. `` Mainline Protestantism is n't a pressure group , '' said Prothero , `` It 's not like the National Council of Churches is lobbying Obama to get a Lutheran appointed to the Supreme Court . '' And while Judaism and Catholicism have their own sets of religious laws that date back millennia , many branches of Protestant Christianity do not . For much of the last 150 years , evangelical Christianity has stressed an emotional theology of `` heart '' over `` head '' -- not a recipe for producing legal scholars with eyes fixed on the Supreme Court . `` Evangelicals have put more effort into getting elected than in getting onto the bench , '' said Michael Lindsay , a Rice University professor who has studied evangelical elites . `` Electoral politics is more similar to the style of rallying of around revival campaign than it is to the arduous journey of producing intellectual giants that could be eligible for the Supreme Court . '' President Obama is expected to nominate Stevens ' replacement early this month . Of the three candidates who are reported to lead Obama 's short list , two -- Solicitor General
-LRB- CNN -RRB- -- For most of American history , a Supreme Court with no Protestant Christian judges would have been unthinkable . Nearly three quarters of all justices who 've ever served on the nation 's high court have been Protestant . And roughly half of all Americans identify themselves as Protestant today . But since John Paul Stevens announced his retirement last month , legal and religious scholars have begun entertaining the unprecedented prospect of a Supreme Court without a single Protestant justice . Besides Stevens , who is Protestant , the current Supreme Court counts six Catholics and two Jews . `` It 's an amazing irony given how central Protestantism has been to American culture , '' said Stephen Prothero , a religion scholar at Boston University . `` For most of the 19th century , Protestants were trying to turn America into their own heaven on Earth , which included keeping Jews and Catholics from virtually all positions of power . '' Many religion scholars attribute the decline of Protestants on the high court to the breakdown of a mainline Protestant identity and to the absence of a strong tradition of lawyering among evangelical Protestants