The Daily Signal - Best of 2019: Christopher Scalia Discusses the Faith of His Dad

Episode Date: December 31, 2019

This week we're featuring some of our favorite interviews from 2019. Today, we're sharing Daniel Davis and Rachel del Guidice's interview with Christopher Scalia, the co-editor of "On Faith: Lessons from an American Believer.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast, and I'm Kate Trinko. We're on a short hiatus for the holidays, but we wanted to share one of our favorite interviews from 2019 with you. We'll be back to our regular programming on Monday, January 6th. Do you own an Amazon Echo? You can now get the Daily Signal podcast every day as part of your daily Alexa Flash briefing. It's easy to do. Just open your Amazon Alexa app, go to settings, and select Flash Briefing. From there, you can search for the Daily Signal podcast and add it to your flash briefing

so you can stay up to date with the top news of the day that the liberal media isn't covering. Well, we're joined now by Christopher Scalia. He's the son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and he recently published a book called On Faith, Lessons from an American Believer. Chris, thanks for being on the podcast with us. Thanks a lot for having me. So I want to ask you first off, what inspired you to write this book? a couple years ago, you came out with a book called Scalia Speaks, which includes a lot of his

speeches on various topics, some on faith, actually, but this one's exclusively about faith. Yeah, he delivered many speeches over the course of his career, and the last collection, Scalia Speaks tries to give kind of a view of him as a man in full, so it covers all sorts of topics, the law, of course, and faith, but a lot of other things like national identity and hobbies and pastimes and things like that. Second to, his speeches about faith were second only to speeches he delivered about law in terms of importance. I mean, he delivered speeches about faith very often,

and they were so important to him that he seemed to have been planning, putting out a collection before he died. He sent a draft to an acquaintance who read over and sent back some notes that he actually sent the notes back to my dad the day before my father passed away. So we're talking about, you know, late in my father's life, a project like this had been on his mind. So we thought it was important to kind of pursue that project, or at least something like it. And taken out of the larger book, I think it's kind of helpful to have just this focus because it gives a sense of in a different context how significant religious issues were to

my father, both legally and personally. But I should add, it's not just speeches in this collection. There are speeches, but there are excerpts from judicial opinions and reflections from family and friends. So Justice Thomas writes a forward to the book, and my brother writes the introduction. There's also the sermon my brother delivered at my father's funeral mass is in there and things like that. So you get, like the last collection is kind of giving a full view of my dad, but in this In this context, the full view of him from a religious angle. So just tell us about his faith and, you know, particularly as you saw it growing up. My brother jokes that, in the introduction, he jokes that my, he winces every time somebody calls my dad a devout Catholic.

Because when somebody's devout, it implies something kind of like a passivity or something like that or, you know, walking around with hands folded. My father was a dedicated Catholic. but there was always, as my brother puts, a kind of an error of argument to it. He loved reasoning about religion and he didn't see a conflict between faith and reason. He thought that they had to be married in the religious, when discussing religion.

But we, so he didn't talk about religion a ton growing up, but it was just always cleared us how important it was to him because of how he acted. And religion was kind of a, central focus of our family life. He was always home for dinner and he always led mass at dinner. Sorry. Not mass. No, my brother would do that later. No, my father led the grace before meals. And that was, he always kind of ran through it. He sounded more like an auctioneer than somebody, you know, like leading a prayer. But it nonetheless left a big impression on us because, you know,

this was our family time together every day and we started it with a prayer. And then there was Mass every Sunday. And he usually did the driving. And I don't remember being, you know, it was never a debate. I don't remember anybody fussing about going to Mass. It's just something we did every week. And I think, especially now that I have a family of my own, I kind of appreciate how difficult that was, how much of an effort that was. And, but he, I said before he didn't lecture us all the time about religion, but occasionally he would talk to us, and because he saved that for kind of important instances, it always left a really big impression. Did your father have a favorite Catholic saint or a favorite prayer that he would always go to? His favorite Catholic saint would be Thomas Moore.

Thomas Moore had a big influence on his life, and Thomas Moore, of course, was the advisor to King Henry, the eighth, who refused to go along with Henry's belief that he could basically do. is remarry. And my father delivered his speech pretty often, really, that's in this collection. We call it not to the wise. He sometimes called it the two Thomases, contrasting Thomas Jefferson with Thomas Moore.

And Jefferson was somebody who edited the New Testament with the razor, cutting out anything involving miracles or revelation. So there's no virgin birth, there's no resurrection. it just ends with Christ dying. And my dad jokes that Jefferson apparently believed that the apostles were making it all up as part of a brilliant plan to get themselves all killed. So on the other hand, Thomas Moore, like Jefferson was a brilliant lawyer, one of the smartest people of his time, but didn't see a contradiction between that, that. that intellect and faith. And my father admired Thomas Moore for that reason.

And favorite prayer, we actually include that in this collection. And it's a prayer we have on the back of his funeral mass card. It's called the sushi pay, and I won't read the whole thing, but it's a prayer by San Ignatius. But my father would often tell me and my siblings, He wouldn't do it often, but he told us separately how much he liked this prayer, how intense a prayer it was, and again, how much he admired it. I'll just read the first sentence, take, O Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and whole will. It was just kind of an ultimate giving of oneself to God's will. And I think that was kind of a beautiful and intense thing for my father.

So I think that was probably his favorite prayer. On the topic of prayer, was there ever a time that he told you guys that he felt like God answered a particular prayer, something that he had been praying for? He never did to me. He never said that to me. And I don't know if he ever did to any other sibling. I know that there were instances in which he was disappointed that things didn't turn out his way. and that perhaps God ignored prayers, but Dad was eventually happy that things turned out the way he did.

There's a speech in this collection where he describes a couple of those disappointments. Probably the most significant one was when he had hoped to be named by Reagan as Solicitor General and was not, and he thought that was, you know, he was crushed by that, really. That had been a big professional goal of his. but if he had been named Solicitor General, he never would have been appointed to the Supreme Court. So eventually my father realized that it was a good thing he hadn't been nominated or made Solicitor General. And I think the lesson he drew from that is that, you know, trust in God's plan. And even in disappointing moments or maybe something good to come of it.

And that story, I mentioned that he described that occasion in his speech, but he also told one of my brothers about that episode when my brother was experiencing kind of a major disappointment of his own that really stuck with my father that that was how God works sometimes. So your dad clearly not only was personally religious, but believed that religion was important for society. You know, I think of in the book he talks about his love of George Washington and how George Washington championed religion and religion

and religious teaching for society. How did your dad see the role of the court in relation to not just religious freedom, but actually, you know, the reality of religion in society? My father often spoke about, as you said, the vision the founders had for religion in the public square and in American life. And that's a point he comes to often in his speeches. And as he saw it, well, as the founders saw it, and as he explained, religion was an important source of virtue for the people. And they needed, government needed to encourage religious belief so that people could be virtuous because for democracy to thrive, for the American experiment to succeed, people needed to be virtuous.

And again, religion isn't the only way, but. for many people, it is kind of the foundation of virtue. And many of the founders recognize that, and it's kind of an assumption of our government. And my father was frustrated that for several decades, the Supreme Court was moving away from that. The Supreme Court had traditionally recognized or espoused the same vision that the founders had and kind of given deference to that vision. But more recently, instead of recognizing or being objective between, unbiased between religious denominations, the court was moving towards an emphasis on being not discriminating between religion and irreligion.

And my father thought that that was kind of, complete aberration from the founder's vision. And he thought that was crucial for the court to recognize that, for example, it would have been fine by the founders for a rabbi to deliver an invocation at a high school commencement ceremony. The Supreme Court ruled while he was on the bench that actually that was a violation of the Constitution, that was a violation of the First Amendment. It was essentially establishing a state religion.

And my dad pointed out, well, I mean, look at all the things that the founders did that along these lines. You cannot believe that the founders would have thought that was unconstitutional. You can decide that's not what our nation should be anymore, but that's up for the citizens to decide, not for the justices to decide on their own. So he really was worried that the Supreme Court was kind of misinterpreting that vision. Sorry, I know I've gone long on this answer. But as far as his personal life, you know, he was often asked kind of how his religious life played into his role as a judge. And he would say that there's no Catholic way to be a judge. There's no, he joked it just as there's no Catholic way to be a short order cook and to make a hamburger except to do it perfectly.

There's no way to, no Catholic way of interpreting the Constitution or interpreting historical context except to do it perfectly. And in his introduction, Justice Thomas says that to Dad, that meant in part he had to be, he stuck to the oath that he made when he was appointed to the Supreme Court, which meant a limited vision of his role as an Article III judge. He could he could not impose his personal religious or religious views or policy preferences on his opinions. his detractors and even some of his supporters assumed that, for example, he ruled as he did in abortion cases because he was Catholic and the churches against abortion. But he would explain to his supporters, if that's why you think I voted as I did, then I'm sorry, but that's just not why. And if the court were actually, if the constitution cleared a right to abortion, he would have ruled differently. But it clearly doesn't. So that's why he ruled as it did, not for any theological reason.

So knowing your father's faith and his conviction to our constitutionally protected freedoms, is there a particular opinion of his that you think is especially appropriate for Americans to revisit today, given all the attacks we're seeing on faith and religious liberty? My co-editor, Ed Whalen, really likes Lee v. Weissman. So this is Leave v. Weissman, and this is one I was referring to earlier, we titled in this collection The Right to Public Prayer. And this is a 1992 case, and the court ruled five to four that non-sectarian benedictions and invocations at high school and public school events were violations of the establishment clause because it created kind of a peer pressure and governmental pressure on students to participate. And my father pointed out how that's simply not the case.

And there's a great line from that, from that opinion. It plays on a line that a lower cut court judge made that, you know, too often the Supreme Court, you know, when addressing religious issues had to determine whether a crush was too far away from a menorah, you know, or something like that on a public property around Christmas time and Hanukkah. And so as somebody at lower court judge had said, that's closer to interior design than the judiciary. And my father says, but interior decorating is a rock hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs. And his point there is that, you know, it's not their job as judges to determine whether, you know, students are experiencing some peer pressure and Freudian misgivings or something like that. You go to the Constitution and to the original public meaning of what was ratified, and that makes clear that this would have been constitutional, what was going on there.

And he came to similar conclusions about displays of the Ten Commandments at courthouses and things like that. On the other hand, there's a case, we included a case that is controversial among defenders of religious liberty. We included that in this collection. It's Employment Division v. Smith. And my father wrote the majority ruling that it was okay. It was constitutional for the state of Oregon to fire employees because they had smoked peyote. These were Native American employees of the state of Oregon and they had smoked peyote as part of a ritual. And my dad ruled that they, it was a, it was a neutral law. It was not seeking to repress a single religion.

It wasn't a targeted thing. It applied to everybody. And so it was constitutional for the state to fire those employees. That didn't mean he thought it was a good law. It meant that it wasn't up to the justices to decide that it shouldn't be a law. And he said it's up to the people to decide how to handle that. And that led to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which is, as you guys know, a big source of conflict right now. So that, a lot of, as I said, a lot of people who are religious liberty defenders don't like that opinion by my father.

I think if they read it, they would kind of recognize that there's actually, it holds up pretty well. I think the logic is sound, though I certainly. understand why it concerns people now. Well, last question for you. He, toward the end of his time on the court, there were some decisions, you know, that he rose really strong dissents to. Always love reading those. Yeah.

They're just so, the writing is just so good. But was he, I mean, clearly he was concerned about the direction of the court on some of these thing. I mean, he and, like, in the same-sex marriage ruling, he and Justice Alito, they were expressing concerns that this was going to lead to some severe questions about the future of religious liberty in America. How do you think he would feel about his, you know, the direction of the court now, you know, with his successor, Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, I mean, do you think he would be encouraged by that, or do you think he would still have concerns about the overall direction of things? I think he would still have concerns, but if you were to tell him when he was first appointed

in 1986 that there would be several originalists on the Supreme Court, several justices who interpreted the Constitution according to its original public meaning, I think he would have been pretty happy. Obviously, that doesn't mean that they're all going to agree or rule as he would have. But it's certainly a strong, a big step in the right direction that would have pleased him, even if he would recognize that, you know, a lot of the same debates are being hashed out and nothing is certain. That the overall direction of the court, I think he would have been pretty pleased by. I mean, he worked hard in his many dissents to explain himself and what the proper role of the judiciary was and what it meant to, what the proper approach to interpreting

the Constitution was. And I think he had a huge influence because he kept, he kept hammering that point home. That's it for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed the interview. And again, we'll be back to our regular podcast programming on Monday, January 6th. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, the Leah Rampersad, and Mark Geine. For more information, visitdailySignal.com.