It seems nearly a foregone conclusion that Amy Coney Barrett will take a seat on the US Supreme Court. And she should. Even without reading her resume, anyone who pauses for an honest and unbiased glimpse of her interactions during her confirmation hearings was impressed with her brilliance, clarity, and expertise. If she isn’t qualified for the Supreme Court, who is?
But no matter how qualified she is, her confirmation hearings were destined to dissolve into more than just partisan saber-rattling and political mud-slinging. Because Barrett’s confirmation hearings have exposed the ideological rift that is so pervasive in our culture.
What we are seeing, dramatized in the Senate, is a clash of ideologies more than just politics. It mirrors the collision that is taking place in the streets of Portland, the classrooms of universities, and even the pews of churches between those who hold to objective truth and those who don’t.
Here’s what I mean.
Our nation was established in the middle of the Enlightenment, which means that our Founders held a particular view of truth. Truth, for them, was something people should defend and pursue. And when lacking, it could be discovered. Modernism was born—modern science, modern philosophy, modern art, and modern industry.
And at the heart of modernism was the belief in universal truth. Truth was outside of people, to be discovered, celebrated, and respected. Truth to live by. Truth to apply and to advance culture. Truth to proclaim. Christians and non-Christians agreed on this. That’s why devout Christians like John Adams could work alongside non-Christians like Ben Franklin and serve the greater good of establishing a nation where all people, Christians or not, could live together. They all generally believed in external, objective truth, and in the laws that upheld it.
So when the Founders wrote their documents, they assumed certain “truths” were “self-evident.” That is, there are some basic, universally accepted principles that all people can agree on. And these truths have nothing to do with feelings or opinions or preferences but are simply universally true. This bias toward absolute truth is embedded in the founding documents, including the Constitution.
And this bias toward truth lasted for generations. Then, we started expelling truth in the 1960s. The expulsion began in our universities, starting with the way we interpreted the texts that we read. Students were suddenly taught that truth was subjective and that how they felt about the words on the page mattered more than what the author said. In fact, what the authors meant was irrelevant. Only how the text made the reader feel mattered. And postmodernism was born.
Over time, this has leaked into all of culture. Postmodernism has replaced external, objective truth with rampant subjectivity. So when postmodernists interpret texts, such as the US Constitution, they interpret and apply it based on their feelings, preferences, or opinions. The text, they say, has no meaning apart from the reader giving it meaning. To a postmodernist, the concept of the text having “original meaning” is, well, meaningless. The only thing that matters is how I feel today.
This view of truth as squishy, flexible, and preferential has been at the heart of the battle we have seen played out for the last six decades in our courts. It’s the reason judges are often motivated by personal agendas rather than applying the law.
So the problem progressives really have with Barrett is not that she is a Christian, or that she is a Constitutional conservative. It’s that she is both. It’s that in her vocation and in her faith, and in her legal decisions, one thing is consistently clear: She still believes in truth. And her only agenda as a jurist is to be faithful to the truth, the law, and to apply it fairly to all Americans.
In legal terms, Barrett is a conservative originalist. As she said in a 2019 lecture, “The law is comprised of words—and textualists emphasize that words mean what they say, not what a judge thinks that they ought to say. … Fidelity to the law means fidelity to the text as it is written.” And to the Senate, she said that being an originalist “means that I interpret the Constitution as a law, that I interpret its text as text, and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. . . So that meaning doesn’t change over time and it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it.”
Translation: It doesn’t matter how I feel, or how you feel, or what you want. It doesn’t matter whether you like what the Constitution says. All that matters is what the Framers meant when they wrote the Constitution and how we apply it while being faithful to that meaning.
So, here’s the thing. Progressives try to cast Barrett as a deranged Joan of Arc, riding into SCOTUS and overturning every precious opinion. But the fact is, she simply respects the text and will apply it as written. Evenly and respectfully. She may not fortify preferences or opinions or feelings, but she will uphold the Constitution. Like it or not.
And Christians who picture her as their conservative savior, breathing needed air into their suffocating hopes, need to understand that it is not her job to make us feel good, either. It’s her job to respect the meaning of the original words and apply them. Whether we like it or not.
And finally, it means that the accusation that she is being put on the bench to fulfill the bidding of President Trump is not only ridiculous but also insulting. To do so would violate her most basic convictions.
We can be glad that her character is shaped by her faith in Christ, but the main reason that Barrett is qualified, alongside her credentials, is that she agrees with the Founders. The same Founders, by the way, whose statues are being toppled in the public square by postmodern progressives who are driven by a bias for their own preferences rather than a bias for truth.
Barrett is not an originalist because she is a Christian. But her faith inclines her toward fidelity to the truth, to applying the Constitution the way the authors intended.
See, what all this means is that Barrett will be faithful to the original intention of the Constitution, and not even her own preferences or feelings will get in the way.
That’s why postmodernists despise her. And that’s why we need her on the bench.