Well, at least the title caught your attention—a sure thing at a time when everything seems saturated with talk of the Da Vinci Code. Of course Leonardo da Vinci was a known cryptic: his notes were written backward in mirror-image fashion. But the veracity of most of the Code novel is less than dubious. It seems the author had little to start with other than an intention to shock the uninformed and thereby stimulate discussion of the absurd. He succeeded, and there, as you might say, goes Hollywood.
In many ways the growing call for a return to the Ten Commandments as a U.S. model of governance plays to the same fabulist dynamic. Was there ever such a Western model in the past? Indeed, what passing knowledge of the ten does our postmodern society really have anymore?
Judge Roy Moore showed himself the attack dog of the Ten Commandment movement when he installed a several-thousand-pound granite monument of the same in the Alabama courthouse. It was a richly modern moment: done in the night hours to avoid those narrow-minded legalists who might have reflexly invoked constitutional prohibitions on establishing a religion—and filmed in living color by a television ministry mindful of how such images sway the Code-hungry masses.
That was then—a few short years back. Never mind that the Alabama Supreme Court unanimously voted to impeach and remove the said judge. The battle cry of the new faithful/credulous has been that “we need to impeach the activist judges who are removing the Ten Commandments from public places.” Somehow Judge Moore became less an activist judge challenging the law, than a modern-day Luther nailing God’s ten to the Constitution. How dare anyone of faith question this act! And in a neat reversal, some of those curbing such activism have themselves been declared the activists in need of removal.
It so often comes back to a personal vision of the foundation of Western law. It also comes back to a utopian hope that the United States is actually foundationally a Christian nation.
Would that it were so. But it seems to me that, Constitution aside, it would put Christianity in a pretty poor light indeed if it were. It would sanctify capitalism and all its innate inequalities as God’s way. It would forever put the question mark on God’s attitude toward Blacks and American Indians. We would have to, as we now so easily do with current conflicts, deduce God’s will and the acts of the faithful in wars against Mexico and Spain. We would have to see in the exploding atom, not a challenge to our faith, but the very fire of God to be harnessed to the cause of projecting His will.
I for one am content that the United States at its founding made no greater claim to the Divine than a recognition of the innate rights we each have as His creation. I am encouraged that the Founders were so humbled by religious diversity that they enshrined the right of all to disbelieve or believe whatever they were moved to. And as a Christian I am inclined to think that a happy by-product of a free society that included so many God-fearing faithful is its strength and resilience.
Today as I look around and see unmistakable signs of moral decay and national uncertainty, I cannot help yearning for modern America to rediscover the Ten Commandments. To decode again what they should mean in the personal life, and in our many social interactions.
Way back in the beginning, the more worldly of the religionists imagined that the laws of the land were based on the Ten Commandments. Of course, this was before the current Scalia-like disdain for “other peoples, other laws,” and the debate was whether English common law—the unquestioned precursor to American jurisprudence—was formed on the basis of the Ten Commandments. Thomas Jefferson in one of his letters dealt rather summarily with this claim, showing that much of it predated Christianity in England and derived from Saxon and Norse norms. Today most any law student can give a quick answer to the wishful thinking behind any such claim. “No factual basis.”
The quick-witted may have noticed that Judge Moore’s ten and other public postings usually come in a very truncated précis. Most have not bothered to read them. But apart from this scribal redaction, there is the problem of “whose ten”? Catholics, Lutherans, other Protestants, and Jews all have their versions, which differ in both numbering and wording.
I could wish that our society comported itself by the universal laws expressed in the Creator’s ten, but even a cursory reading tells me we don’t and that we shouldn’t be required to, since human beings are poorly suited to decide their fellows’ compliance to such laws.
The commands in Exodus, chapter 20, tend to focus on attitudes. “No other gods before Me” is hardly a matter of state control unless we want to revisit the Inquisition. Not “bowing down to (false gods/idols)…nor serving them” is a matter of loyalty testing that will rapidly conflict with mammon/capitalism and patriotism. “Not take the name of the Lord in vain” again must elude any government control short of inquisitorial. “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy” has long attracted church/state attention. But of course it is both wrong to compel to a Sabbath and erroneous to insist on Sunday when the commandment specifies the “seventh day is the Sabbath” because it memorializes the rest day of God after His six day creation. “Honor your father and your mother” is a goal of societies everywhere—Shinto to animist—but not clearly enforceable. “You shall not murder” sounds good and comports with commonly held global mores, but gets shaky when the state kills judicially and by waging war. “You shall not commit adultery” is certainly within the rights of a state to administer. But is our hedonistic society clearer about sin than those vigilantes Jesus rebuked for taking up stones against adultery? “You shall not steal” is certainly a basic of most societies, but still at root an attitude, and one in need of much legal clarification beyond mere property rights. And where would our political discourse be if the prohibition against “false witness” were universal? In reality the law is nuanced by secularity and quite legalistic on perjury, a far different standard than God’s intent. The ten words end with a prohibition against coveting! Where would our entire modern order be without this? Any good believer battles this urge, even as consumer societies stoke it. No man-made law against this.
A few weeks ago, on May 7, a coalition of faith leaders held the first ever “Ten Commandments Sunday” event. I wish them well in their high-minded goal of morally reviving our culture. But I think them tilting against the wrong windmill in thinking that government posting of the Ten Commandments—a pretty open challenge to the First Amendment, which limits the government’s power to promote religion—will in itself do the job.
Every good story has its “aha” moment, and the Ten Commandments code has its for me in the stated agenda of the Ten Commandment Coalition. They urged all supporters to work toward passage of the Constitution Restoration Act. In the doublespeak typical of our times, this act would essentially muzzle the constitutionally mandated power of the judiciary to find on issues involving the Ten Commandments and prayer in schools—under pain of impeachment for any judge who dared to take such a case.
No, these great Ten Commandments are not the property of the state—which is ill-equipped to understand them and over equipped to enforce them. They were written by God on stone and preserved in His temple, never in the palace, even in the theocracy of ancient Israel.
Lincoln E. Steed
Editor,
Liberty Magazine
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