Commentary: Public school walls are not the place for Ten Commandments

Christian activists in several states have been tenaciously pushing legislation requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in every public school classroom in their state.

During my more than 50 years in Christian ministry, I’ve been an unstinting promoter of the Ten Commandments. Thus, one might expect me to be fully on board with such legislation. But I’m not.

And it isn’t because my love for the Ten Commandments is waning. It’s because I see the Ten Commandments as too spiritually significant to be wrested from their spiritual context and relegated to framed posters hanging on classroom walls where they will be ignored by the students. Or, worse, will be figuratively crammed down the students’ throats.

The Ten Commandments are special. They’re unique. They’re a religious document that needs to be treated as such. They describe a God-human relationship.

In fact, much of what they address should never be included in any secular law, because the Ten Commandments can be fully honored and appreciated only in the context of a specific spiritual experience and relationship.

They aren’t a model to be copied by legislators. And to try to make them fit that role is like forcing a square peg into a round hole.

Note the preamble: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” The Ten Commandments are about God having taken the initiative to rescue the Hebrew people from forced servitude. The Ten Commandments are the response God asks from the beneficiaries of that divine rescue.

The Ten Commandments describe the kind of relationships the liberated slaves should pursue. These include: Which deity to worship. Avoiding forms of worship unacceptable to that deity. Showing due respect in using that deity’s name.

The list also includes: How to relate to each other. How to relate to material things. And even certain kinds of thinking that should be avoided. At least half of the content of the Ten Commandments would be totally inappropriate for inclusion in any law governing an e-pluribus-unum society.

The Ten Commandments’ deeply spiritual message isn’t celebrated just by Jews, who were the people directly benefited by the God-initiated liberation that led to this document. Many of us as Christians also apply the commands — metaphorically — to our own spiritual experience.

We view God as taking the initiative — when Christ came to this world — to deliver us from our slavery to sin. In the Ten Commandments, we see God outlining how beneficiaries of Christ’s salvation should respond.

We see the Ten Commandments as a divine guideline about how “saved” people should relate to God, to each other, to material things — and how even certain kinds of thinking should be avoided. In our metaphorical adaptation of this document, we recognize its inescapably spiritual/religious nature.

The tragedy that’s unfolding in several states right now is that well-intended but misguided people want to use tax-funded venues (i.e. public schools) to promote this religious/spiritual document as if it’s generally applicable to everyone in our pluralistic society. It isn’t. And such a misapplication cheapens it and robs it of its spiritual beauty and impact.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution defended wholeheartedly the right of religious groups to promote their religious perspectives within the marketplace of ideas. But they wisely refused to have the public purse fund the oversight of such undertakings, or to place on such activities the imprimatur of government.

They saw our Constitution as the safeguard to ensure that the majority can’t ignore the rights and wellbeing of the minority in such situations. In other words, our Constitution’s framers operated in harmony with a social principle that’s been endorsed almost universally: Treat others as you would want to be treated if the roles were reversed.

It’s tragic that such a fair, common-sense and highly revered principle as the Golden Rule is being trampled in the rush to turn the Ten Commandments into something that I’m certain God never designed them to be — nor that the framers of our Constitution ever envisioned them to be.