Soon 6 of 9 Supreme Court justices will be Catholic. How did this come about in a country where Catholics make up ~20% of the population?

And why are there no evangelicals on the Supreme Court, even though they are so numerous and support the Republican party much more fervently than Catholics?

A lot of this has to do with institutions: Catholics have built a thick web of institutions of higher learning, including law schools. Evangelicals have focused their energy elsewhere: Bible colleges, seminaries, etc.

19th century US Catholics, a small minority in a majority-Protestant nation, chose to build parallel educational institutions: Georgetown University in 1789, Notre Dame in 1842, and Boston College in 1863. (They created law schools in 1870, 1869 and 1929 respectively).

This is different from how other religious minorities responded. Jews often took a different route, preferring non-confessional education--public schools and (while there were quotas on their admission to Protestant universities, including the Ivy Leagues) public universities.

Evangelicals, meanwhile, built institutions that promoted the spread of their religion. Higher education was not a priority institutionally. And when in the 1950s evangelical theologian Carl Henry tried to build a research university, the venture fell apart.

My point is not that Catholic institutions are inherently conservative or that all or even most Catholics espouse conservative ideas. That's obviously not true. Biden went to Catholic school, for example.

But Catholic institutions of higher learning have created a space for conservative Catholic theology and politics to thrive. And once anti-Catholic prejudice began to abate after WWII, there was a pool of highly-educated lawyers and jurists for the Republican Party to draw upon.

With the death of #RBG and the nomination of #AmyConeyBarrett, soon 6 of 9 #SCOTUS justices will be Catholics. Here's something I wrote about how this came about: https://scroll.in/article/897641/why-catholic-intellectuals-are-overrepresented-in-the-us-conservative-movement