Where to Put the Ten Commandments

In case you were wondering, I could not object more to the posting of the Ten Commandments on the walls of public schools anywhere in the United States, even though I believe it is election season pandering and will be overturned by the Supreme Court. There’s no way they’re fucking with the founding vision. Not the conservatives anyway.

I want you to know that I recognize the substantial contributions the Judeo-Christian system of ethics made to American civilization. And I agree that, compared with Islam, and some of the other newer religions (woke in general), Christianity is leagues better. But this is a secular nation with a bill of rights that explicitly guarantees every citizen of the republic freedom of conscience and of speech (and of association and assembly). The only time religion is mentioned in the Constitution is where it says a man assuming public office cannot be forced to pledge allegiance to it.

These rights not only protect citizen expressions given the constraints of time and place, but they also protect the right of people to expect that government spaces are kept ideologically and politically neutral. This protection is especially important when it comes to children, who cannot consent to receiving ideological, political, and religious messages in public spaces without their parents present. The posting of a specific religious doctrine on the walls of public schools is government respecting the establishment of religion. This is not allowed by the First Amendment.

Don’t worry. This does not interfere with your religious liberty. You can post the Ten Commandments on the walls of your home. You need not take them down when atheist friends visit. You can post them on the walls of your business. You can tattoo them onto your body. You can do that because religious liberty is your birthright. It is our birthright.

This will sound dark before its unpacking, but German sociologist Max Weber told us, “Today the spirit of religious asceticism—whether finally, who knows?—has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs.”

Weber means that Protestantism, a reclamation of the ancient Jewish law, breaking the hegemony of Catholicism, because of this gave rise to the capitalist spirit and its attendant bourgeois values of individualism, liberalism, rationalism, and secularism. These values are beautiful things. We must try hard to preserve them. Because there is a warning in Weber’s words: the corporate form of late capitalism is not only disenchanting—it is depersonalizing.

But there is also promise in his words: “No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.’”