “nones”.Backlash, after all, can take many forms. The kind of backlash that has led people to disavow religious affiliation in general is what I call a “broad” form of backlash. In this form, backlash against a radical form of religious expression leads people to distance themselves from all religion, including more moderate religious groups that are viewed as guilty by association with radicals. This is a common pattern within social movements, where moderates often worry that radicals will discredit their movement as a whole.But this is not the only plausible form that backlash can take. One can also imagine a narrower, more targeted, backlash against the religious right itself, in which people do not abandon religion altogether but rather migrate to more moderate or otherwise appealing religious groups. Evidence of this form of backlash abounds. It can be found in rising numbers of people who identity as “spiritual but not religious”. These individuals are not rejecting religion altogether; they are embracing a new category of religiosity, one viewed as unpolluted by its association with radical conservative politics.‘Identity crisis’: will the US’s largest evangelical denomination move even further right?Read moreSimilarly, those who associate with the religious left do not discredit religion in general, but promote what they view as a more pluralistic form of public religious expression. Since Donald Trump was elected president with the support of religious conservatives, typically low-profile groups on the religious left received a surge of positive attention as observers saw in them a means of checking the power of the religious right. As a column by Nicholas Kristof put it in the New York Times: “Progressive Christians Arise! Hallelujah!”Finally, new research finds that people who are both religious and politically liberal are intentionally distancing themselves from the religious right by depoliticizing their public religious expression – a development worthy of much more attention.Finally, backlash is not a one-way street – the experience of being the object of political backlash has led to a counter-backlash among the conservative Christians who comprise the religious right. White evangelical Christians believe that they are being illegitimately persecuted and are increasingly invested in the boundary between the perceived morally righteous and their enemies. Religious conservatives not committed to Trump and the Republican party are being pushed out. Those who remain are not only deeply loyal to a shared political project, but less likely to encounter internal checks on radical ideas.Even as this group is shrinking by some measures, recent data suggests that growing numbers of nonreligious and non-Protestant Americans are adopting the label of “evangelical” – not as a statement of their religious identity, but as a statement of their political identity as rightwing Republicans or supporters of Donald Trump. Together, these counter-backlashes seem to be driving this movement toward deeper political radicalism.Backlash against the religious right has had ripple effects far more widespread than previously recognized. These dynamics are effectively reshaping American religion and politics, and show no signs of stopping.
      Ruth Braunstein is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and the director of the Meanings of Democracy Lab. She is the author of Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy Across the Political Divide
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      Justice on the Brink review: how the religious right took the supreme court

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      Justice on the Brink review: how the religious right took the supreme court Linda Greenhouse does a fine job of raising the alarm about the conservative conquest and what it means for the rest of us – it’s a pity she does not also recommend ways to fight backLinda Greenhouse’s byline became synonymous with the supreme court during the 30 years she covered it for the New York Times. She excelled at unraveling complex legal riddles for the average reader. She also had tremendous common sense – an essential and depressingly rare quality among journalists.The Agenda review: how the supreme court became an existential threat to US democracyRead moreBoth of these virtues are on display in her new book, which chronicles “12 months that transformed the supreme court” after the death of the liberal lion Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the obscenely rapid confirmation of her conservative successor, Amy Coney Barrett.As others have pointed out, Barrett’s ascension was the crowning achievement of a decades-long project of the American right, to pack the highest court with the kind of people who delight in telling graduating students things like the proper purpose of a legal career “is building the kingdom of God”.Barrett is also the sixth Catholic appointed to the court. Another, Neil Gorsuch, was raised Catholic but now attends the church of his wife, who was raised in the Church of England.Greenhouse describes the Federalist Society as the principal engine of this foul project. Founded in the second year of the Reagan administration to change the prevailing ideology of the leading law schools, its 70,000 members have become the de facto gatekeepers for every conservative lawyer hoping to serve in the executive branch or the judiciary.Most students of the judiciary know that all 226 judges appointed by Donald Trump were approved by the Federalists. But until I read Greenhouse’s book I never knew that every one of the 500-plus judges appointed by the two Bushes also earned the Federalist imprimatur.“Its plan from the beginning was to … nurture future generations of conservative law students” who years later would form the pool from which “conservative judges would be chosen”, Greenhouse writes.She also adds the telling detail that makes it clear that this situation is even worse than it appears. After Gorsuch thanked a Federalist banquet “from the bottom” of his heart, after his confirmation to the supreme court, the then White House counsel, Don McGahn, told the same gathering it was “completely false” that the Trump administration had “outsourced” judicial selection to the Federalists.“I’ve been a member of the Federalists since law school,” said McGahn. “So frankly, it seems like it’s been in-sourced.”Greenhouse’s main subject is the impact on the law of the replacement of a celebrated progressive, Ginsburg, with the anti-abortion and anti-contraception Barrett. A meticulous examination of the most important cases decided during Barrett’s first term demonstrates how the new justice contributed to Chief Justice John Roberts’ determination to “change how the constitution” understands race and religion.The centuries-old wall between church and state is being eroded and government efforts to promote integration – or prevent resegregation – are under steady attack.Roberts’s opposition to important sections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act goes all the way back to his service in Ronald Reagan’s justice department in the early 1980s. As chief justice he made his youthful scorn for the virtues of integration into the law of the land, writing a majority decision invalidating the plans of Seattle and Louisville to consider race to prevent resegregation of public schools. By a vote of 5-4 the court ruled the consideration of race violated the constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.Roberts’s opinion declared that the school systems’ “interest in avoiding resegregation was not sufficiently ‘compelling’ to justify a racially conscious remedy”.For most of the country’s history, the establishment clause of the constitution has prevented the government from “endorsing or coercing a religious practice or viewpoint”, Greenhouse writes, while “the free exercise clause requires the government to leave believers free to practice their faith”.But Roberts and his allies have thrown things upside down, turning the free exercise clause “from its historic role as a shield that protected believers from government interference into a sword that vaulted believers into a position of privilege”.Greenhouse is a woman of convictions. Even as a reporter, she was famous for taking part in a march supporting abortion rights. In a previous book she bragged of contributions to Planned Parenthood. But none of her critics could ever find any evidence that her stories in the Times were slanted by her personal beliefs.That objective stance was entirely appropriate when she was a daily reporter. But book writing is different. After doing such a good job of describing the decades-long rightwing campaign to produce a court whose views are increasingly at odds with the majority of voters, Greenhouse doesn’t endorse any ideas about how to remedy the situation.Supreme Ambition review: Trump, Kavanaugh and the right’s big coupRead moreShe shows no enthusiasm for the idea of expanding the number of seats on the court, which was championed by Pete Buttigieg and others during the 2020 election, and she doesn’t even support the idea that 83-year-old Stephen Breyer should feel any pressure to retire during the current Congress, to make sure Joe Biden can appoint, and a Democratic Senate confirm, a liberal successor.Similarly, Greenhouse never suggests Ginsburg was wrong to stay in office until her death, rather than retire during Barack Obama’s time in office so that she wouldn’t be replaced by someone like Barrett.Unwilling to regulate dark money’s vicious role in our politics, and happy to eviscerate the most basic protections of the Voting Rights Act, the court is increasingly tethered to religious rightwing orthodoxy.Greenhouse does a superb job of describing how we got here. What she lacks is the passionate imagination we need to re-balance an institution which poses an urgent threat to American democracy.
      Justice on the Brink is published in the US by Random House
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      Biden v US Catholic bishops: Politics Weekly Extra

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      Last week Catholic bishops in the US voted to move forward with plans that could result in Joe Biden being banned from receiving communion because of his stance on abortion. Jonathan Freedland speaks to former congressman Tom Perriello about the decision and its potential impact on voters

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      Last week the US Conference of Catholic Bishops voted to move foward with plans to draw up new guidance on the eucharist, which could see President Biden being banned from receiving communion due to his stance on abortion. Why are they doing this? And what impact will it actually have? Jonathan Freedland speaks to Tom Perriello, the executive director of Open Society Foundations US about a piece he wrote last week condemning the move by the bishops. Archive: Getty; CNN; YouTube Listen to Comfort Eating with Grace Dent Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      ‘Unique problem’: Catholic bishops split over Biden’s support for abortion rights

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      At some point this weekend, Joe Biden will take his place in a line of people approaching the altar of a Catholic church to receive communion.The US president, a devout Catholic whose speeches regularly include biblical references and who carries a rosary that belonged to his late son, attends Mass every weekend – in Washington, his home town of Wilmington in Delaware, or wherever he happens to be traveling. If the traditional Sunday morning Eucharist service is not possible because of his schedule, he will receive the sacrament on Saturday evening as permitted by the Roman Catholic church.“It’s really an encounter with God,” Father Kevin Gillespie of Holy Trinity in Washington, the church Biden usually attends in the capital, told the Atlantic earlier this year. For Biden, this “sacred and intimate moment” is a “gift that enhances his faith”, and “we most certainly encourage him to improve his intimacy with God through the Eucharist”.But not everybody in the Catholic church in America is quite so keen on Biden receiving communion. Next week, a national online meeting of US bishops will discuss whether the president and other high-profile political figures should be denied the sacraments because of his stance on abortion rights.“How can he say he’s a devout Catholic and he’s doing these things that are contrary to the church’s teaching?” archbishop Joseph Naumann, chair of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) committee on pro-life activities, asked last month. Biden’s position was a “grave moral evil” which presents a “unique problem” for the church, Naumann said.Cardinal Raymond Burke, a leading conservative and critic of Pope Francis, has gone further, saying that politicians who “publicly and obstinately” support abortion are “apostates” who should not only be barred from receiving communion but deserve excommunication.At their meeting, the bishops will consider a document aimed at clarifying the church’s position on the Eucharist, and decide whether to commission further work on the circumstances in which the sacraments may be denied. The proposal needs the support of at least two-thirds of the 280 bishops in the USCCB – and more than 60 have already requested a suspension of all discussion, citing divisions within the conference.Among opponents of the move is Robert McElroy, the bishop of San Diego, who wrote in America Magazine, the Jesuit journal, that “the Eucharist is being weaponised and deployed as a tool in political warfare. This must not happen.”A letter from a senior Vatican official last month urged US bishops not to rush any debate and decision, and there has been speculation that the first meeting between President Biden and Pope Francis could take place at the Vatican the day before the USCCB’s virtual session opens. That would be seen as a strong signal from Rome.Whatever the outcome of the USCCB’s deliberations, the decision on whether an individual parishioner should be denied communion lies with the local bishop. Wilton Gregory of Washington and Francis Malooly of Wilmington, Delaware, have both made it clear that Biden is welcome to receive communion at churches in their dioceses.Father Gillespie’s public defence of Biden attending Mass has drawn angry phone calls, letters and emails. He told the Guardian it seemed best to refrain from speaking further on the matter, but said the president “has and will be welcomed to receive the Holy Eucharist” at his church.Biden, the second Catholic to occupy the White House after John F Kennedy, has said his faith shapes “all that I do” and will “serve as my anchor” through his term in office. In his book, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics, he wrote: “My idea of self, of family, of community, of the wider world comes straight from my religion.”On abortion, Biden has said he personally believes life begins at conception but recognises others do not share his view. “What I’m not prepared to do is impose a precise view that is borne out of my faith on other people,” he said in 2015.In recent months, the Biden administration has lifted restrictions on federal funding for research involving human foetal tissue, rescinded a Trump policy barring organisations that refer women for abortions from receiving federal grants, and allowed women to remotely obtain a prescription for an abortion pill during the pandemic.The Catholic church says that Catholics in public life should uphold principles consistent with its doctrine. But in a survey carried out by the Pew Research Center in March, more than two-thirds of US Catholics said Biden’s views on abortion should not disqualify him from receiving communion.According to exit polls taken during last November’s presidential election, just over half of US Catholics (51%) voted for Biden, compared with 45% who voted Democrat in 2016; and 47% voted for Trump, compared with 52% in the previous election.Andrew Chesnut, professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the USCCB’s proposal “serves to further polarise an already sharply divided episcopy, some of whom have been outspoken opponents of Pope Francis’s relatively progressive papacy.“The proposal to exclude Biden and all election officials who support legal abortion from communion is an effort on the part of conservative bishops to shore up their base of regular Mass-goers who are the life blood of the church. But exclusionary ecclesial policies will only lead to greater defection from the pews, especially among Millennials and Generation Z.”Michael Budde, professor of Catholic studies and political science at DePaul University in Chicago, said barring Biden from communion “will be rightly seen as a move of desperation, an attempt to coerce what has not been won by persuasion or dialogue”.He added: “There is no consensus among the Catholic faithful on this measure; significantly, there is no real support for it at the level of the worldwide Catholic communion as voiced by Pope Francis. That there are finally some important US cardinals and bishops who are tired of this can’t-win strategy may be an indication that someday a better vision might finally emerge.”A scathing editorial in the National Catholic Reporter earlier this month said the “tragic reality” of proceeding with the proposal was that “it will seal the deal on the branding of Catholicism in the United States as a culture war project.“This culture war … is not the church of mercy and encounter that Pope Francis is trying to offer the world. Nor does it resemble what the carpenter’s son from Galilee preached and died for.” More

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      The Guardian view on US bishops versus the president: Biden is on the angels’ side | Editorial

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      Joe Biden wears his Catholicism on his sleeve. The American president carries the rosary beads of his late son, Beau, around his wrist, and each Sunday he attends mass in Washington, or in his home state of Delaware. After Mr Biden’s election to the White House last year, Pope Francis sent him a copy of his book on the Covid pandemic, Let Us Dream. In it, Francis calls for a new spirit of solidarity in societies which have learned the hard way that “no one is saved alone”.Through his $2tn American Rescue Plan, Mr Biden hopes to turn that theological claim into public policy, deploying the resources of the state in the name of a more equal, sustainable society. “I grew up with Catholic social doctrine, which taught me that faith without works is dead,” he has said.For millions of ordinary American Catholics, disillusioned and alienated by their church’s shameful handling of sex abuse scandals, the Biden presidency is therefore an uplifting source of celebration and hope. But within the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), it is instead treated as an insidious threat to ecclesial authority. As Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas put it recently: “Because President Biden is Catholic, it presents a unique problem for us.”The reason is Mr Biden’s backing of abortion rights, which goes against Catholic teaching. On issues such as the rights of refugees, concern for the poor, the dignity of work and the climate emergency, the president and Pope Francis march in virtual lockstep. But figures such as Archbishop Naumann and the president of the USCCB, José Gomez, believe that the president’s position on abortion confuses the faithful and brings his own Catholicism into disrepute. In such circumstances, they speculate, it may be appropriate to take the extreme step of denying him holy communion at mass.The last similar discussion took place in 2004, when the pro-choice Catholic John Kerry was running for the White House. The issue was eventually parked and Mr Kerry didn’t win. Now the bishops have announced a vote next month on the subject, with a view to issuing a clarificatory document. The arch-conservative cardinal Raymond Burke is already on the record stating that “apostate” politicians backing abortion rights should be denied communion. As the conciliatory Mr Biden makes a credible fist of uniting a nation divided by decades of culture wars, it is tempting to despair. The USCCB has no power to order the withholding of communion, and the Vatican has already made clear its disapproval of the proposed June vote. But this may cut little ice with prelates who have fiercely resisted the liberal priorities of Francis’s papacy from its inception eight years ago.The weaponising of the eucharist illustrates the extent to which much of the hierarchy of US Catholicism has become the theological wing of extreme Republicanism. The end result, as one prominent theologian has warned, may be some kind of “soft schism” as conservative bishops try to pull the church further to the right. Surveys indicate that a majority of US Catholics believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.The extraordinary violent denouement of Donald Trump’s polarising presidency meant that dialling down division became an urgent national priority. Mr Biden, in both tone and substance, has done a pretty good job on that front so far. If only the national leaders of his church could follow suit. More