court packing churches

Packing the Court: An Issue for Churches

Sue Cyre on October 15, 2020

Presidential candidate Joe Biden has been asked repeatedly whether he would “pack” the Supreme Court by increasing the number of justices beyond the current nine as some Democrats, including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, have threatened. Biden has refused to state his position on packing the court likely because he fears either alienating his progressive base if he refuses to add justices or alienating his more moderate base if he favors adding justices.

If Biden packs the Court, it will further legislate from the bench. It is much easier for a handful of justices to implement a radical progressive agenda than it is to convince a majority of 100 Senators and 435 Representatives to do the progressives’ bidding. 

Packing the court would facilitate a progressive hegemony. That is the political reason for packing the court. There is an ideological reason that is even more fundamental: identity politics. For many progressives, there is no objective truth. Rather, each identity group has its own perception of truth based on members’ unique experiences. As Christians, this political and cultural move shouldn’t surprise us. It happened early in the Mainline Protestant churches.

When Justice Sonia Sotomayor appeared before the Senate judicial committee in 2009, concerns were voiced over her 2001 statement:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life. 

…My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage. [1]

In other words, since there is no objective truth common to all people but only individual perspectives based on race, gender, and sexual orientation, it is essential that every group be represented on the Court. In the past, heterosexual white males have “rigged the system” in order to maintain their power. This is Critical Race Theory (CRT). According to CRT, those in power have legislated in a way that preserves their power. It follows then that the marginalized and oppressed have greater moral authority and a “greater ability to see the way truly things are. Only powerlessness and oppression bring moral high ground and true knowledge.”[2] Therefore to include all truths based on the perspective of the powerless, the Court would have to include justices representing oppressed groups of which there are infinite combinations (that’s called intersectionality) but would at least include: Blacks (Clarence Thomas doesn’t acknowledge he is oppressed and therefore doesn’t “count”), LGBT, transgender, First Nation, etc.

This replacement of objective truth by the subjective truths of identity politics happened early in America’s Mainline Protestant churches. Liberation theology, which began in South America in the 1960s, was based on Marxism’s class oppression claiming only the poor knew truth and could speak truth to power. Liberation theology was adapted by women claiming they were the oppressed group and became radical feminist theology. The radical feminists attacked the Bible declaring it was a record of men’s experience of God in patriarchal cultures and therefore its teachings oppressed woman and other minority groups. The Bible had to be rejected or re-interpreted.

Womanist theologians, who were black feminists, rejected the cross and a historic understanding of salvation. Latina women developed Mujerista theology and that had yet a different experience of God. LGBT had yet a different experience. Every group that could claim victimhood resulting from Christian teaching based on Scripture became a voice of authority and truth. Church doctrine had to be revamped to reflect the experiences of the various identity groups. Radical feminist Sallie McFague succinctly explains the ideology by reversing the biblical order that human beings are created in God’s image and instead contends, “we imagine God in our image.”[3]  Every “our” representing an oppressed group, has a different image derived from gazing in the mirror. To reject the moral authority and interpretation of a member of a victim group was to further oppress them, deny their experience and therefore their humanity, and exclude their perspective of truth.

Whatever happens in the election and the next administration, the issue of court packing will not go to go away. The political agenda of packing the court is partly based on Critical Race Theory, which is a political, social agenda flowing out of Liberation Theology and all the radical adaptations. CRT is being taught in schools and academia and corporations. Just as the Bible was the source of oppression in the church and had to be undermined or rejected completely, the Constitution is already being viewed as the source of oppression and must rejected or at least surmounted and reinterpreted. America has already been condemned as being systemically racist. Architects of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence have been decried as irredeemable racists and their statues toppled.

Objective truth is based on God’s revelation in Scripture. Therefore, change must begin with the church. The church possesses the truth and has been entrusted with preserving it and passing it on to future generations.  Yet, the 2020 Ligonier report “The State of Theology”[4] found that fifty-four percent of US adults believe truth is relative. Sadly, even thirty-six percent of Evangelicals believe there is no objective truth and religious belief is a matter of personal opinion. Firstly, Church leaders must engage the false teaching because it has entered the church. Secondly, the church cannot present biblical truth as a personal and private option. If the church refuses to proclaim that Christ is Lord over all of life — public and private — she denies her calling. The church has a public role to play.

Anglican missiologist Lesslie Newbigin rejected the claim that the church’s role is merely to proclaim a private, personal religion:

For the modern church to accept this status is to do exactly what the early church refused to do and what the Bible forbids us to do. It is, in effect, to deny the kingship of Christ over all of life — public and private. It is to deny that Christ is, simply and finally, the truth by which all other claims to truth are to be tested. It is to abandon its calling.[5]

The church must directly confront the idols of this age and dismantle them. When the church fails to confront the idols, it presents Jesus Christ as one version of truth alongside others. The church must be bold and courageous in challenging the culture’s lies. Only then will the church fulfill her calling, regain her strength, and lead the way to reforming and renewing the culture.

Sue Cyre
Sue Cyre is a past board member of the Institute on Religion & Democracy. She previously served as Executive Director of Presbyterians for Faith, Family and Ministry (PFFM), an initiative providing resources to assist adherents in their defense of the biblical theology. Cyre also served as editor of Theology Matters.

[1] www.cnn.com/2009/Politics/05/28/sotomayor.latina.remark.reax/

[2] Timothy Keller, “A Biblical Critique of Secular Justice and Critical Theory,” https://quarterly.gospelinlife.com/a-biblical-critique-of-secular-justice-and-critical-theory/

[3] Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982) 126

[4] https://thestateoftheology.com/?ut_source=ligonier&ut_medium=slider

[5] Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986) 102

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