ABCs of Amy Coney Barrett’s Faith

Convivium, 12 October 2020

Failure to understand deeply religious people will underlie a lot of words thrown at the U.S. Supreme Court nominee this week.

Hearings that begin today on Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the American Supreme Court will bring out abundant words beginning with C. Conservative. Constitutionalist. Catholic – or “devout Catholic” in this case. Charismatic Christian. And Cult. 

Depending on how restrained or wild the hearings get, the last word might be heard only as a dog whistle. But it will almost certainly be in the air. Barret and her husband are members of People of Praise, an ecumenical charismatic community headquartered in South Bend, Indiana, where both of them went to Notre Dame.

Partly this is just the incapacity of secular media outlets to understand deeply religious people. Hence “fundamentalist” or even “fanatic” is used to describe people who are so extreme as to think their religious faith ought to shape all aspects of their life. And so anyone – actually not anyone, but conservative Christians – who belongs to a religious community that has agreed upon principles and a common rule of life is suspected of belonging to a cult. 

People of Praise is not a cult. Cults do exist, and newly established religious communities can become cults. But any human community can become corrupted. People of Praise is a relatively small (about 2000 members worldwide) community, not yet 50 years old, that grew out of the Catholic charismatic renewal of the late 1960s and 1970s. That renewal might be described in shorthand as a kind of Pentecostalism for Catholics.

Indeed, People of Praise, while largely Catholic, is not officially Catholic; it is an ecumenical community of Christians who seek to live more intentionally their faith in a common, charismatic fashion. As one might expect, the Word of God has a central place in their worship and spirituality, and so they are subject to the usual incomprehension by Biblically illiterate people who do not understand scriptural concepts like “handmaid of the Lord” or “head of the body”.

Barrett’s membership in People of Praise is a sign of how an increasing number of Christians in recent decades have sought support in their lives of discipleship beyond the local church they attend. 

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