How Evangelicals Can Help Fix the Supreme Court

American evangelicals have a Supreme Court problem. But it’s not the problem you might assume.

 

A new poll from LifeWay Research shows that few Americans with evangelical beliefs consider Supreme Court nominees, religious freedom or abortion as issues of top importance when it comes to voting for the next president.
The poll showed that only 10 percent of evangelicals say their main concern is Supreme Court nominees, while 7 percent said their top concern was protecting religious freedom and only 4 percent said it was based on the candidate’s view on abortion.
This is in contrast to another Lifeway poll of Protestant pastors, which said that pastors were almost twice as likely to vote those issues as a top concern.
In a column for The Gospel Coalition, Joe Carter writes that instead of relying on the next president to “fix the Supreme Court,” Americans should look to Congress.
He says that Congress should reduce the Court to seven.

“Some might condemn this as obstruction,” he said. “But in the wake of a presidential election like this year’s, in which the main virtue of a vote for either candidate is that it is not a vote for the other one, nobody should be permitted to claim a mandate to shape the future of the judicial branch.”
Carter says that evangelicals need to support this type of “alignment.”
“We evangelicals have the power to help fix our Supreme Court problem. Now all we need is courage and resolve to implement the change.”