The Ten Commandments remind us the U.S. is still the freest nation on earth | Opinion
The L.A. Times laments the law as opening a front in the American cultural war that is deliberately provocative on the part of a specific brand of White Christian Nationalists of monolithic beliefs. More on what is the motivation of such people shortly.
It is hard in the US to fix a line between church and state. The editors mention several Supreme Court cases, two involving Kentucky with decisions banning public displays in public schools and in county court houses, and one in Texas allowing such as a cultural display. In the two Kentucky cases the Supreme Court ruled that although Kentucky argued it was reminding people of a most significant cultural foundation the justices stated that the court knew it was Kentucky promoting religion. A Texas monument on public land was allowed because it was a heritage statement not confronting people every day (as in a classroom).
Compounding the problem of fixing a line, the Supreme Court building in D.C. has two versions of the Ten commandments in its most prominent places, on its front entry door and above where the justices sit.
The constitutional line probably cannot be fixed because politics arises out of culture and culture arises out of religion. There must be a common religion (ultimate values and understanding of reality) to unify people into a community by providing a common ethics and ethos that all can abide by. There is now no common religion. The old religion was Judeo/Christian and its ethic and ethos created Western civilization. That ethos is built first on belief in a God of absolute values and on The Law (Ten Commandments) that separates humankind from all other creatures. Other elements of the western tradition are: all life sacred; individual worth and freedom; a fear of power (the right of Englishmen to be free of arbitrary power); rationalism and faith in tandem; religion and politics separate; comparatively greater respect for women.
In the U.S. this western tradition was distilled into Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (the traditional American’s political religion encompassing all peoples) declaring all people by God’s design born free with capacity to govern themselves. The Constitution was how Americans would govern themselves, free from arbitrary governmental power. Under the Constitution and its emphasis on the individual, the U.S. is today the freest nation on earth regarding speech and religion and far above all other nations in its religious and ethnic/racial composition diversity.
This is what those people assigned by the editors the pejorative White Christian Nationalists wish to preserve. This is why they post the Ten Commandments as part of the western world’s command to remember the past and the present day’s foundations. Within the west, the Ten Commandments is not sectarian but universal.
The LA editors want the cultural war to be over with them having won. In most instances there can be no merging/melding of opposing forces/ideals because each side’s beliefs are contradictions of the other’s. Very many Americans today have bought into Marxist ideals that reject Western ideals. Marxists insist on atheism and no moral grounding and the only thing that matters is power and who has it. It is a return to paganism.
Prominent Americans denounced President Trump’s 2017 Poland speech for defending western civilization instead of working toward an interconnected world of no borders. For decades now American universities don’t require American history and almost all Western civilization courses have been replaced with world civilizations courses.
The founding fathers insisted on a democratic republic of checked powers. They insisted on freedom of religion in the public square for all. Most importantly they warned Americans then and now that if they ever lost their Christian ethos they would lose their nation, that country Lincoln called the last, best, hope of earth.
J. Larry Hood is a retired state government employee and has been adjunct faculty at area colleges.
