by Hailey Lyons
I can’t have been the only one holding their breath during the Supreme Court hearing on November 10 over the Affordable Care Act. California v Texas may decide that SCOTUS’ 2017 striking down of the financial penalties on the individual mandate clause means the individual mandate must go, and/or the entire ACA. While what we’ve heard since the hearing is positive – Roberts and Kavanaugh erring on the side of severability rather than dismissing the ACA entirely – there remains much work to do in order to win over the other conservative Justices. This includes Gorsuch and Barrett, two Justices who claim to be in the mold of Scalia as Textualists.
Part of my nervousness for this hearing is a direct result of Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. While other op-eds and professional analysts have written tomes on her experience, judicial philosophy, and religious concerns, I want to keep the focus here on the connection between the Christian doctrine of Inerrancy and the legal doctrine of Textualism. There is a surprising amount of scholarship on the connection between the two, but in light of recent events I feel the need to bring it back into our minds.
Many of us in the UCC come from different denominations with vastly different understandings of the value and methods of interpretation that can be applied to Scripture. As I explored previously, the Methodist doctrine of Prima Scriptura and the Evangelical doctrine of Sola Scriptura are inextricably linked by the power arbiters of Scripture hold. However, the Evangelical doctrine of Inerrancy – or infallibility depending on your denomination – reigns supreme in the Christian Right denominations and many non-denominational churches. Inerrancy cements not just who holds the power to interpret Scripture but also several key, presuppositional points that have become the hallmark of Evangelicalism. This has not always been the case and is a rather recent phenomenon of the past hundred years of American Christianity.
Textualism largely originates with the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who argues that the Constitution should be interpreted solely within itself – separated from socio-historical understandings and intentions. Within Textualism, sitting Justices Gorsuch and Barrett occupy vastly different approaches. Gorsuch has shown through his rulings thus far that he sticks rather strictly to the assumptions of Textualism, while Barrett copies Scalia’s wedding of Textualism to Strict Constructionism, a form of Originalism that’s deeply invested in the historical popular opinion at the time of the Constitution or law under consideration’s writing. While Scalia openly contradicted himself and rejected Strict Constructionism, both his legacy and Barrett’s judicial philosophy uphold it completely. Thus, there is an awkward relationship between rigidly understanding a text devoid of its time and context and attempting to understand public opinion of the time and context.
This is exactly how Inerrancy has evolved in Evangelical circles. Inerrancy often served in its early contexts as a way of providing ministers without education license to impose their own culture and context into Scripture itself. At the advent of Higher Criticism in Germany, Evangelicals were suspicious and terrified of its potential to wrench the interpretation of scripture out of their hands. However, through the decades leading to the rise of the Moral Majority and coming to the end of the 20th century, increasingly determined conservative takeovers of Evangelical institutions provided an awkward mix of Inerrancy and the Higher Criticism. In Reformed circles, Evangelicals use a form of exegesis that strives to combine portions of the Higher Criticism with Inerrancy while keeping Inerrancy at the top of the interpretive hierarchy and retaining interpretive power within authoritative bodies.
At its outset, Inerrancy and Textualism don’t seem particularly joined, but their evolution to form awkward relationships between the authority/interpretation of texts within strictly textual frameworks and authority/interpretation of texts within their socio-historical contexts provide a parallel body of study. The modern products of these relationships provide also provide a stunning parallel that cannot be ignored.
One of my focuses in my graduate program is Christian Nationalism within the Evangelical community, and the various ways it expresses itself. The dominant view of Christian Nationalism in Evangelicalism currently privileges a revisionist narrative of history that advocates America is a Christian nation founded on Christian principles that would be in line with modern Evangelical theological positions. The less dominant view doesn’t believe America is a Christian nation, but instead places a revisionist narrative of biblical history that meets modern Evangelical theological positions anyways. Both embrace inerrancy, and appropriate history to that end.
Amy Coney Barrett did not join the Supreme Court without extreme concern and dispute. Much of this was rooted in her obvious intermixing of judiciary education at Notre Dame with her fringe Catholic views. More than any Justice to sit the bench in recent memory, there was no question that Barrett would not be able to separate her religious views from her judicial ones – despite her vociferous statements to the contrary. At issue are also – as a Strict Constructionist – her religious views providing a revisionist view of American history that is more likely to steer her judicial philosophy hard to the right side of the political spectrum.
In both cases, history is only relevant in that it suits the whims of the textual interpretations imposed on it by authorities. When understood this way, there is no difference beyond the semantical one between Inerrancy and Textualism. Perhaps this is why so many Evangelicals and political conservatives have come together on judicial appointments and policy positions in recent decades. Rather than easily dismissing Evangelicals’ fanaticism on women’s autonomy and heteronormativity, we should understand it through this lens – one that demands supreme control of interpretations of texts and history itself in order to control the present and future.
