Louisiana’s Ten Commandments

The governor of Louisiana has recently signed a bill that requires public schools to display a large poster of the ten commandments in each classroom. This is unconstitutional behavior, but it is also ignorant, sloppy, and disingenuous, maybe even deceitful, theology. I won’t talk about how this seems to violate the first amendment of the US constitution’s establishment clause. Rather, I want to address the way we violate the commandments themselves and the bad theology behind these violations, which makes the people who wrote, passed, and signed this law immoral according to their own professed faith.

The vast majority of modern-day Christians violate the first two commandments. We often violate the third. And we usually misunderstand the tenth commandment and ignore the way Jesus interpreted it. Louisiana’s ruling elites are either ignorant of the meaning of the ten commandments, or ignore-ant of their meaning.

In the next few posts, I want to explain what I mean. 

Thou shalt have no other gods before me. 

Traditional Christianity inherently violates the first commandment. Traditional Christianity places Jesus Christ before the Father in every way that matters. Christians look to Christ for their salvation from sin, which is their understanding of the purpose of their religion; his sacrifice on the cross is what saves them and he even plays a role as a judge, though his Father is presumably the chief justice. Christians pray in Jesus’ name, even though Jesus himself prayed directly to his Father—“Our father who art in heaven.”  The paragraph about Jesus in all the creeds, Nicene, Apostolic, and Athanasian, is far longer than those for the Father and the Holy Spirit, and its theology is central to the creed as a whole.

Christian theology’s solution to this problem is the theology of the trinity. In my opinion, with this theology we project a meaning out of the theological dissonance created by holding two opposing ideas and commitments of faith in one’s mind at the same time: that there are three Powers in heaven, but really, there is only one. (By “theological dissonance,” I mean the combination of cognitive and moral dissonance). I consider the arguments for why the trinity is truth quite tortured. I feel that the only real solution for this dissonance is to fall back on faith and let reason be.

Now I’m not saying that Jesus Christ is not God, nor that the triune God is not real, nor that Friends should not worship a triune God. Some religious temperaments do not need a coherent and sensible theology to know religious fulfillment. Some traditions of religious faith and practice can deliver on their promises without a reasonable theology. And just because it doesn’t work for me doesn’t mean that the Trinity doesn’t work for others or, more importantly, that it isn’t the religious truth.

But traditional conservative Christian evangelicalism does, in fact, need a coherent theology; it’s all about what you believe. And I’m saying that trinitarian Christianity isn’t monotheism, however clever your argument is. Three persons but one God—how does that work? This is why the rabbis at the Council of Jamnia in 84 CE declared Christianity a heresy: there can only be one Power in heaven.

More importantly for an examination of Louisiana’s new law, on the face of it, traditional Christianity puts Christ before his Father in every way that really matters, even though Jesus himself did exactly the opposite—and that violates the first commandment.