We need no voice from a thundercloud to teach us not to murder, steal or bear false witness
By Herbert Rothschild
Louisiana may become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be posted in every public school classroom. Its senate passed such a bill late last month. The previous month Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed a bill that would have permitted Arizona’s teachers to read or post copies of the Ten Commandments in any school building.
Posting the Ten Commandments on government properties such as schools and courthouse lawns has been one way that conservative Christians contend that we can save the U.S. from decline. They seem convinced that, because this divinely decreed foundation of morality is ignored, atheistical leftists are creating an immoral society.
Most resistance to posting the Decalogue on public property has been legal in nature, citing its violation of the First Amendment clause forbidding an establishment of religion. That opposition has succeeded for the most part, because the first three commandments unquestionably call for specific religious observances.
In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Kentucky law permitting the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms violated the First Amendment. In 2005, it ruled 5-4 that displaying them in Kentucky courthouses was a similar violation. Oddly, Justice Stephen Breyer then switched sides in a companion case and the court also ruled 5-4 that displaying them at the Texas state capitol did not violate the Establishment Clause. Supposedly, the monument, when “considered in context, conveyed a historic and social meaning rather than an intrusive religious endorsement.”
I would welcome opposition to publicly sponsored display of the Ten Commandments on historical and moral as well as Constitutional grounds. I would (and now will) argue that as a code of justice the Ten Commandments are rudimentary, and they were not especially formative of U.S. law.
In a National Public Radio interview, Dodie Horton, who sponsored the mandatory display bill in the Louisiana senate, contended, “Our laws are based on the Ten Commandments. In fact, without them, a lot of our laws would not exist.” Which laws might she mean (the interviewer didn’t ask)? It needs no voice from a thundercloud to teach us not to murder, steal or bear false witness. No society can tolerate such actions because they destroy social cohesion.
Hebrew society wasn’t even the first to write down these prohibitions. The Code of Ur-Nammu antedates the Book of Exodus by at least a millennium. In it, murder, rape, robbery and adultery are capital crimes. A somewhat later and more famous Mesopotamian code, ascribed to Hammurabi, has 282 laws and regulations addressing a wide range of social and economic interactions. A portrait of Hammurabi in marble relief is included in the frieze on the south wall of the U.S. Supreme Court chamber.
The figures in that frieze and its continuation on the north wall point to the many sources of our laws. Reading the south frieze left to right: Menis (from ancient Egypt), Hammurabi, Moses, Solomon, Lycurgus (ancient Sparta), Solon and Draco (ancient Athens), Confucius and Augustus Caesar. Reading the north frieze from left to right: Justinian, Muhammed, Charlemagne, King John (because he signed the Magna Carta), Louis IX, Hugo Grotius, William Blackstone, John Marshall and Napoleon.
We don’t have legal documents from all these figures, but most of them represent legal developments that were formative for us. Pace Ms. Horton, were there no Ten Commandments, our laws would look no different than they are, but they are unimaginable without the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law), the codification of Roman law under the auspices of the 6th century CE Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I. An even more formative influence was William Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the Laws of England” of the 18th century. It’s the best-known description of the doctrines of the English common law, which developed separately from Roman law.
The idea that Western civilization is in decline has a history that long precedes its most famous statement, Oswald Spengler’s two-volume “The Decline of the West,” published in 1918 and 1922. As the idea gained currency, so did an interest in the decline and fall of Rome as an analogy. Now, whatever any third-rate pundit doesn’t like about the United States finds a parallel in late Roman times as confirmation that we are doomed if we don’t repudiate it and revert to the virtuous lives of our ancestors.
Ironically, the thesis of Edward Gibbon’s renowned study of the decline and fall of the Roman empire (1776-1794) was that Christianity was its primary cause. One of his arguments for this thesis was that Christianity undermined Roman civic virtue. An emphasis on private success, whether through spiritual salvation (then) or material accumulation (now), works against public participation.
If we are failing as a society, I doubt that it’s because we are less inclined to honor our parents than prior generations or more inclined to murder, steal and perjure ourselves. Last year, crime in the U.S. declined across nearly every category, with the FBI tallying one of the lowest rates of violent crime in more than 50 years. Ample data suggest, however, that we are less connected individually and less cohesive socially. These are conditions the Decalogue doesn’t address and cannot remedy. Concerned lawmakers would do better to concentrate on the deterioration of civics education in the public schools.
A 2017 report by the National Education Association titled, “Forgotten Purpose: Civics Education in Public Schools,” begins by recalling, “One of the primary reasons our nation’s founders envisioned a vast public education system was to prepare youth to be active participants in our system of self-government. The responsibilities of each citizen were assumed to go far beyond casting a vote; protecting the common good would require developing students’ critical thinking and debate skills, along with strong civic virtues.” The report went on to lament the decline of civics instruction, exacerbated by the emphasis on mandatory standardized testing in “core subjects.” No more than one quarter of students perform at or above proficiency on the National Assessment of Educational Progress civics tests, which are given to students in grades four, eight and 12.
Another way to address disconnection and aimlessness is universal national service before age 26 for all but the most severely impaired. I don’t mean military service, although that could be one option. There is a tremendous amount of work to be done to strengthen our society, and few ways of living are more fulfilling than doing such work. As long, of course, as we don’t covet our neighbor’s wife and livestock while we do it.
Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear on Friday in Ashland.news. Email Rothschild at [email protected].
