Lily on the Ten Commandments, Response 1

Lily on the Ten Commandments, Response 1

Since we are committed to engaging in honest, thoughtful dialogue, I should begin by mentioning that I am truly undecided on the Ten Commandments issue. My "gut instinct" is not leaning one way or the other yet on the cases currently before the Supreme Court. One of the great things about having the chance to dialogue with our thoughtful friend Andrew on these difficult issues is that it can help me work through some of the nuances and gray areas that have so far prevented me from coming to any solid conclusions.

The initial starting point of my thinking is: I sense that a balance must be struck. On the one hand, we can probably agree that the Commandments cannot properly be displayed when their primary purpose and effect is to establish or promote religion (to borrow some Lemon test terms). If the display is making a blunt statement that the government is embracing a religious creed in the course of its lawmaking, I cannot see how the establishment clause would allow such a thing.

However, surely any historical study of how law has evolved over time would simply be factually inaccurate if it failed to include some mention of the Decalogue. The ancient Hebrews took an enormous jurisprudential stride when they tied the pragmatic laws about how you run a society (don't steal, don't kill, etc.) to the moral and ethical laws about how one worships. Prior to the revelations of Moses, the prevailing status quo in human societies involved a dual approach to lawgiving: there were laws about how you worshipped the gods to keep from angering them, and then there were laws about how your society functioned. The great innovation of the Ten Commandments is that they meld together these two concepts, by suggesting that you can please God by following such societal strictures as not lying and not stealing.

Perhaps one way to look at it is this: before the advent of the Ten Commandments, a person had (1) a civic duty not to lie, steal, etc., and (2) a religious/moral duty to worship the god(s) of his choice. But the Ten Commandments say, "You know what? You have a RELIGIOUS duty not to lie, steal, kill, covet, etc." The Decalogue recognizes that there are certain fundamental principles that societies need to espouse in order to survive, and then takes one more step: it transports those pragmatic principles into the realm of the sacred.

Ask virtually any American, and s/he will tell you that s/he not only feels s/he has a civic duty not to commit murder, but also an ethical duty not to do so. In fact, I would hazard a guess that on a personal level, most feel that the ethical duty is the more persuasive reason for refraining from wanton killing. Certainly, I don't want to kill people (or lie to them or steal from them) because I understand that society would descend into chaos if everyone was doing that. But it is even more compelling to me that killing, lying, and stealing are actions that violate a moral duty. If I had to tell you my number one reason why I don't do those things, it's the moral duty, not the pragmatic considerations.

So, all of this is to say, I truly think there are two intellectually honest sides to this debate. The trouble, as usual, comes with line drawing: how do we decide where the line is between a display that is an honest historical acknowledgement to one of the pillars of our American society, and one that is implicitly saying, "We, the government are embracing the particular religious tradition that gave rise to this list of rules"? On that, I simply don't know yet!