Reinstate the Ten Commandments

The Louisiana governor signed into law legislation that requires a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in all public classrooms.

And the Left absolutely lost its mind.

The ACLU, who used to stand for free speech but now stands for radical leftism, immediately announced this was unconstitutional and they were going to stand up against it.

CNN’s Elie Honig was asked if the display violated the First Amendment. He replied:

Yes, flagrantly, in my view. If you wanted a perfect example of what the First Amendment prohibits, I think this is it. The First Amendment says Congress, government, shall make no law respecting establishment of religion, meaning state entities can’t do things that endorse any particular religion or religiosity in general.

And if you look at those 10, there are some — I know one of the defenses is, well, these are themes that are consistent throughout civilized society and throughout religion. Shall not kill, number six, I’m cheating, because I’m looking. But you know, don’t kill, don’t rob, don’t steal, that kind of thing. But there are some Commandments that are inherently religious. Observe the Sabbath day. I’m the only God that you may worship. So, it’s an inherently religious document.

Here is the problem with this particular argument: The United States is not a fundamentally secular country.

The First Amendment was designed to guarantee the practice of religion against the federal government. The idea that there is a separation wall between church and state in the sense that religion was never supposed to impact people’s values in how they vote, or religion could never be promoted in the public square, or religion could never be promoted against irreligion generally by the government is also untrue. There is no historical basis for this.

The First Amendment specifically says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. This was never originally supposed to be implemented in the states. It took all the way until the 1940s for the Supreme Court to declare that this was now going to be applied at the state level.

In fact, nine of the 13 colonies had established churches at the time of the Revolutionary War. Connecticut maintained its Congregationalist church, a state-sponsored church, until 1818. New Hampshire had one until 1819. Massachusetts had one until 1833.

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Well past the establishment of the First Amendment, there were states in the United States that established religions. Why? Because the goal here was to stop the federal government from establishing its own generalized religion that would prohibit people at the state level from having their own religions.

The idea that secularism was supposed to predominate in the United States is obviously untrue; none of the Founders believed that. Even the Founders who leaned toward atheism tended to believe religion had an extraordinarily positive effect on the body politic. The promotion of religion generally was considered a good thing by the Founding Fathers.

As President, John Adams wrote a letter to the Massachusetts militia, saying:

We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government for any other.

George Washington said in his first inaugural address:

The foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality … there is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness.

Thomas Jefferson, the guy everyone talks about in terms of coining the phrase “separation between church and state,” recognized “the moral branch of religion” as “how to live well and worthily in society.”

But for the last several decades, the courts have done something that is completely unprecedented and stupid: They have read the establishment clause and the free exercise clause as being opposed to one another.

The Constitution says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

There are two ways to read that, and the Supreme Court has read this in the dumbest possible way. One way is that Congress shall not prohibit you from freely exercising a religion. The second way is that Congress shall not establish any religion. And the Court has read them completely separately.

What that’s done is put them in conflict with one another because it turns out that if you express your religion freely in the public square, then the Supreme Court might say you’re violating the establishment clause.

But that’s never how these provisions were meant to be read. They were meant to be read in tandem. The basic idea was that you couldn’t establish any religion as the official religion of the United States, because in doing so, you would quash the free exercise of people of other religions via compulsion.

That is what the Constitution was designed to prohibit: compulsion in religion.

But there’s nothing compulsory about a sign on a classroom wall. If there were something compulsory about a sign on a classroom wall, there’d be all sorts of serious free speech issues in a classroom because it turns out classroom walls are filled with all sorts of stuff.

The argument is made that if I walk into a public school and there is a sign that quotes the Bible in a nondenominational way, it still violates my free speech. And the Ten Commandments are nondenominational because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all agree that the Ten Commandments were given to Moses, and they agree on the content of the Ten Commandments.

In 1971, the Supreme Court took up the case Lemon v. Kurtzman. And they came up with an incredibly stupid test to determine whether some sort of government action violated the separation of church and state. They said that any law had to fulfill three conditions. One, it had to have a secular purpose. Two, it had to have a predominantly secular effect. And three, it had to not foster excessive entanglement between government and religion.

When you read that, it is, on its face, nonsensical. It basically doesn’t set any standard at all because you can make an argument for virtually any religious display that it both violates the Lemon test and also does not violate the Lemon test.

In 1980, when the Supreme Court ruled in Stone v. Graham, there was a law that required classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, and the Supreme Court found that it was unconstitutional because it had no secular legislative purpose. They said the Ten Commandments convey a religious undertone because they include the religious duties of believers worshiping the Lord God alone, avoiding idolatry, not using the Lord’s name in vain, and observing the Sabbath day.

But that was based on a fundamental misreading that is enshrined in Lemon, that the government of the United States has to take no position between religion and irreligion, that the government of the United States has no interest in promoting public morality via generalized religion, that the government has to be absolutely agnostic about whether it is promoting the Ten Commandments or whether it is promoting paganism.

In 2005, there was a similar case about a public display of the Ten Commandments. Justice Antonin Scalia dissented in this case. He wrote, “What distinguishes the rule of law from the dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority is the absolutely indispensable requirement that judicial opinions be grounded in consistently applied principle.”

He was ripping the Lemon test. He was saying there’s no consistently applied principle. He continued:

That is what prevents judges from ruling now this way, now that–thumbs up or thumbs down–as their personal preferences dictate. … the Court acknowledges that the “Establishment Clause doctrine” it purports to be applying “lacks the comfort of categorical absolutes.” What the Court means by this lovely euphemism is that sometimes the Court chooses to decide cases on the principle that government cannot favor religion, and sometimes it does not. …

Besides appealing to the demonstrably false principle that the government cannot favor religion over irreligion, today’s opinion suggests that the posting of the Ten Commandments violates the principle that the government cannot favor one religion over another. That is indeed a valid principle where public aid or assistance to religion is concerned, or where the free exercise of religion is at issue … but it necessarily applies in a more limited sense to public acknowledgment of the Creator.

If religion in the public forum had to be entirely nondenominational, there could be no religion in the public forum at all. One cannot say the word “God,” or “the Almighty,” one cannot offer public supplication or thanksgiving, without contradicting the beliefs of some people that there are many gods, or that God or the gods pay no attention to human affairs. With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our Nation’s historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.

In other words, every time Joe Biden finishes his speech and says, “God bless our troops,” why isn’t that an establishment of religion in the same way it would theoretically be an establishment religion to put the Ten Commandments in a public school classroom?

The answer is because it’s not establishing religion. Biden isn’t forcing you to do anything, and neither is the sign on the public school classroom. It is encouraging you to abide by the central fundamental moral premises of the West.

The attempt to remove the Ten Commandments says more about the society than the attempt to replace them. All of Western civilization is based on a merger of Judeo-Christian ethics found in the Old and the New Testaments and Greek reason.

Here’s why the Ten Commandments are important: They take certain fundamental principles and put them beyond the scope of debate, which is good. You don’t want to live in a society where “thou shalt not kill” is a debatable proposition. How about “honor thy parents”? We’re now a society that does not honor our parents and scorns our parents as racists and bigots and white supremacist and vestiges of the past.

How about “do not bear false witness”? We live in a society in which you are allowed to bear false witness so long as the political motivations of the person against whom you are bearing the false witness are suspect.

A society that abides by the Ten Commandments is going to be better than a society that does not.

The centralizing philosophy of the United States used to be grounded in Judeo-Christian virtue. That is why it is good to put the Ten Commandments back up on the wall. Not everyone will abide by them, but they will remind people that a functional society has to have a functional philosophy.

And the most functional philosophy over the last several thousand years has sprung from those Ten Commandments.