Louisiana governor, Jeff Landry, sat down with Rolling Stone journalist, Lorena O’Neil, to discuss Louisiana’s law that mandates posting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms:
“The Ten Commandments are the fabric of civilization, and you’re telling me we can’t hang them in school?” he [Governor Jeff Landry] asked me.
When I [Lorena O’Neil] brought up people who don’t believe in God, Landry got impassioned. “They don’t have to look at the poster! They don’t believe in what? Do not kill?”
Landry, a Roman Catholic, thinks the Ten Commandments (the Exodus 20 version) are the fabric of civilization. Either Landry is ignorant about human history or he’s deliberately misleading his constituents. I suspect it’s the latter. It is also possible that Landry is using the word “civilization” in a narrow sense of the world, but regardless, human civilizations predate the Bible story that records God giving Moses the Ten Commandments on two tablets of stone. It is unlikely Moses was an actual person, and the Ten Commandments were written down over three millennia after the establishment of human civilization. Historians debate the dating of the Ten Commandments and the start of human civilization, but whatever dates you go with, human civilization predates the Ten Commandments. This means Landry’s claim that. the Ten Commandments are the fabric of civilization is false.
THIS [Posting the Ten Commandments in Schools] MAY BE, IN FACT, THE FIRST MAJOR STEP IN THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION, WHICH IS DESPERATELY NEEDED, IN OUR COUNTRY.
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Landry seems to think that Louisiana public schools are religious institutions that grudgingly allow non-Christians to enroll with the understanding that they will be exposed to the trappings of Christianity. “Don’t like the Ten Commandments posters?” Landry asks. “Don’t look at them.” Landry wrongly thinks that those who oppose the posting of the Ten Commandments lack moral grounding or a basis for morality. He doesn’t seem to understand that moral foundations can be built from various sources, including the Ten Commandments. And let’s be clear, the Ten Commandments are insufficient for building a broad, comprehensive moral foundation.
The first four commands are explicitly religious in nature. They have no relevance to non-Christians. Landry brings up the sixth command. He must think that this command is self-explanatory, but it’s not. What this command means is debated both within and without the Christian church. The same can be said of all ten commandments. Who, exactly, is going to interpret the commandments for students? What’s next, bringing in priests and preachers to provide the proper interpretation for students?
I support teaching the Ten Commandments in a high school World Religions class. Surely, one class session on the history of the Ten Commandments should suffice, right? Why must the Ten Commandments be posted on the walls of every classroom? Students will soon get used to seeing the poster and, before long, not pay attention to it. Posting the Ten Commandments will not make a bit of difference for public school students. All Landry has done is win a paper victory in the latest culture war.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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