I saw here that Antonin Scalia is bummed that the Supreme Court has no Protestants, evangelical or otherwise, thus violating the fundamental principle of “no social transformation without representation.”
Scalia’s point is interesting, although I don’t quite know what to do with it. Scalia also points out another dimension of the court’s unrepresentativeness — that all nine of its members are successful lawyers. Personally, I’d be cool with including a few non-lawyers on the court, but I wouldn’t go so far as to seek out unsuccessful people. From a constitutional perspective, I’d think the “representation” issue would be more relevant when applied to the House of Representatives, but of course that group underrepresents poor people and other marginal members of society.
Anyway, the bit about Protestants motivated me to dig up this graph I made a few years ago:
Protestants have done alright.
As I wrote when I posted this graph earlier, religion is an interesting political variable because it’s nominally about religious belief but typically seems to be more about ethnicity.
