©2002 Ed Buckner, Council for Secular Humanism, www.secularhumanism.org
The House was just grandstanding and pandering, as many of the members probably know—but it did get a lot of press then and is still being offered as a panacea, so now is a good time to review the basics on the Ten Commandments. The courts have been consistent about the unconstitutionality of posting the Ten Commandments in government buildings, and history and logic both support their rulings. I have addressed, in another essay, the almost certainly false Madison quote on the subject. Other framers of the U.S. Constitution may have written about the decalogue, but Thomas Jefferson certainly did, and what he wrote is worth our consideration. Jefferson argued at length and at various times in his long life that our (American) laws derive from English common law and that common law in turn owed nothing to Christianity or to the Ten Commandments. An example:
. . . we know that the common law is that system of law which was introduced by the Saxons on their settlement in England, and altered from time to time by proper legislative authority from that time to the date of the Magna Charta [1215 CE], which terminates the period of the common law...and commences that of the statute law.... This settlement took place about the middle of the fifth century. But Christianity was not introduced till the seventh century.... Here, then, was a space of about two hundred years, during which the common law was in existence, and Christianity no part of it.... If, therefore, from the settlement of the Saxons to the introduction of Christianity among them, that system of religion could not be a part of the common law, because they were not yet Christians, and if, having their laws from that period to the close of the common law, we are able to find among them no such act of adoption, we may safely affirm (though contradicted by all the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law....We might as well say that the Newtonian system of philosophy is a part of the common law, as that the Christian religion is....Finally, in answer to Fortescue Aland’s question why the ten commandments should not now be a part of the common law of England? We may say they are not because they never were made so by legislative authority, the document which has imposed that doubt on him being a manifest forgery.” (Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814. From Andrew A. Lipscomb, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. XIV, Washington, DC: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903, pp. 85-97.)
Aside from their significance—or lack of it—as an influence on our laws, the Ten Commandments are, if endorsed by government, a clear violation of the First Amendment and of church/state separation. They are overwhelmingly religious in nature, despite repeated absurd declarations to the contrary by people who have apparently not read them, at least not lately. Furthermore, there is no agreed upon text of what properly constitutes the ten. Not only do different Bible translations provide different wordings, but Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish versions disagree about various details. And there are two very different versions in the same book of the Bible, with one wild version, in Exodus 34:14-27, that commands us not to “seethe a kid in his mother’s milk,” having a better claim to being the ten commandments, if the biblical text that precedes this passage is taken on its own terms. Many of the people who want to see the decalogue posted in government buildings probably do not have any version posted in their own houses or businesses or churches, could not name more than three or four of the commandments, and probably have very little understanding of the importance of separation of church and state in protecting their own religious liberty.
And that bit about the Ten Commandments being “posted” in the U.S. Supreme Court Building? False, despite frequent repetition. I have personally checked this out, very carefully (our son Michael used to live only two blocks away). There are a number of symbolic allusions to the commandments on and in the building, as there are to such other sources of law as Solon, Confucius, Hammurabi, Muhammed (but not to Jesus), and Napoleon. (According to the most obvious interpretation of the Ten Commandments, the sculptural allusions there, including symbolic references to Moses and the decalogue, violate the second commandment prohibiting “graven images.”) The words—of whatever version is considered correct by one group or another—are nowhere to be found in or on the building.
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CFI SUMMIT
OCTOBER 24-27 2013
TACOMA, WASHINGTON
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