In the small Midwestern citywhere I started school, my classmates and I began each day by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and, then, the Lord’s Prayer. The one little Jewish girl in our class was exempt from the second ritual; the rest of us bowed our heads exactly as we were told, eyes shut and hands folded at our waists, and mumbled a particular Protestant version of the prayer (sins were “trespasses,” not “debts,” though neither word made much sense to us). The Catholic kids had to pick up that extra last sentence — the “kingdom, the power and the glory” part — and the few unchurched youngsters just kind of hummed and moved their lips.
When I was in 4thgrade, the Supreme Court made it clear that the U.S. Constitution didn’t allow taxpayer-funded schools to sponsor praying. Justice Hugo Black’s decision noted that government-sanctioned prayer had been a factor prompting many early English colonists to migrate to America, and that underlying the First Amendment’s promise of religious freedom was the founders’ belief that “a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade religion.”
More than six decades later, in a society far more diverse than what I knew as a child, the politicians leading Louisiana have decided to ignore that notion, seemingly imagining revival of the religious hegemony that Christianity enjoyed in the"Leave It To Beaver"era. Last week, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana signed a law requiring every classroom receiving public funds in that state — from kindergarten through college — to post the Ten Commandments on a poster at least 11 inches by 14 inches, “printed in a large, easily readable font.” Because there are three versions of the so-called Decalogue in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, and many translations, the legislature had to specify the words that the “poster or framed document” the law requires would use, so the law adopts the version of the Ten Commandments from the version authorized in 1604 by King James I of England.
That archaic language specificity is my favorite feature of the law. That’s because in the eighth of the King James version’s 10 “thou shalt nots,” a neighbor’s wife is categorized alongsidehismanservant,hismaidservant andhiscattle — all those being possessions, you know, that you’re not supposed to covet. Just imagine the thoughtful conversations that commandment might provoke in a classroom!
Perhaps that notion of spousal ownership might yield some discussion of the historical denigration of women in society. Or maybe the kids perplexed by the old English language could push through that and then explore the legacy of slavery in America, though that topic can get a teacher in trouble in a growing number of Republican-led states, Louisiana unlikely to be an exception.
Probably I’m just fantasizing, though, since 21stcentury kids surely aren’t going to learn anything from a poster on a wall. The legislature might just as well have specified handbills and pamphlets, which at least would demonstrate reverence for the Revolutionary Era’s version of the internet.
What’s made clear by a law that requires an 18th-century communication medium, using 17th-century English and embracing medieval notions of patriarchal property rights, is that Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law is a political statement, not an educational one. It’s aimed at reminding evangelical Christians that they need to look nowhere but to the MAGA movement for guidance, and in that, it is entirely performative, like so much in politics these days. What it is not is any good for the kids.
Louisiana politicians sidestep morality — and the Constitution
Mind you, it’s entirely appropriatefor legislators, who broadly prescribe what will be taught in state-funded schools, to be concerned about the moral education of children. You might even consider it more essential now than in my childhood, since the decline of spiritual affiliation in America since the 1960s means that fewer of any religion’s moral lessons are imbued in children.
But Louisiana’s politicians have actually sidestepped that issue. Even if you believe that the inheritors of Louisiana’s great tradition of perfidious political profiteering are the right people to set standards of moral instruction in the schools, you can’t think that they believe this particular law is the right way to teach kids not to kill, steal, lie, commit adultery or want toownthat lady next door.
That’s because they know that the law they have passed is flat-out unconstitutional: In 1980, the Supreme Court struck down pretty much the same law — in that case, from Kentucky — and the justices affirmed the broad principle in 2005 in blocking the display of the Ten Commandments at a courthouse. Yes, that 2005 decision came from a court that included only two of the nine justices who now sit on the Supreme Court. But when the Louisiana law reaches the Supreme Court, as it surely will, it will smack up against the philosophy of the current court’s conservative majority, which is described as “originalist.” Originalists say that the Constitution must be interpreted as it was understood at the time of its adoption. And not only were the Ten Commandments nowhere in the founders’ deliberations, but it’s a fact that the Constitution nowhere mentions either God or the Bible.
James Madison, the so-called Father of the Constitution, considered freedom of conscience to be essential to human existence, and thus saw it as imperative that government not hold any sway over what people could believe. Beyond that philosophy also lay a pragmatic consideration: There was so much religious diversity in the 13 original colonies that the promise of full religious freedom was key, Madison and his colleagues knew, to assuring that the Constitution would be ratified and the union survive. Even a Trump-infused Supreme Court won’t so blithely banish precedent and affirm so blatant an affront to the rule of law as the Louisiana statute presents.
Yet you cannot dismiss a reality that must have guided at least some of the Louisiana lawmakers: America needs a more vigorous sense of morality. Ironically, and sadly, many of us see its absence in the emergence of cruelty and selfishness as the guiding political principle of former President Donald Trump, though that’s clearly not the worry of the Republican-majority Louisiana legislature and its governor.
Indeed, we might argue that while students certainly would benefit from better instruction in both morality and religion, it ought to reach them not as indoctrination for any particular religion, but in a way so that they might come to appreciate the role religion has played in societies throughout history, for good and for ill, and to grasp what constitutes moral behavior. Perhaps that instruction would reveal that the emergence of Trumpism is in no small part a result of the decline of a moral code throughout much of society. That’s a notion worth exploring, and its reality is a result worth fighting.
The Ten Commandments as a performance prop
If you want to get to the rootsof what constitutes moral behavior, or pretty much anything else, of course, you need to look into deep history. Scientists believe that humans began to collaborate with each other about 400,000 years ago, perhaps to forage more productively and to get added protection from predators. That led to a sort of cooperative reasoning —if I’m good to him, he’ll be good to me— which eventually yielded shared social norms. With the rise of agriculture a mere 10,000 years ago, societies began to develop, and with that came diverse religious, ethnic and political influences.
The humans who filled those societies craved spiritual connection. You may believe that impulse was conceived by God, or you may say that the impulse came first and the notion of a deity followed. In either case, the result has been the emergence of many varied religions over time. Among the world’s 7.8 billion current inhabitants, the largest belief groups now include about 2.4 billion Christians and 1.9 billion Muslims; then come some 1.2 billion people who consider themselves atheists, agnostics, nonreligious and secular people. The religious diversity that follows is astounding in its breadth: Hindu, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism, Baha’i and countless more.
Most of those faiths (though not all) teach that theirs is the one true belief for humanity. Yet those religions rarely developed along pathways that can be considered proven foundations. For example: While both Judaism and Christianity teach that the Ten Commandments were handed down to Moses by God during the Israelites’ flight through the desert to freedom from enslavement in Egypt, there is little to support the notion that Moses was a real person, or that the stories of the exodus from Egypt are literally true. History has not been able to establish who might be the personage represented by Pharoah in the Biblical account.
That’s not to deny the value of the foundational moral precepts of Christianity and Judaism. On a personal level, I must affirm that they were essential to forming who I am, and I still cherish them with gratitude and awe. But indoctrination with one set of views ill prepares citizens in so varied a world as today’s for the interactions with others that are necessary to forge a peaceful co-existence. Children need to grow up with a morality that respects, as much as possible, all of the world’s great teachings. Morality is too important to society to let it be based upon a foundation as unproven as one particular set of religious beliefs, especially since religious teachings tend to be perverted by their most rigid and radical advocates.
John Jay Chapman, an American writer born during the Civil War, suggested a course that might be useful even now. He wrote in 1910 that students should become versed in the ideas that have guided moral behavior for centuries, rather than a particular code: “It is familiarity with greatness that we need — an early and first-hand acquaintance with the thinkers of the world, whether their mode of thought was music or marble or canvas or language.” You know, Chapman’s notion sounds a lot like a liberal arts education, which isn’t so much in vogue just now, in no small part because it is under attack by the same radical right-wingers whose number includes those who delivered us Louisiana’s Ten Commandments legislation.
Instead of advancing the sort of preparation for the world that might give young people breadth and understanding, then, we’re watching politicians pilfer a text that billions of people consider sacred and use it as a performance prop. That could strike one as a violation of not just the First Amendment, but also the First Commandment. You know, that part about not taking the Lord’s name in vain. Clearly, the lessons of those verses have been lost on its supposed righteous advocates.
Rex Smith is the retired executive editor of the Times Union in Albany, New York. He publishes regularly with his The Upstate American newsletter.
