Dorf on the Court's Catholic majority

Columbia law prof Michael Dorf has this opinion piece, "A Catholic Majority on the Supreme Court: The Good News in Judge Alito's Nomination, and a Warning":

[I]n a country with a history of anti-Catholic bias, anti-Semitism, anti-Mormonism, and pogroms against Jehovah's Witnesses as recently as the 1940s, members of the majority religious group will, it seems, have just two of nine seats on the Supreme Court with nary an issue being raised. That fact shows that, in important respects, we have become a religiously pluralist nation.

Yet the news is not entirely good. As I explain below, there remain doubts about Americans' capacity for religious tolerance for persons of other faiths, and beyond the sectarian divisions, there appears to be a new line of battle being drawn. This line separates, on the one hand, non-believers and believers who treat their faith as a private matter, and, on the other hand, believers of all faiths who question the notion of church-state separation.