One of the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s most quoted (and mocked) interviews was his February, 2013 “conversation” in New York Magazine where he affirmed his belief in the existence of the Devil, even explaining that Satan’s activity is less visible today because he “got wilier.”

This was too much for reporter, Cenk Uygur. In a video commentary for The Young Turks, he exclaimed, “That’s cuckoo for Coco Puffs! We have a lunatic on the court.” And “How do you make rational decisions when you are a person who is proud of basing your decisions on sheer irrationality?”

Scalia responded to his New York magazine interviewer thus:

You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.

He insisted, in other words, that reason was on his side. And he was right to do so. Scalia’s belief in the Devil was the corollary to his belief in God, and it was his reasonable belief in God that lay at the foundation of his belief in moral absolutes, in objective good and objective evil. His reasonable faith was, in other words, the foundation for his moral reasoning.

The Devil depicted in The Temptation of Christ, by Ary Scheffer, 1854.

And while there is no religious test for a Supreme Court justice (or for a president or congressmen or governor or mayor), it would be difficult to imagine a judge who was hostile to Judeo-Christian morals rightly interpreting the very Constitution that presupposed those morals.

From a biblical perspective, the “fear of God” — meaning, the reverential recognition of who he is as the Holy, All Powerful, All Good Judge — was considered an essential ingredient not just for pious living but also for right judging.

The Scriptures are replete with statements that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and the beginning of knowledge (see, e.g., Proverbs 1:7 and Job 28:28), while the patriarch Abraham was concerned that the men of the city of Gerar would kill him and take his attractive, wife Sarah because, he thought, “There is no fear of God at all in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife” (Genesis 20:11).

If they had a healthy fear of God, they would not commit such heinous crimes, or so Abraham thought.

More than 500 years later, Jethro gave his son-in-law Moses wise counsel about appointing leaders to adjudicate for the people of Israel, urging him to “look for able men from all the people, men who fear God, who are trustworthy and hate a bribe …” (Exod. 18:21).

Fearing God, being trustworthy and hating a bribe went hand in hand.

Similarly, when the Judean king Jehoshaphat appointed judges over the nation, he said to them, “Consider what you do, for you judge not for man but for the LORD. He is with you in giving judgment. Now then, let the fear of the LORD be upon you. Be careful what you do, for there is no injustice with the LORD our God, or partiality or taking bribes” (2 Chr. 19:5-7).

So, the judges were to judge in light of the perfect justice of an all-seeing God with whom there was no partiality or taking of bribes. As men who were accountable to the Judge of judges, they had to adjudicate fairly and impartially, taking no bribes and not allowing social status or public opinion to influence their decisions. Right would always be right and wrong would always be wrong, and their job was to distinguish between the two and rule accordingly.

Justice Scalia was a constitutional “originalist” — he believed that the meaning of the Constitution was static, except when altered through the amendment process outlined in the Constitution itself. “My burden is not to show that originalism is perfect,” he once explained, “but that it beats the other alternatives, and that, believe me, is not difficult.”

And the intent of the Constitution is laid out in its opening words: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

For Scalia, the existence of true justice and liberty presupposed the existence of a good and moral God, a conviction that provided the moral backbone for many of his rulings, not to mention provided fuel for his fiery (and often prescient) opinions.

And so, while we recognize that America is absolutely not a theocracy (in direct contrast with ancient Israel), a strong argument can be made that a God-fearing justice might well come to very different judicial rulings than a justice who scorned the idea of a theistic God and who also rejected the idea of moral absolutes.

Although it is beyond the scope of this article, it would be interesting to compare the rulings of Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, both Obama appointees and both famously liberal, to the religious beliefs of these women (or to the absence of those beliefs).

It would also be interesting to ask how Justice Ginsburg’s liberal Judaism has influenced her rulings when compared to Justice Scalia’s conservative Catholicism.

Should President Obama seek to appoint a justice to replace Scalia, we could learn a lot by asking, “Is this appointee a God-fearing individual who believes in moral absolutes?” Does he believe good and evil are real, or just cultural constructs? The answer to that question would tell us a lot.