What Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination doesn’t mean

On Saturday, President Trump nominated federal appeals court judge Amy Coney Barrett to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Barrett would be the court’s sixth Catholic member (not counting Neil Gorsuch, who grew up Catholic but has since been affiliated with the Episcopal Church). Still, superfans and detractors alike have seized on her religion as a defining factor in her nomination.

Most of this commentary has been unhelpful, whether it’s obtuse references to The Handmaid’s Tale or icons of “The Glorious ACB” with a halo. But two of America’s more prominent commentators on religion and American politics—Ross Douthat on the Never-Trump right and Elizabeth Bruenig on the left, both at the New York Times—have tried valiantly to find a deeper meaning in this nomination. Both failed, and in doing so taught readers an important lesson on the functional disappearance of religion from the public square.

For Douthat, whose insightful book on worldwide economic and cultural decadence I reviewed earlier this year, Barrett represents the possibility of a new kind of “conservative feminism,” distinct from both the liberal feminism pioneered in the 1970s by people like Ginsburg and the backlash to it. This strain of feminism would integrate a recognition that Ginsburg’s legal advocacy opened real opportunities for women and overcame real injustices with “ideas from the old regime about the centrality of marriage, children and religious commitment to the good life.”