If you want to post the Ten Commandments in schools, you ought to learn more about them

This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on March 6, 2024.

In the latest “Law and Order” episode of the GOP’s march toward theocracy, the Arizona Senate passed Senate Bill 1151, which would allow the Ten Commandments to be displayed and read in public schools.

“The progressive slide down in our country right now is because we have taken the Ten Commandments away from our schools,” Sen. Anthony Kern claimed on the Senate floor.

In addition to the Ten Commandments, the law includes the display or reading of:

• U.S. Supreme Court decisions
• The Declaration of Independence
• The National Anthem
• “In God We Trust”
• The Pledge of Allegiance
• U.S. “history and heritage” documents

It passed 16-12 in a party-line vote.

Anne Laurie Gaylor, cofounder for the Freedom from Religion Foundation, criticized the bill, insisting Arizona public schools have “no business telling school children how many gods to worship or what gods to worship or whether to worship any gods at all.”

Given how the Satanic Temple has responded to these overreaches of government by arguing in favor of religious liberty and adding their own displays or after-school programs to the existing list of evangelical options, one might wonder if a good response would be to add other non-Christian religious materials to the bill.

“If conservatives want us to read the Ten Commandments, then let’s read them.”

But in the case of the Ten Commandments, one of the responses needs to be to go along with the conservative game being played here. If conservatives want us to read the Ten Commandments, then let’s read them. But rather than reading them at a surface level of how they may or may not be used as a culture war weapon of 21st century United States politics, let’s dive into the Ten Commandments for their original context.

The irony is, when we do this, we undermine the entire basis for modern conservative evangelical Christianity.

The Ten Commandments as a moral code

Like the Arizona Republicans, many evangelicals view the Ten Commandments through a modern 21st century political lens. In this world, God gave humans the Ten Commandments in order to reveal to us how we are to behave toward one another. These conservatives believe Democrats refuse to worship God in right way and therefore reject God’s law.

By removing Ten Commandments displays from our schools, these conservatives believe our society has become like the Israelite society in the book of Judges, which states: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”

Fundamentalist preacher John MacArthur says our culture is “committed to the fact there’s no truth, no authority, no rules and no judge.” One evidence of this is the absence of the Ten Commandments in our public schools.

Thus, by posting the Ten Commandments in our schools, we would recommit ourselves to truth, authority, rules and God as our judge, which presumably will bring about moral order once more. So they say.

The Ten Commandments as a driver of shame

At a deeper level in evangelical theology, the Ten Commandments serve not primarily as a way to reveal God’s moral expectations for us, but to drive us to shame in order to reveal our need for Jesus.

Continue reading at Baptist News Global.