In Texas, a new bill proposes to place the Ten Commandments in every classroom in the state. Another would allow school districts to employ chaplains instead of councillors.
Liberalism is under attack not only from the left, which has been trying to smuggle a Marxist, racialist, anti-science ideology into schools and universities in the form of critical theory, but also from the right, where religious fundamentalism is enjoying an alarming resurgence.
On the right, especially in the United States, the threat is a heady mix of white nationalist anti-immigrant sentiment, Christian nationalism, and misogyny.
The aims of this theonomic movement include to reintroduce religious indoctrination into schools, reverse the 20th century equality struggle of women and sexual minorities, subject women once again to their fathers and husbands, justify discrimination against ‘immigrants’, impose a narrow Christian moralism upon society, and undermine scientific teaching that contradicts the creation myths contained in the Bible.
In Texas, which likes to think of itself as a bastion of liberty, new bills have been tabled to require the display of the Biblical Ten Commandments, as well as to permit school districts to trained counselors who do not have to be trained in counselling or psychology, nor be certified by the State Board for Educator Certification.
A great many other bills have passed, particularly at state level, aimed at imposing Christian morality upon women, sexual minorities, children and society at large.
Church-state separation
If this sounds like a threat to individual liberty, and a gross violation of the separation between church and state, it is. Specifically, it appears to violate the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which says, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…’
However, the US Supreme Court, given a generation-long conservative leaning by a certain former sleazebag president who cheated on his wife with a porn star, recently overturned not only Roe vs Wade, but also another, lesser-known legal standard, known as the Lemon test.
The Lemon test is a precedent established in 1971, which is used to determine whether a law violates either of the clauses about religion in the First Amendment. It requires that a proposed law should have a secular or non-religious purpose, does not advance or inhibit a religion, and does not promote an extreme entanglement with religion on the government’s part.
That test was scrapped by a case in 2022, which instead provided a test of whether a governmental display of religious content comports with America’s history and tradition.
This ruling went a long way towards destroying the historical and traditional separation between church and state upon which America was founded.
There is nothing inherently good about history and tradition. Slavery and segregation are also part of America’s history and tradition. So are the patriarchal oppression of women and discrimination against sexual and other non-conformists. So are a whole lot of things that are both morally and legally objectionable.
Founding fathers
However, appealing to some vague “tradition” rather than the Constitution plays to religious conservatives, who believe that the US was founded upon Judaeo-Christian principles and that Christianity is a necessary part of the American tradition.
This belief is false. Don’t take my word for it. Read the view of Harlow Giles Unger, a historian who has written a dozen biographies of the founding fathers: ‘The US a Christian nation? Not according to the founders!’
The religious right wants the entire nation to be Christian in nature, and observe Christian mores and laws, just like, say, the Iranian regime considers their country to be Islamic in nature, and expects everyone to observe Islamic mores and laws.
As two-time US Attorney-General (under Bush Snr. and Trump) William Barr, who remains a senior Republican Party figure, said in a speech a few years ago: ‘free government [is] only suitable and sustainable for a religious people’.
He claimed (incorrectly, as we’ve seen): ‘By and large, the Founding generation’s view of human nature was drawn from the classical Christian tradition.’
The First Amendment alone should have disabused him of that notion. It explicitly grants Americans the right to break the first two of the Ten Commandments by guaranteeing religious freedom.
Barr’s speech is reminiscent of these words by another famous politician:
‘Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . we need believing people.’
That politician was Adolf Hitler.
Anti-democratic
Seeking to impose a single religion upon society is inherently anti-democratic. It suggests that the US is a country for Christians alone, and that everyone else must be assimilated into Christian values. It violates the religious freedom of everyone who does not share their Christian faith.
In a liberal democracy, nothing stops people from practising religion, teaching religion to their children, or gathering together in groups and communities under religious rules.
The individual liberty at the root of liberal democracy, however, does stop people from discriminating against those who choose not to follow their particular faith, subjecting unwilling bystanders to their religious practices, or teaching religion to other people’s children without consent.
Freedom of religion implies freedom from religion.
Some might think it is not that radical to apply the Ten Commandments to people’s daily lives. They’d be wrong.
For a start, it legitimises the notion that moral behaviour is rooted in the laws laid down by a bronze-age god, rather than in a modern humanist philosophy based on individual self-ownership and liberty.
Many Christians – like Barr – earnestly believe that one cannot be moral without adhering to a given (and arbitrary) selection of their religious laws. I’ve been told that over and over by South African conservatives, too.
This is patently absurd. One only has to document the widespread, systematic abuse of children by religious people in religious institutions of all denominations all over the world to be disabused of the notion that religion makes people moral.
All that human morality requires is the recognition that everyone has a right to life, to own themselves and the fruits of their labour, and to act as they see fit provided those actions do not infringe the same rights of others.
It does not require a claim to some form of supernatural truth.
Frankly, I would be suspicious of anyone who (a) claims to know absolute truth, (b) needs a poster on the wall to remind them to act like a decent human being, and (c) believes that if they fail to act like a decent human being, they can simply seek forgiveness from their god.
Commandments
The first three of the commandments are only applicable to people who believe in the (surprisingly insecure) Judaeo-Christian god. It violates religious freedom to impose these on non-Christians.
The fourth imposes a six-day workweek, which we’ve worked long and hard to reduce to five or even four days. It prohibits work on the seventh day, though life doesn’t stop for those who don’t share the faith, and Christians themselves would expect their house fires to be doused, their heart attacks treated, their burst pipes to be repaired, and their Sunday lunches to be served on the Sabbath.
The fifth commandment demands unconditional respect for one’s parents, even if they’re child molesters or spouse-beaters or drunks or drug addicts or criminals. Many parents do not merit respect.
The sixth commandment applies only to a particular Christian conception of marriage, and has been widely abused to punish rape victims.
The tenth prohibits a thought crime, and is entirely impossible to obey. It’s good advice, perhaps, but as a commandment, it is absurd.
The remainder are just good common sense, albeit that Christians have never been particularly good at obeying them, justifying religious war and judicial executions, stealing land, gold and precious gems from non-Christians all over the world, and happily lying to advance their own goals and impugn the characters of those with whom they disagree.
The Ten Commandments aren’t even child-appropriate. Who is going to answer primary school children when they ask, ‘What is adultery?’ Who will explain to a child what it means to ‘covet thy neighbour’s wife, or his manservant, or his maidservant’?
Unqualified
When children have a need for counseling, foisting a pastor upon them is, frankly, child abuse.
Their only cure for mental health issues is ‘come to Jesus’. Their only advice to children who are abused at home is ‘honour thy father and thy mother’. Their only advice for pubescent children is ‘don’t masturbate, because that lets the devil in’. Their only lesson for older teens is ‘sex is sinful; stay a virgin until you’re married’.
They are, as the bill itself explains, unqualified to teach, to dispense counseling or to offer psychological help. Chaplains and pastors have done untold psychological harm to children by insisting on a repressive sexual morality.
If religious instruction actually had better outcomes than modern, secular teaching and counselling, one would expect to see that in the data. But the data tells a different story.
As I’ve pointed out before, younger generations today are substantially less religious than their parents, and they are also having sex much later than older generations.
This should come as no surprise to those who know that teenage pregnancy rates are, without exception, high in Bible Belt states, because of a lack of sex education and repressive attitudes towards sex.
Modern sex education, which the religious right seeks to prohibit because it supposedly ‘sexualises’ children and doesn’t exclusively preach abstinence, has a positive impact on a broad range of sexual health indicators.
Direct threat
Religion is not a threat to classical liberal values. One can certainly be both classically liberal and religious.
However, recruiting the state in the service of religion imposes your religion upon others. That is a direct threat to classical liberal values, to individual freedom, and to democracy.
It puts us on the road towards a mediaeval kind of patriarchal, oppressive and authoritarian society. The Handmaid’s Tale was a dystopian warning, not an instruction book.
What’s going on in the US, and threatens to infect other nations whose right-wing commentariat takes cues from the American culture wars, reminds me of these words:
“The national government will maintain and defend the foundations on which the power of our nation rests. It will offer strong protection to Christianity as the very basis of our collective morality. Today Christians stand at the head of our country. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theatre, and in the press – in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during the past years.”
Again, that was said by Adolf Hitler.
The Christian right has tried to distance itself from Hitler by calling him an atheist. This claim is false.
That’s what I mean when I said Christians aren’t very good about upholding their own commandments: one kills millions with wild-eyed abandon, and the others bear false witness to avoid having to explain his actions.
That alone is reason enough to keep religion out of public education, public law and public institutions.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.