By Alex Badas (University of Houston) and Eric R. Schmidt (Millsaps College)

For decades, evangelical groups have used the Supreme Court to pursue conservative social policies. With the confirmation of three Justices nominated by former President Trump, the Court has issued stridently conservative opinions on abortion, religious exemptions to public accommodations law, and religious expression by public employees. Speaking in Rome in July 2022, Justice Alito described religious liberty as “under attack” by secular forces that “want to hold complete power.” An evangelical interest group associated with Liberty Counsel – one of the highest-profile legal organizations that represents conservative Christians – claims to have visited the Justices in chambers to minister and pray. And senators have used judicial confirmation hearings to interrogate the nominees’ religious beliefs.

Yet while the Court has delivered for evangelical activists, there are no evangelical Christians on the Court. Do evangelical Christians know that none of the Justices are evangelicals? And if they believe otherwise, does this influence how they think about the Court’s legitimacy? In our recent article in Political Research Quarterly, we set out to answer these questions. In the process, we established that many evangelicals believe that both evangelicals and atheists are represented on the Court. 

We think these beliefs are consequential because of something called “social imagery” – a term we use to describe Americans’ beliefs about the Justices’ religious identities. We borrowed the term from an influential book by Donald Green, Bradley Palmquist, and Eric Schickler, who referenced the “social group imagery” of the political parties. According to the authors, people perceive that the Republican and Democratic parties draw support from different groups – and this perception compels them to identify with the party that supports people like them. Of course, perceptions need not reflect reality. Indeed, research shows that people overestimate the percentages of stereotypical groups in the party coalitions.   

Our research applied this logic to the way evangelicals perceive the Supreme Court Justices. In November 2020, we collected data from a representative sample of 1,000 adults in the United States from YouGov. The survey asked whether respondents considered themselves evangelical Christians. Later, we asked them to estimate the number of Justices that are evangelical Christians, as well as the number that are atheists.

According to our survey, only 17 percent of evangelical Christians know that there are no evangelicals on the Court. Only 49 percent know that there are no atheists. Evangelicals reported, on average, that there were between 3-4 evangelical Christians and 1-2 atheists on the Court. Non-evangelicals overestimated these numbers too – but not to the same extent as evangelicals (see below figure).

To determine whether these perceptions influence how evangelicals evaluate the Court, we focused on the Court’s “judicial legitimacy.” When someone considers the Court legitimate, this means they accept the Court’s institutional structure and authority to make decisions. If someone considers the Court illegitimate, they question the Court’s authority and believe the Court’s institutional structure should be changed to limit its authority. Our survey used two different measures of judicial legitimacy. No matter which measure we used, we found the same thing.

Our findings showed that when evangelicals perceived that there were more evangelical Justices, they gave the Court higher legitimacy ratings. Evangelicals gave the Court lower legitimacy ratings when they perceived that there were more atheist Justices. These patterns held even after we accounted for respondents’ partisanship, ideology, attention to the Court, and perceived ideological alignment with the Court. (The figure below shows how evangelicals (black line) react to increasing perceptions of evangelical and atheist Justices — when the black line is above the dashed line at zero, that means they see the Court as more legitimate.)

To corroborate our findings, we conducted a follow-up experiment. We surveyed 1774 respondents on Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk; 20 percent of the respondents identified as evangelical Christians. We gave each respondent five profiles of hypothetical Supreme Court nominees. After reading each profile, respondents told us whether they would support the nominee’s confirmation to the Court, as well as whether they believed the nominee would make the Court’s decisions fairer.

For each profile, we randomized the nominees’ biographical traits. Some nominees were Republicans; some were Democrats. Some went to elite law programs; some didn’t. Some were given an “unqualified” rating; others were “very qualified.” Some believed in a “living Constitution”; others wanted to stick to the Constitution’s “original intent.” Some were male; some were female. And so on.

Most importantly, we randomized the nominees’ religious backgrounds. 16 percent of the profiles listed the nominee’s religion as either “born-again Christian” or evangelical Christian.” The other profiles listed different religious backgrounds – such as atheist, Jewish, Muslim, or Mormon.  

As the below graphs show, the nominees’ religious identities made a significant difference. Regardless of the nominees’ other biographical traits, evangelicals were more likely to support nominees described as evangelical or born-again Christians, and more likely to believe these nominees would make the Court’s decisions more fair. For their part, non-evangelicals were less likely to support evangelical Christian nominees and less likely to think they would make decisions more fair.

This is exactly what social imagery theory would predict. No matter Justices’ partisan or ideological background, evangelical Christians want evangelical Justices on the Supreme Court. Non-evangelicals don’t.  

These findings are timely. During oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health (2022), Justice Sotomayor expressed concern for the Court’s legitimacy – asking whether the Court would “survive the stench” of overturning Roe v. Wade. Concerned about the Court’s conservative turn, President Biden appointed an expert commission to evaluate potential reforms to the judiciary. Concerned about Supreme Court ethics, the Senate Judiciary Committee recently invited Chief Justice Roberts to testify – an invitation Roberts politely but firmly rejected. From this vantage point, the Court’s future seems less certain than at any time since FDR’s failed “court-packing” plan during the New Deal.

Nevertheless, our findings complicate this story. The Court’s legitimacy still turns on what the Court decides. However, it also turns on who people think is doing the deciding. Consider that 36 percent of born-again Christians believe abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances.[i] However unpopular the Dobbs decision remains, social imagery provides one way for the Court to “survive the stench” of Dobbs: maintain the illusion that there are evangelical Justices on the Court.

Alex Badas is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Houston. Further information on his work can be found on his website and Twitter.

Eric R. Schmidt is an Assistant Professor of Government and Politics at Millsaps College. Further information on his work can be found on his website and Twitter.

Image Note: The cover image for this article was retrieved from Wikipedia’s entry on “The United States Supreme Court Building.” The image was produced by Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16959908

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[i] This statistic was calculated using data from the 2020 American National Election Study. Of those who called themselves born-again Christians, 24 percent said that abortion should always be permitted, while 12 percent said that the law should permit abortion, but only when the need for the abortion has been established.