Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-18-2023
Department
Communication
Abstract
In this essay, we analyze the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett to identify and explain the interaction between religion and jurisprudential philosophy. By tracing rhetorical scholarship on religion, politics, and the Supreme Court, we highlight tension engendered by both the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Barrett herself in locating her Catholicism as a desirable attribute for a nominee while at the same time espousing the importance of judicial objectivity. We suggest Barrett and her supporters on the committee invoked the judicial philosophy of originalism to allay this tension while occluding conversations about Barrett’s prior ideological commitments. We conclude by troubling the wide circulation of a simplified version of originalism and the (re)circulation of Christian victimhood narratives.
Original Publication Information
Coker, C. R., & Reed, J. L. (2023). A Handmaid’s Tale: Amy Coney Barrett, Originalism, and the Specter of Religion. Communication and Democracy. https://doi.org/10.1080/27671127.2023.2228375
ThinkIR Citation
Coker, Calvin R. and Reed, Joel L., "A Handmaid’s Tale: Amy Coney Barrett, Originalism, and the Specter of Religion" (2023). Faculty Scholarship. 881.
https://ir.library.louisville.edu/faculty/881
DOI
10.1080/27671127.2023.2228375
ORCID
0000-0001-6767-3398
Included in
Christianity Commons, Communication Commons, Jurisprudence Commons, Political Science Commons, Supreme Court of the United States Commons
Comments
This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in Communication and Democracy. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
© 2023 National Communication Association