Religion
When the Supreme Court was established in 1789, the first members came from among the ranks of the Founding Fathers and were almost uniformly Protestant. Of the 112 justices who have been appointed to the court, 91 have been from various Protestant denominations, 12 have been Catholics (one other Justice, Sherman Minton, converted to Catholicism after leaving the Court), eight have been Jewish and one, David Davis, had no known religious affiliation. Three of the 17 chief justices have been Catholics, and one Jewish Justice, Abe Fortas, was unsuccessfully nominated to be Chief Justice.
Read more about this topic: Demographics Of The Supreme Court Of The United States
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“They live together without king, without government, and each is his own master.... Beyond the fact that they have no church, no religion and are not idolaters, what more can I say? They live according to nature, and may be called Epicureans rather than Stoics.”
—Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512)
“Magic is the envelopment and coercion of the objective world by the ego; it is a dynamic subjectivism. Religion is the coercion of the ego by gods and spirits who are objectively conceived beings in control of nature and man.”
—Richard Chase (b. 1914)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)