Be Careful Where You Put The Ten Commandments

Two years ago, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore dedicated a monument to the Ten Commandments that has since been displayed prominently in the state judicial building. Now, his colleagues on the bench say that the monument has to go, at least from the building's rotunda. His Honor professes to be expressing the free exercise of religion that the First Amendment to our country's Constitution permits. But fellow judges regard his actions as amounting to the establishment of religion, which the First Amendment prohibits.

The way our system works, only judges can finally decide (a) whether an issue like this one is a constitutional issue at all, and (b) if it is, just what the Constitution does and does not say about it. The rest of us, however, can have opinions about both. And a lot of us do. My own began with chagrin that Judge Moore has been taken seriously by anyone as a defender of everyone else's faith. Of all the people who should know better, he tells us with a straight face that a 5,000 pound granite monument to a specific religious tradition, sitting in a federal building, isn't an in-your-face insult to a society committed to religious liberty for all.

Putting the best face on it, what the recently suspended Judge Moore is trying to do is call our attention to the place that the Judaeo-Christian tradition occupies in American history and life. Is this a problem? Of course it is. Part of the problem is with where and how the Judge wants to drop his testimony: at the courthouse rather than in our classrooms and churches. More importantly, it is with his obliviousness to what freedom of religion must mean for a religiously pluralistic society. Pretty clearly, Judge Moore is about the business of elevating one religious tradition in this country above all the others.

For the Judge and his ardent supporters, the indispensable foundation of morality, ethics, and the law is belief in God. "Let's get this straight," he has been quoted as saying, "It's about the acknowledgement of God." Without the superstructure that such a belief provides, he and his fellow believers hold, all three become mere human contrivances whose truth is relative only to the cultures that think them up.

I once heard an eminent Protestant pulpiteer put it this way: When you take "God" out of "Good," all you're left with is a zero. At the time, I thought that his remark fell somewhere between the howlingly funny and the reprehensibly facile. I still do. Human beings can be moral, ethical, and lawful whatever they may or may not believe about God. And they can be none of the above while professing a strong belief in God with all the verbal eloquence of which dissembling people are all too often capable.

Contrary to Judge Moore's certitude, if we are forced to honor the roots of Western law by compressing them into one form or another of a Decalogue, then we are going to encounter difficulties that more thoughtful believers will not be able to resolve easily. For one thing, we will have to decide on exactly which version of the Big Ten we are to go with. Personally, I prefer Deuteronomy over Exodus on the matter, but not everyone will agree. Next, we will have to try to figure out what each commandment meant for its own day before we can get very far figuring out what it implies for ours. Merely citing a prohibition against killing, for example, gets us about as far in determining punishment for capital offenses as it does in formulating foreign policy: nowhere.

And then, of course, there is the matter of how Jesus weighed in on the Decalogue. Apparently, just two commandments were enough for him. It might even be that he wasn't thinking primarily of commandments at all. The so-called "Love Commandment" doesn't look very much like just another externally imposed rule for behavior. It looks much more like the image of an inward virtue, of the sort the ancient prophet Jeremiah seemed to have in mind: I shall set my law within them, writing it on their hearts…For representing this kind of law, granite seems hardly the best medium.

However the situation in the Alabama judicial building is finally resolved, at least two ironies in it should prove memorable. First, a hard-shell Fundamentalist Christian jeopardizes his tenure on the federal bench by defending a tradition of Jewish legalism that Jesus himself staunchly opposed. And second, some of the most ardent supporters of memorializing this tradition the Judge's way belong to a denomination that includes people who are convinced that God does not hear the prayers of Jews anyway.