“I don’t have direct knowledge of any disclosure regarding religious affiliation,” the staffer said. “All official correspondence with the Committee is within her questionnaire and attachments, so if she has, they’ll be in there.”
The Rev. Leslie Watson Wilson, national director of People for the American Way’s African American Ministers in Action, cited Jackson’s faith statement at the nomination announcement and said she hadn’t learned more about Jackson’s religious persuasion, adding she suspects Jackson or others who know her may be preventing her from being “stigmatized or put into a particular box” about her faith since critics are already casting her as liberal or radical.
“It’s one of those things where we are going to have to respect her privacy,” Wilson said.
Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson meets with Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., on Capitol Hill, March 10, 2022, in Washington. Jackson’s confirmation hearing starts March 21. If confirmed, she would be the court’s first Black female justice. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
In 2020, at an awards dinner where she was honored by the University of Chicago’s Black Law Students Association, Jackson said: “In my faith tradition, it is said that to whom much is given, much is expected. I take that to mean that we who have benefited have a responsibility to give back to our community in whatever way we can, and I feel very strongly about that obligation.”
She expressed those same sentiments — almost completely word for word — the previous year when she keynoted a legal firm’s retreat.
Just as she expressed gratitude for the spirituality at her roots on the day of her nomination to the Supreme Court, she likewise mentioned her parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents “instilling the values of faith and family” when she spoke at her 2013 investiture ceremony of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
In turn, she told her daughters, then “on the verge of tweendom,” that she hoped they would learn lessons from her experience: “Work hard, be kind, have faith, and remember that all things are possible.”
On Monday, as Jackson’s confirmation hearings were set to begin, religious leaders joined others in rallying to support her, focusing on her record and expertise.
“You have opened doors for her,” Wilson said in a prayer of thanksgiving at the start of a rally in front of the Supreme Court featuring organizations that have been advocating for a Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court. She listed Jackson’s numerous legal roles and sought divine assistance in bringing Jackson “to the next level.”
Heather Taylor, a social justice commissioner of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, emphasized Jackson’s perspective and qualifications at a news conference held by her historically Black denomination on Capitol Hill on Monday. Citing Jackson’s education, clerkships for federal judges and service on federal courts and as a federal public defender, Taylor said “perspective matters” when justices consider voting rights legislation and cases that could have an adverse effect on marginalized people.
“I am not here today to degrade or denigrate or put down the moral compass or perspective of the white men but rather to say that the integration of the perspective of the Black woman, who has rightfully been dubbed in this nation as the conscience of America, is long overdue,” she said.
The speech included in the Judiciary Committee records where Jackson expounded most on faith was at the 2011 graduation ceremony at Montrose Christian School, a now-defunct Maryland school on whose inaugural advisory board she was a member prior to becoming a federal district judge.
