The Ten Commandments and Church and State
As regards the Ten Commandments and the State, it should be the Synagogue/Temple and State rather than the Church and State since the New Testament Christ-paradigm is a significant re-appropriation and re-interpretation of the Decalogue and all matters of the Hebrew Scriptures.
It is disheartening to observe the naïveté of persons who wish for the Ten Commandments to be displayed as icons of identity in government facilities meaning they would like for America to be a Christian-theocratic state. This misses the obvious textual origins of the Ten Commandment, as well as the intentions of the founders of our form of government.
Does anyone believe that the American founders wanted something like the established religion of the Church of England in the English monarchy? Do they think that our founders wanted a State-preferred and promulgated Christian religion, but just without the monarchy?
What is truer to our founders' wisdom is a form of government which prevented mainly Christians in disagreement about doctrine and practice from harming or even killing each other because of religious differences. We know that when America had "local theocracies" like in Salem, Christian leaders were not prevented from persecuting and killing of people who were believed to have "heretical" practices, as defined by the local religious council that defined such heresies worthy of death.
The truth of Christian history in Europe is that Christians did not practice charity with each other especially when religion and politics got involved. How many Christians were persecuted and burned at the stake by other Christians? The American founders pondered the history of the failure of Christian charity of Christians hurting, persecuting and even killing each other as well as Jews in the name of their religious-practices. For our founders, this lack of Christian charity or a more universal justice necessitated an outside neutral referee which the Constitution of the United States was intended to be. The founders of our country were not anti-religion or even pro-religion, but pragmatic community builders who surveyed the kind of political practices needed for people with different religions, faith practices, and ethical values to live together without harming each other and further to promote the kind of humane values which people of any persuasion could enjoin.
The founders and anyone with any insight into applied jurisprudence knew that the Ten Commandments are unenforceable. They are based upon ideal behaviors generated at a particular context in human history. Is it always possible for children to honor parents? Can the injunction against lying even be practically legislated except within the perjury rule of the courts? Does the State want to legislate marriage relationships? And the last commandment is the most impossible one to enforce. How could the State enforce the command not to covet? Desire is an internal and invisible phenomenon and cannot be externally controlled. It is one thing to regard the Ten Commandments as a model for recommended behaviors for the art of living in community, and therefore a teaching tool toward our better angels; it is quite another thing to regard the Ten Commandments as constitutionally and juridically practical to be enforced in American society. One can have regards for the insights of the Ten Commandments without naively trying to make them the chief model of our Constitutional democracy.
Any attempt to depart from the wisdom of our founders regarding the separation of church and state is the subtle way of saying, "the homogeneous practices for me and those in my closest community" should be the enforced practice for everyone else.
I would beseech us to allow the genius of our American system with a government to referee so as to keep us from any form of theocracy.
