Why Should Christians Be Slow to Celebrate the Ten Commandments in Public Schools?

Some Christians may be tempted to see the recent decision by Louisiana lawmakers to require that the Ten Commandments be posted in all public schools as an unqualified good. While we should encourage our political authorities to align our society with God's order by doing justice and maintaining a certain standard of morality, Christians should be less than enthusiastic about the political uses of the biblical text. Christians need to recognize the difficulties associated with the assimilation of the biblical text by governing authorities.

First, when the Ten Commandments are used by political authorities, there is a tendency for “God” to become a generic term that does not refer to the Triune God of the Scriptures. Read in the context of the biblical story, the Ten Commandments speak against aspects of our nation's constitution — namely, the freedom of religion. The first three commandments require an unreserved commitment to the Lord as God. This is not a generic higher power, but the God who liberated Israel from Egypt and would later raise Jesus from the dead. This specific and exclusive claim is, at best, pushed to the background and, at worst, denied by reconceptualizing God as a non-specific higher power. Second, the commandments in both Exodus and Deuteronomy begin with a reference to the Lord's deliverance of His people from Egypt. Detaching the commandments from the story of God's redemption — which the Louisiana law does — allows a specific portion of the biblical text to be incorporated into American history and civil religion. The Louisiana law makes no mention of the Bible's authority as divine revelation, but consistently highlights the historic use of the Ten Commandments as a means of summarizing “civic morality.”

Requiring the display of the Ten Commandments seems to be motivated by religious zeal, but not Christian zeal. The law seeks to create good citizens of the United States and active practitioners of America's civil religion. Encouraging people to follow some moral code is appropriate, yet that isn't all that displaying the Ten Commandments in schools is doing. The moral code is embedded within a story about our nation that competes with the Christian story. The Louisiana law may be the latest shell fired in America's culture war, but Christians need to remember that we are not responsible for fixing a broken culture, but for living as a distinct people within that culture as we wait for the culmination of God's kingdom. America's civil religion confuses the message of the gospel by substituting wholesomeness for holiness. It aims to retain “baseball and apple pie” rather than acknowledging the authority of a crucified Savior.