Supreme Court Justices by Religious Affiliation

[Skill and Chance]

Feels weird the Catholic percentage is so low overall given they are currently a supermajority of the court (conservatives - Gorsuch + Sotomayor)!

[Skill and Chance]

In 2015 the Supreme Court was 7 Catholics and 2 Jews. 0 Protestants. It’s insane that it worked out like that. Some of it can be explained by demographics I guess, Justices tend to come from the northeast where there are more Catholics and Jews. Even then you’ve still got Clarence Thomas. What proportion of black people from rural Georgia are Catholic, 0.5%?

It hardly matters, but it is quite odd.

TBH I would expect someone's religious views to have a much greater impact on their jurisprudence than their sex or especially skin color.  It's kind of shocking how much more attention the latter gets. 

[Skill and Chance]

The 2 most underrepresented groups by far are open atheists/agnostics and Evangelical Christians.  Regarding the 1st group there are many SCOTUS justices going quite far back who most likely were quietly atheist/agnostic, perhaps including some of the current ones.  However, if you told me in a vacuum that SCOTUS was now split 6R/3D, I would have guessed that about 3 of the R appointees would be Southern Evangelicals.  Instead it's 0!  And the one justice who comes closest to being in that group (Jackson, although she has never publicly claimed the label and likely never will) is a D appointee.

[Skill and Chance]

Great data and thanks for that website. Suprising amount of Unitarians but it has always been popular amoung the Elites thanks to John Adams.

It's also worth noting that it seems like Unitarians were mostly appointed during the years where it was a bit more of a fad:

1812
1858
1862
1882
1903
1921
1943
1945

While there were obviously Unitarians before this (within Protestant denominations), the American Unitarian Association (which largely spun out of Congregationalism) began in 1825 and lasted until 1961.  By the time it merged with the Universalist Church of America in 1961, it was more or less a pointless collection of extremely liberal churches that didn't have any real theological convictions ... hence it merging with a group that inherently actually has NOTHING to do with being Unitarian, haha; you can be a Trinitarian Universalist, of course.

I think Unitarianism was only especially popular in a society where you felt cultural pressure to be a part of an organized Christian denomination but you were extremely theologically liberal.  In an America after the World Wars, I think its days were extremely numbered, and you then of course see no more Unitarians on the Supreme Court in the second half of the Twentieth Century.

Yes, the bottom line is that Unitarian meant something fundamentally different in that era than it does now.