State, Religion: A Dangerous Mixture

Republicans and a few conservative Democrats recently voted to allow schools to post the Ten Commandments. Supporters of the legislation argued that enshrining these rules for right behavior might encourage students to adopt a better and stronger moral compass. Perhaps some school shootings, or other bad deeds, could be headed off.

Some observers are ready to go along, on the “it couldn’t hurt” rationale. The problem is that it could hurt indeed. The most important entity that would be put at risk is religion itself.

Plainly, posting the commandments would amount to governmental endorsement. Why else hang anything on a wall? Further, it seems inescapable that by proclaiming the commandments, government also would be endorsing those religions that teach them.

Consider that the first few commandments deal with one’s proper relationship to God. These evidently would be posted alongside the biblical rules about honoring parents, and against adultery, killing, stealing, lying, and coveting. No members of the House proposed posting only the fourth through the 10th commandments. No member of Congress proposed posting the rules for right behavior taught by Buddha.

First, when government is a key supporter of one’s faith, the apparent need to lend one’s own support diminishes. Silently, perhaps, and implicitly, adherents to the faith may be tempted to relax. Perversely, government support thus may work to weaken faith in the long run. Believers in religions that teach the commandments should be wary.

Second, government support may work to reduce religious diversity. If evangelical Christianity, say, is crowned as right or legitimate, at least some people may be discouraged from forging their own religious paths.

Blindered believers may see no particular loss in this. To more open traditions, however, an unhappy result is that the overall religious experience of the nation is diminished, as the traditions from which we may all borrow and learn are fewer, less vigorous, less multiform.

For all of that, the third problem may be the worst for people who take faith seriously. It is that asking government to say which religion is the right one amounts to asking government’s blessing upon that religion. Where government stipulates religious rules, government is evidently superior to those rules, to that religion.

Thus even if some form of the Judeo-Christian tradition (and its commandments) wins the contest for government’s imprimatur, the dubious prize will be an apotheosis of the state, not of God. Surely it is getting it exactly backward if we are presented, not with “God Bless America,” but with “America Bless God.” The late Kate Smith would not be alone in her unhappiness at that outcome. Faith communities ought to consider it a blasphemy.

As we approach another Fourth of July, people of faith may echo the familiar hymn title: “God Bless Our Native Land.” The hymnals I’ve seen don’t contain, “Our Native Land Bless God.”