Book Review – Supreme Court Decision Makers
In his book, Witnessing Their Faith, Religious Influence on Supreme Court Justices and Their Opinions, author Jay Alan Sekulow, Esq., attempted to test the hypothesis that Supreme Court justices wrote their opinions under the influence of their long held religious beliefs. The book’s actual value, instead, seems to be the explanation of how opinions and decisions of the high court of the United States reflected the influence of the times, and the beliefs held during those times, in which the Justices lived.
This is not a book that tries to explain how either the Court works or how the System of Freedom of Expression works. Those topics have been left to others. It is also not a treatise on 1st Amendment law, although its help in understanding the development of the law in that area is invaluable. While it is certainly true that our Supreme Court bases its rulings on prior decisions, the common law, and the foundational documents of our government, such as The Constitution, The Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence, the Supreme Court Justices very much embedded in the events which for us are history but for them were events experienced and yet to be pondered.
Thus, while this book might not take its place next to The System of Freedom of Expression by Thomas I. Emerson (1970) or Freedom of Speech by Zechariah Chafee, Jr. (1920), it will no doubt have a place for lawyers, Christians and students of the Court that are working toward an understanding of 1st Amendment law.
The most striking thing about the book is its historical recitations that inescapably lead to the conclusion that most of the Court decisions reviled by today’s citizen Christians were handed down because of disputes between citizen Christians. This was clearly a case in which the “church” in its universal sense, rather than meeting as was done at the first Jerusalem Conference described in Acts 15, bickered and left to secular authorities the task of sorting out the dispute. Indeed, the book also demonstrates why Christians today are not as unified as would be necessary to achieve the political desires of most evangelicals. The book should be read by lawyers that do not practice in the area but are often presented questions by Christians regarding their rights under the 1st Amendment.
