By Gary Houchens
Lawmakers in Louisiana recently made headlines and invoked hysterics from the “separation of church and state” crowd by mandating that the Ten Commandments be displayed in the classrooms of all K-12 and public universities. The law is, like similar laws in the past, probably headed straight to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Hopefully with a conservative majority, the Court will see the wisdom in what Louisiana’s brave lawmakers have attempted to do: remind students that America’s political culture was not born in a secular vacuum but is the product of a long history of ideas that prominently includes the moral values of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition.
I’m old enough to remember when Kentuckians had their own battle over the Ten Commandments. In 1978 Kentucky adopted a similar law mandating that the Commandments be displayed in classrooms. That law was eventually overturned in a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision.
The dissenting Justices clearly saw what Louisiana’s leaders also see: that making sure every student is aware of the Ten Commandments is not an attempt to indoctrinate them into a specific religious belief. As evangelism, such an effort would be clumsy and ineffective. The Ten Commandments law is, rather, about forming students with an accurate historical understanding of the American system of government and its patrimony.
This is what the opponents of Louisiana’s law miss, and their ignorance is evident in their claims that lawmakers could just as well mandate that various documents or teachings of other religions, including Satanism, be displayed in classrooms.
But those other religious teachings or documents do not have the same kind of direct, historical significance for the United States. The ideas that formed the American founding were a product of Christian civilization, which was itself a synthesis of ideas from Greece, Rome, and, yes, Jerusalem. The Jewish religious tradition provided the moral and theological foundation of Christian belief, which, as it spread to dominate European culture, gave birth to the very ideas secular liberals take for granted as fundamental to our way of life.
Above all, the idea of the dignity of the individual simply did not exist as we understand it today until Judeo-Christian moral values took hold in late antiquity. Historian Tom Holland documents this process in his 2019 book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, cataloging the vast number of ways in which the modern world as we know it could not exist without the Christendom that preceded it.
Dominion was not an attempt at evangelism. Holland was not a Christian at the time he wrote the book, although now it appears he may be regularly attending church, in part because of what he discovered in his studies: that human rights, republican democracy and other values we take for granted are inextricably intertwined with the teachings of Judeo-Christianity.
Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law, like Kentucky’s before it, does not infringe on any student’s right to believe whatever they choose about any religion. But it does recognize that students need to know the history of their government, and the civilization from which it emerged, and the religious ideas that informed it. Displaying the Ten Commandments in classrooms is a good start on that broader, and necessary, educational goal.
Gary Houchens is director of the educational leadership doctoral program at Western Kentucky University. From 2016-2019 he served on the Kentucky Board of Education.