Since President Obama nominated Elena Kagan for the newly vacated seat of the last Protestant on the current Supreme Court, the religion blogosphere has been jammed with posts on what a Catholic/Jewish court means for America. And some have wondered how this came to pass culturally, not just politically.
Much of the reaction is really about a specific category of Protestants -- Evangelicals -- being missing in action on the high court. Not a peep from the mainline or liberal wing of Protestantism. Neither is anyone publicly mourning the vanishing WASPs -- White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. At least not so far as I've seen.For example: Patrick O'Callahan at the News Tribune in Tacoma, Wa. sees the real reason for the vanishing Protestant affiliation for Supreme Court nominees is the bias of the Ivy League against evangelicals -- specifically Harvard and Yale. (Hat tip here to Bob Kellemen at Everyday Christian for sending me to this
O'Callahan writes that in the Ivy League...
Evangelicals need not apply. This is an oversimplification, but Ivy League campuses and other high-prestige schools are not particularly hospitable to conservative Protestants. In fact, the professoriat at elite colleges appears outright hostile to evangelicals.
My guess is that the professors don't dislike their Christian convictions per se so much as they view evangelicals as political Neanderthals who oppose abortion rights and gay marriage, and vote for the likes of George W. Bush.
Some evangelicals also run into special problems reconciling a literal or near-literal reading of the Bible with evolution, the foundation of modern biology.
O'Callahan doesn't look very far back in Ivy League history -- back to when these were WASP bastions where Jews were specifically unwelcome. In a 2005 interview with Bloomberg News, Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and author of The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton,
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