I find the disappearance of the Episcopalian (and in turn the White-Anglo-Saxon Protestant) from the hallowed halls they used to populate fascinating. There hasn't been an Episcopalian president since George Bush Sr, but it seems to me that he consciously eschewed all the WASP trappings and presented himself as a Southerner good ol' boy; Bush went so far as to adopt the culture war causes of evangelicals, such as school prayer and abortion, which don't have as much resonance to mainline protestants. More presidents have been Episcopalian than any other religion but they seem to be going the way of Unitarians and deists in terms of being a politically influential group that has all but become irrelevant.
The EC has been shrinking and getting older for a while, so it makes sense that Catholics have supplanted them on the Supreme Court for demographic reasons as well (Amy Coney Barrett has 7 kids). Perhaps the fact that every big ticket university that was religiously affiliated with mainline protestantism has become secular while the Catholic institutions have remained Catholic has something to do with them having an outsized influence in politics and law.
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I find the disappearance of the Episcopalian (and in turn the White-Anglo-Saxon Protestant) from the hallowed halls they used to populate fascinating. There hasn't been an Episcopalian president since George Bush Sr, but it seems to me that he consciously eschewed all the WASP trappings and presented himself as a Southerner good ol' boy; Bush went so far as to adopt the culture war causes of evangelicals, such as school prayer and abortion, which don't have as much resonance to mainline protestants. More presidents have been Episcopalian than any other religion but they seem to be going the way of Unitarians and deists in terms of being a politically influential group that has all but become irrelevant.
The EC has been shrinking and getting older for a while, so it makes sense that Catholics have supplanted them on the Supreme Court for demographic reasons as well (Amy Coney Barrett has 7 kids). Perhaps the fact that every big ticket university that was religiously affiliated with mainline protestantism has become secular while the Catholic institutions have remained Catholic has something to do with them having an outsized influence in politics and law.
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