NPR’s Nina Totenberg has an interesting story contemplating the possibility that, after Justice Stevens’s anticipated retirement, there may be not a single Protestant justice on the Court. As she puts it in striking context:
Depending on the Stevens replacement, there may be no Protestants left on the court at all in a majority Protestant nation where, for decades and generations, all the justices were Protestant.
(I don’t know that Stevens would identify himself as a Protestant, but that’s conventionally how he’s labeled.)
Here’s an interesting passage on Notre Dame history professor (and prominent evangelical thinker) Mark Noll’s thoughts on the matter:
“Is it a rebuke that there might be no Protestants on the Supreme Court?” he asks. “Indirectly, I suspect it would be.”
It would be a rebuke, he says, in terms of what Protestant identity means, and why there wasn’t a Protestant good enough to fill even a single Supreme Court seat.