Thoughts on the Ten Commandments

 

The state of Louisiana now officially mandates displays of the Ten Commandments in both public and private schools. When I first heard about this, the thought that came to my mind was, "whose version of the commandments"? 

The passage in Exodus 20 is somewhat different from that in Deuteronomy 5. And neither of them neatly breaks itself down into a list of ten bullet points.

The traditional Jewish understanding of the "ten commandments" involves a first commandment that demands monotheism. A second commandment that prohibits graven images. And so forth. In this version, there is only one commandment against "coveting".

The Roman Catholic Church has another take on it. The RC Church, after all, enthusiastically embraces icons (the Eastern Church even more so). The RC Church regards iconoclasm, the smashing of images of the sacred, and even of God Himself, as a heresy it has done well to overcome. So it soft-peddles the whole no-graven-images thing. (I say this without judgment -- its evasion of iconography is hardly one of the troubling pieces of the Church's long history -- think of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel!) Consistent with this, it lumps together those first two commandments from the older faith. To keep the number constant at ten, though, it then divides the ban on coveting into two parts. Coveting your neighbor's wife is something different from coveting his farm animals. (Here's a judgment, I do see a positive side to that change.)

Many Protestant churches have reverted to the older list, siding with the iconoclast heretics in early Christian history. Giving no-graven-images explicit treatment as a commandment of its own and combining the "covets" back into one. Some, though, (notably the Lutherans) have kept the RC wording. Yet others have made other changes than what I've mentioned here, concerning especially the ordering of the commandments.

The point, though: if the state of Louisiana is now ordering a specific "ten commandments" text, then it is taking sides in a sectarian dispute. It is most likely adopting the Catholic presentation because ... well ...it is Louisiana. That is the majority religion there. But that is the problem, isn't it? A majoritarian political process (or any other political process) deciding that the laws from God are this rather than that.

Whether you think it is constitutional or not, ... it is damned ugly.

I use the "whether you think" formulation not as a dodge, but simply because I understand there is an intellectually serious case to be made against "incorporation," that is, against the premise that Louisiana, as a state, is subject to the first amendment's establishment clause at all. I think that argument has little to be said for it other than its intellectual seriousness, though. The Roberts Court has shown no inclination to take that road, in establishment cases or in other areas where it might be invoked.

The point, regardless, is that the new Louisiana law is an ugly perverse piece of work, putting the state openly in the business of telling people -- especially young folk -- not just whether but how they ought to worship, down to what the right ordering of God's commandments must be.