There’s some interesting history on the Supreme Court’s anti-religious turn in the last century in an article by a couple of Catholic social scientists, Is American Democracy Safe for Catholicism? It seems that the big change occurred around 1940, when the Court stopped talking about “civil liberty,” a traditional conception that recognized the common good, and started talking about “civil liberties,” a new term for a new and far more ideological construct. The former lets religious understandings play a role in public life, the latter makes the unencumbered ego the standard and treats any appeal to distinctive religious teachings as an attack on the regime. Religious liberty thus becomes identical to public suppression of religion.
Oddly, the authors say the danger posed by the current American regime is “primarily to the souls of Catholic political leaders who are tempted to sever the connection between their religious convictions and their political positions when the former are inconsistent with their political interests.” I would think the problem is much broader. The regime regulates almost the whole of social life, it claims the right to educate children and radically change social and moral attitudes, it demands loyalty that extends to life-and-death matters, we all participate in it as citizens, and since Vatican II the big push has been to erase the distinction between Catholicism and the rest of the world. So it’s not just Mario Cuomo we should worry about.
The two authors, Gary Glenn and John Stack, are participants in an organization of mainstream Catholic orthodox scholars known as the Society of Catholic Social Scientists. Their website has some interesting material on it, notably recent articles and symposia from the group’s journal Catholic Social Scientist Review.