Amerykańska chrześcijańska prawica, sędziowska kontrola prawa i instrumentalizacja potrzeb religijnych − splot zależności

Abstract

The tension between democratic principles and religious doctrines has long been a subject of scholarly inquiry. In recent years, when “religion is back with a vengeance” and there are serious religious overtones of the current illiberal upsurge, the issue of exploitation of religious passions for political ends requires renewed and sustained scholarly attention. Therefore, political efforts and successes of Christian Right in the United States should be a major contemporary field of inquiry, especially if one considers the rivalry between the constitutional order and the religious one, and also the faith-based reality divide within the American society.This article explores hidden sources of the exploitation of religious passions in the U.S. constitutional practice in four periods: 1) after the Civil War, when religiously reinforced social conservatism developed in the South; 2) in the 1950s and 1960s, when the business elite and conservative clergymen promoted the role of religion in public life in order to fight the New Deal political order; 3) in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Republican Party formed an alliance with conservative Christians; 4) in the Donald Trump’s era which culminated in the U.S. Capitol attack of 2021. I argue that these periods had two common features: the racist basis and the U.S. Supreme Court’s involvement in the power struggles. I suggest that a peculiar symbiotic relation has developed between the Supreme Court and the Christian Right and I also discuss three possible jurisprudential effects of this relation: the enhanced legitimacy of the Supreme Court in religious affairs; the Supreme Court as a channel of institutional access of churches and religious groups to policy making; and also some unintended consequences of infusing the law with ideas rooted in illiberal social order.