Steer clear of People of Praise

Go after Trump, but spare Barrett’s religion

All faiths are at least a little weird to those outside of them. Imagine telling someone unfamiliar with Catholicism, “Every chance I get, I eat some bread that I believe is the body of God’s only son, who was executed in Jerusalem under Tiberius.” Totally normal, right?

So to all of my friends who think that the religious practice of Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, who is a member of a charismatic ecumenical community called the People of Praise, ought to bring out the bulldog in Kamala Harris and other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, I say dear God, no.

First, you cannot fight bigotry with bigotry; religious intolerance is just as wrong as any other kind of othering. And Senators, treating her like the kook she is not is just what the president hopes you will do. Unless you want to star in Trump campaign ads that he’ll say prove Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is “against God,” don’t even think about it.

Yes, women leaders in the People of Praise were until recently referred to as “handmaids” — a biblical reference to Mary, the mother of Jesus. In the Gospel of Luke, when the angel tells her, “You will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus,” she responds, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.”

But the group was not the inspiration for Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.” “What the people in that book are going through is horrible,” said Joannah Clark, who runs a People of Praise school in Portland, Oregon, and has known Barrett since college.

The group does not require a loyalty oath, arrange marriages or force women to keep having children. It puts a premium on intellectual life and values education for men, women and children. Its well-regarded schools are attended by many nonmembers.

Don’t be a hypocrite

It does have a view of marriage that I don’t share and you might not, either, but that St. Paul certainly did. (“As the Church is subordinate to Christ,” says his letter to the Ephesians, “so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.”)

You know that favorite pro-choice rejoinder, “If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one”? If deferring to your husband at home and speaking in tongues isn’t your brand of theological vodka, then don’t join the People of Praise, or any Pentecostal church. But don’t be the kind of hypocrite who embraces only those differences that line up with your own cultural views.

Just as Biden is not coming for your guns or your suburbs, neither is he coming for your religious liberty. But could we please make sure Sen. Dianne Feinstein is aware, so she doesn’t repeat the folly of her 2017 “dogma lives loudly within you” gift to Republicans at Barrett’s confirmation hearing for her appointment to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals?

I have talked to Republicans who know Barrett personally and love her, and to Democrats who know her and don’t. But I give special weight to Notre Dame law professor Mark McKenna, who doesn’t think Trump should be able to fill this seat and doesn’t agree much with his former colleague Barrett on either politics or legal philosophy.

Yet he sees her as brilliant, decent and operating in good faith. “Religious attacks are both gross and totally politically misguided,” he said. He’s right.

When Justice Sonia Sotomayor visited Notre Dame five years ago, McKenna recalled, she “spoke movingly about how her faith has shaped her as a justice” and nobody found that suspect. The legal giant whom Barrett will presumably replace, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, drew inspiration from her Jewish faith, too. Why is Barrett’s orthodox Catholicism and membership in a charismatic Christian community any different?

Unambiguously conservative

As for the kind of justice Barrett would be, Trump was never going to pick a Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s moderate choice to fill Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat four years ago. Barrett is unambiguously conservative and does seem to think that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided.

If the endgame in choosing a justice is who can get us the results we want, McKenna said, “then we don’t have a rule of law any more.” That’s exactly how Trump has said he looks at the court. It’s not, however, how the high court was ever supposed to function. Those who know Barrett see her as someone with a far less partisan view of the court’s role, and hers.

Trump is so overtly transactional that he says out loud he has to seat his nominee before Election Day so that the person he picks can in turn pick him after he disputes the voting results. But in Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court had to look at counting ballots in a way Florida law hadn’t contemplated. That’s not going to be the case in 2020.

I can’t help wondering whether Barrett, who doesn’t curse or enjoy hearing others do so, is really a fan of our pgrabbing, soldier-mocking, handicap-denigrating president. Nobody tell him, but I don’t think she’s the political hack he’s hoping for.

By all means, Democrats, go after the fact that this shouldn’t be Trump’s choice to make and that he’s trying to undo the Affordable Care Act amid a pandemic. But heap scorn on the People of Praise and you’ll regret it.