A federal judge struck down Arkansas’s law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments on the basis that it establishes a state religion. My question is: What religion, exactly, do critics think is being established?
One might say, “Christianity, of course.” But the Decalogue is not exclusive to Christians, and not all of the Ten Commandments apply to them. For example, the Bible says that the Sabbath (the fourth commandment) was a sign given to the nation of Israel. Christians do not keep the biblical Saturday Sabbath, because Christianity is not Israel, and because the Lord Jesus Christ is our rest. We (try our best to) keep the moral commandments of the law, which Jesus summarized as “love thy neighbor as thyself.” When listing commandments to follow, as recorded in the New Testament, neither Jesus nor Paul mentioned the Sabbath — just the moral commands.
So then, Arkansas must be trying to establish Judaism as the state religion, right? There are roughly 5,000 Jewish people in the entire state, representing 0.17% of the population. I don’t think they’re trying to establish a Jewish state either. Even Muhammad, the founder of Islam, endorsed the Ten Commandments in the Quran through his endorsement of the Torah and by affirming each command in some way. Again, nobody would accuse Arkansas of trying to establish an Islamic state.
The point of displaying the Decalogue is to pay homage to the principles on which this country was founded. The United States was founded on Judeo-Christian values, which are reflected in our laws. That is an inescapable fact, and the more we try to forget this, the more our laws stray from those values. As the next generation of lawmakers, students these days could use a reminder that they have a Creator to whom they have moral obligations.
The pilgrims came to America to practice protestant Christianity free from persecution from an oppressive church-state. Many of the country’s founders were clear about the fact that the Bible, Christianity, and the Ten Commandments in particular, are the ideological bedrock of moral and civil code. While many of these “outdated” laws are no longer in effect, the states and colonies have seen prohibitions against murder, perjury, adultery, theft, blasphemy or profanity, and idolatry due to such actions violating one or several of the commandments.
If a state’s constituents feel strongly enough about displaying the Decalogue to elect leaders willing to do so, then the government should respect the wishes of those constituents. It is a historical fact that God gave Moses the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai, it is a historical fact that the Jewish people have attempted to live by those laws for thousands of years, and it is a historical fact that those commandments have shaped jurisprudence in every country around the world, but perhaps none more than the United States of America.
Nobody is proposing that we go back to 17th-century laws outlawing blasphemy or idolatry, but it’s also important to understand where the values that inform our nation’s laws come from. They did not come from secularism, naturalism, and agnosticism, which are all religious beliefs or practices in their own right. The idea that “religion” should be completely absent from schools misses that fact. Who’s to say secularism trumps Abrahamic religion?
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A Godless moral code is a moralless moral code, and even the most renowned atheistic thinkers agree that objective good and evil do not exist if God does not exist.
You don’t have to believe in God, but you should thank Him that America was founded by people who do.
