People For's Elliot Mincberg and Peter Montgomery are quoted on Christian nationalism within the Supreme Court in this Article for Mother Jones.
During the contentious confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, a self-appointed Christian apostle named Dutch Sheets issued an urgent call for prayer on his website. Sheets is a leader in an enigmatic charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which calls the faithful to fight a spiritual war for Christian control of the United States government. He urged his readers to ask God to grant them “a majority of Justices who are Constitutionalists, literalists (meaning they believe the Constitution is to be taken literally, exactly as it is written) and who are pro-life.” He added, “Let’s also boldly ask Him for another vacancy on the Court soon—I feel strongly in my spirit another is coming quickly. We should be offensive in our prayers, not just defensive and reactionary.”
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Peter Montgomery, research director at the People for the American Way’s watchdog publication Right Wing Watch, has also been tracking New Apostolic Reformation prophets’ fixation on the nation’s highest court. He has documented how prophets have encouraged their followers to ask God to remove all the left-leaning justices from the Supreme Court. In 2018, he attended an event at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, during which Sheets and several other prophets fervently prayed for the remaking of the Supreme Court.
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Jauregui could find much to like in the creeping religiosity of some of the justices’ recent writings. The first high-profile case of this kind in recent history came in 2014, when the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision allowed employers to decline to pay for employees’ birth control insurance because of their religious convictions. In his decision, Alito cited a 1935 handbook for Jesuits on moral theology. Since then, says People for the American Way’s Mincberg, the Supreme Court has handed religious groups several victories. He pointed to the 2019 case American Legion v. American Humanist Association. In a seven-to-two decision, the Court ruled in favor of the American Legion, which had erected and maintained a 40-foot cross on public land in Maryland. The ruling overturned that of the 4th Circuit, which had concluded that the cross “either places Christianity above other faiths, views being American and Christian as one in the same, or both.” In the Opinion of the Court, authored by Justice Alito, he wrote that taking down the cross would be “aggressively hostile to religion.”
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