"We will defend it because it is truth, and you can't deny truth," said Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court, explaining why he had erected a two-and-a-half-ton monument of the Ten Commandments in the Alabama State Judicial Building's rotunda. On everything from the war on terrorism to human reproduction to school vouchers, the mouthpieces of the religious right -- like Moore -- have a habit of claiming for themselves unique knowledge of God's will. And when it comes to displaying the Ten Commandments in government buildings, they also seem to claim unique knowledge of God's laws, deciding for all Judeo-Christian believers which Ten Commandments constitute undeniable truth.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ruled that "Roy's Rock" is an unconstitutional government monument to "the Judeo-Christian God, and, in particular, to his sovereignty over all the affairs of men." But even as he pointedly chastised Moore for his theocratic vision of American governance, Thompson went to great pains to note that some displays of the Ten Commandments in government buildings are appropriate, even agreeing with Moore that the Ten Commandments are an important source of American secular law.
Given the language of the debate surrounding the "Ten Commandments Judge," unsuspecting citizens could be forgiven for thinking that followers of the myriad Judeo-Christian religions actually agree on what constitutes the Ten Commandments. While the Bible refers to the Ten Commandments (actually 10 "Words" or "Statements" in the original Hebrew), it doesn't literally present a numbered list. Different religions, therefore, divide the biblical passages differently.
Jews begin their Ten Commandments with the statement, "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." Catholics and many Protestants consider that to be a preamble and begin with, "You shall have no other Gods before me." Jews place that second and combine it with the prohibition against graven images. Protestants prohibit graven images second, but as a stand-alone commandment, while Catholics ignore graven images altogether and go right to the ban on taking God's name in vain.
Protestants and Jews agree on No. 3 -- not taking God's name in vain -- but at this point, Catholics address the Sabbath. Commandment four for Catholics is, "Honor your mother and your father," but this is where Protestants and Jews address the Sabbath. Interestingly, Catholics simply "remember to keep the Sabbath day," while the Sabbath commandment for Jews and for many Protestants details family and community prohibitions against working on the Sabbath -- prohibitions that extend even to "the stranger that is within your gates."
Jews and Protestants honor their parents with No. 5 and prohibit murder, adultery, stealing, bearing false witness and coveting people and property with six through 10, respectively. Catholics prohibit murder, adultery, stealing and bearing false witness with six, seven and eight, but they address coveting twice (regarding wives in commandment nine and property in commandment 10).
If this is confusing, it gets worse when we consider the institutional and theological diversity of the many Protestant denominations, as well as the hundreds of independent Christian churches and denominations in the United States. And we haven't even mentioned Orthodox Christians, Latter Day Saints and other Judeo-Christian believers.
This is not an argument for or against any particular version of the Ten Commandments, but to Jews and Christians who take their beliefs seriously, these variations can make real theological differences. For instance, there are Protestants who make much of the Catholic omission of the graven-images commandment. And because the Jewish version of the Ten Commandments begins by establishing freedom as God's intended condition for man, many Jews consider the Sabbath -- a weekly day of freedom from work -- to be a sacred moral obligation and not just a commanded ritual observance.
Why does any of this matter to people who are neither Jewish nor Christian? For one thing, the implications are not just theological. According to the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, nearly 79 percent of Americans identify themselves as either Christian or Jewish. Therefore, to the extent that Judeo-Christian religious beliefs influence and inform the behavior of more than three-fourths of the population, these differences could have tangible political, economic and social consequences for the entire nation.
On questions such as those raised by the Alabama case, if the major Judeo-Christian religions differ on the Ten Commandments -- not just in interpretation but also in defining them in the first place -- how could we possibly display them as a unifying moral code? Religious conservatives routinely defend government displays of the Ten Commandments by arguing that they represent the Judeo-Christian heritage of our country. But that is simply an attempt to distract us from a theocratic right-wing political agenda cloaked in Christianity. If we are intellectually honest with ourselves, the best we could reasonably argue is that the Ten Commandments exist in various forms, common elements of which have influenced our secular legal system. Perhaps that is why, as the district court ruling noted, appropriate and constitutional government displays of the Ten Commandments all seem to punt on the question of which 10 by depicting tablets that are blank, show only Roman numerals or have the text obscured.
As a matter of conscience, Citizen Moore is free to believe and defend whatever he pleases. But when Chief Justice Moore took it upon himself to use the King James Bible's version of the Ten Commandments to create what the court called "a consecrated place, a religious sanctuary, within the walls of a courthouse," he tried to elevate not just the Judeo-Christian God, as the court argued, but his own Evangelical Christian God to a position of sovereignty over the Alabama legal system. That is not only unconstitutional -- it is the height of spiritual arrogance to those of us who do not share Moore's religion.
David L. Englin is a military officer stationed in Washington, D.C. His views are his own and in no way reflect the position of the U.S. Department of Defense.
