Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roberts Is More Likely to Favor Religious Liberty, Study Finds
A study from The Supreme Court Review has found that today’s Supreme Court is more likely to favor religious liberty.
According to the study, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has “ruled in favor of religious organizations far more frequently than its predecessors—over 81 percent of the time, compared to about 50 percent for all previous eras since 1953.”
The study noted that in “most of these cases, the winning religion was a mainstream Christian organization, whereas in the past pro-religion outcomes more frequently favored minority or marginal religious organizations.”
As CBN News reported, the study also found that under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the ’50s and 60’s, the Supreme Court only supported religious liberty 46 percent of the time. From the 1960s to the 1980s, however, while being led by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, the Supreme Court’s support for religious liberty grew to 51 percent. Under Chief Justice William Rehnquist from the ’80s to 2005, the Supreme Court’s support of religious liberty further grew to 58 percent.
Katherine Beck Johnson from the Family Research Council argued that she is glad Christians are winning in court because they are “simply using the first amendment as our protection.”
She continued, “We’re utilizing it at the courts. it is our right, and we’re winning because the Left is infringing on our first amendment right.”
Based on a statistical analysis, the report suggests that this change is “largely the result of changes in the Court’s personnel: a majority of Roberts Court justices are ideologically conservative and religiously devout—a significant break from the past.”
According to the report, Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh are likely most responsible for the shift toward religious liberty.
In essence, the report found that the current Supreme Court has upheld religious liberty an overwhelming majority of the time, even during the pandemic.
Photo courtesy: Bill Mason/Unsplash
John Paluska has been a contributor for Christian Headlines since 2016 and is the founder of The Washington Gazette, a news outlet he relaunched in 2019 as a response to the constant distribution of fake news.
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