Sixteenth-century Protestant reformer John Calvin often wrote in favor of toleration while he was powerless. Yet when he attained power, Calvin burned Spanish theologian Michael Servetus at the stake for his views on baptism and the trinity, “question[s] that neither of them knew anything about,” as Robert Ingersoll put it. “In the minority, Calvin advocated toleration—in the majority, he practised murder.”8 The Catholic Church tyrannized Europe while it had control. As the civil authority or alongside the civil authority, it burned, tortured, imprisoned, blackmailed, and murdered to ensure conformity. But as the minority in the United States, the Catholic colonists fought for a secular government. Daniel Carroll, a Constitutional Convention delegate from heavily Catholic Maryland and one of two Catholics present at that convention,9 later argued for the amendment to ensure a secular government and protect religious worship because “the rights of conscience are, in their nature, of peculiar delicacy, and will little bear the gentlest touch of governmental hand.”10
John Adams noticed this historical trend,11 as did James Madison, the Father of the Constitution and the Father of the Bill of Rights. Madison penned the greatest defense of religious freedom and secular government in 1785 to oppose a three-cent tax that would support Christian ministers. His “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments” examined what churches with civil power—ecclesiastical establishments—had wrought. “In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the Civil authority; in many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny: in no instance have they been seen the guardians of the liberties of the people,” wrote Madison. “Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty, may have found an established Clergy convenient auxiliaries.” He concluded, “A just Government instituted to secure & perpetuate it needs them not.”12
Engraving of James Madison from c. 1828, after a painting by Gilbert Stuart.
The other framers were familiar with this history, which is partly why most concluded, as Carroll did, that religious freedom is dependent on the government not taking sides on any religious issue, however gently or lightly. They therefore chose, in Jefferson’s words—words later adopted by the Supreme Court to explain the principle underlying the religion clauses—to build “a wall of separation between Church & State.”13
THE FIRST COMMANDMENT is fundamentally at odds with the US Constitution in another respect—the source of power. The Constitution sites power in the people. The Ten Commandments’ authority rests on the claim that they are the words of a god—even though the first commandment’s prose and feral threat, the “other gods” it refers to, and even the “god” himself, all suggest a man-made, not divine, author.
The claim of divine authority is shaky even according to the bible’s own story. Moses was the sole witness to a god actually giving the commandments and may have been a tad delirious (see page161). Rather suspiciously, he had the priests set a perimeter around the mountain to ensure that no other person could see, or not see, his god.14 So even assuming the bible reports these events accurately—a rather large assumption—the divine authorship claim rests squarely on Moses’s word. This is Thomas Paine’s point in the Age of Reason: “When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so.”15 Yet the authority of all the commandments rests tenuously on the claim that this particular god—one of many acknowledged in this very commandment—is supreme.
Those other gods cast even more doubt on the commandments’ claim to divine authorship and authority. Christopher Hitchens pointed out that the commandment “carries the intriguing implication that there perhaps are some other gods but not equally deserving of respect or awe.”16 The Jewish Encyclopedia says that the early Hebrews were “monolatrous rather than monotheistic; they considered Yhwh to be the one God and their God, but not the one and only God.”17 Yahweh was “the national God of Israel as Chemosh was the god of Moab and Milkom the god of Ammon.”18 That there was “no other God in Israel…did not affect the reality of the gods of other nations.”19 Whether or not the bible admits that there are other gods and that the Israelites believed in them without worshipping them—and even if one particular god did write the Ten Commandments—is beside the point. The first commandment still conflicts with American principles.
In the United States, the people are supreme, not god. Article VI of the Constitution reads: “This Constitution…shall be the supreme Law of the Land.”20 The Supreme Court has specifically decided that religious belief cannot take precedence over the Constitution: “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself. Government could exist only in name under such circumstances.”21 Religious belief is a personal right individuals possess, not the source of governmental power.
The people are not one source of power and god another; “the people are the only legitimate fountain of power,” wrote Madison.22 Madison was echoing Hamilton’s statement in The Federalist number 22: “The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority.”23 Benjamin Franklin thought that “in free Governments the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors.” He believed this so strongly that he claimed that leaving public office and rejoining the ranks of the people was a promotion: “For the former therefore to return among the latter was not to degrade but to promote them.”24 Writing of the Constitution, our fifth president, James Monroe, explained that “the people, the highest authority known to our system, from whom all our institutions spring and on whom they depend, formed it.”25
Not only are the people supreme, but America is “founded on the natural authority of the people alone without a pretence of miracle or mystery,”26 as John Adams put it. The people are solely responsible for the Constitution. Remember, while defending American ideals during the Revolutionary War, Adams cautioned that it should “never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods.”27
The conspicuous absence of a god from the Constitution, and the rather heavy emphasis the founders gave to its first three words—“We the People”— embody its conflict with the first commandment. The framers “formed our Constitution without any acknowledgment of God,” as Yale president Timothy Dwight later complained.28 As the framers excluded god from the document, the document excludes religion from government—its only references to religion are exclusionary:
Prohibiting a religious test for public office.29
Prohibiting governmental interference with religious worship.30
Prohibiting religious interference with government.31
That’s it. Nothing is said about Jesus, Yahweh, or any other god, or any of the sets of Ten Commandments.32
The First Amendment enshrines rights that are necessary for a functioning democracy. It allows free thought and free communication, and it allows citizens to interact freely with their government. The free exchange of ideas fosters a thriving democracy. Constitutional scholar Geoffrey Stone perfectly captured the First Amendment’s importance to self-governance when he wrote:
To meet the responsibilities of democracy, individuals must have access to a broad spectrum of opinions, ideas, and information. For the government to censor public debate because it thinks a particular speaker unwise or ill informed would usurp the authority of citizens to make their own judgments about such matters and thus undermine the very essence of self-government…. The First Amendment promotes the emergence of character traits that are essential to a well-functioning democracy, including tolerance, skepticism, personal responsibility, curiosity, distrust of author
ity, and independence of mind.33
The first commandment stands directly opposed to these freedoms. About one hundred years after the Constitution was proposed and ratified, Pope Leo XIII used the first commandment to declare it “unlawful to demand, to defend, or to grant unconditional freedom of thought, of speech, or writing, or of worship, as if these were so many rights given by nature to man.”34 Leo had the gall to title this order On the Nature of Human Liberty. The shackling of the human mind sanctioned by Leo’s encyclical is sought by most religions and would destroy the freedoms of the First Amendment. The Judeo-Christian first commandment and the US First Amendment fundamentally conflict. They are irreconcilable.
15
Punishing the Innocent: The Second Commandment
II. “You shall not make for yourself an idol [alternate translation: “any graven image”1], whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.”
— Exodus 20:4–6
“A curse from the Lord righteously falls not only on the head of the guilty individual, but also on all his lineage.”
— John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 15592
“We are to look upon it as more beneficial, that many guilty persons should escape unpunished, than one innocent person should suffer.”
— John Adams, opening statement defending British soldiers accused of murder in the Boston Massacre, 17703
We mortals must read any divine command in its entirety. The second commandment is a tad verbose, but if we simply skim the order or read one of the modern paraphrases that appear on monuments around the country—such as the abridged language on the monument that sits outside the Texas capitol in Austin, “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images”—we will miss the appalling punishment “the LORD your God” doles out to innocent children.
This commandment conflicts with the American principles embedded in the First Amendment in several ways. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, the press, and worship.4 It protects one’s ability to worship any idol one chooses, be it a saint, as the Catholics do, or a sandal, as in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. It also protects the right to reject worship. The amendment protects not only worship, but also many forms of expression, including religious or even blasphemous imagery.5 The second commandment, on the other hand, prohibits more than just religious imagery. The text prohibits images of anything in heaven, on earth, or in the water. That covers most of the known world. In short, it ends art. The commandment prohibits a basic, universal human impulse: to create something that reflects and thereby enhances the beauty of life. The freedom to make and display images of Jesus, a freedom most Christians cannot resist exercising, is protected by our Constitution but prohibited by this commandment. It is specious to argue that a command punishing the very rights protected by the Constitution could have influenced it in some way.
The second commandment did not influence our nation’s founding, but it did shape history. It has robbed historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and humanity of many riches and wonders. The underlying sentiment—my god is the right god and your beliefs are wrong—appears in each of the first four commandments. This attitude led the Taliban to blow up the monumental sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan in March 2001.6 Judeo-Christianity behaved similarly when it held absolute power. Waves of idol destruction in the name of one god or another have swept the world. These destructions are distinctly un-American, but quintessentially Judeo-Christian. After all, God commanded Moses to slay three thousand of his friends, brothers, and neighbors, for violating this stricture. The early Christian theologian Origen interpreted the commandment to mean that “it is not possible at the same time to know God and to address prayers to images.”7 Celsus and Tacitus, two non-Christian historians living during the first two centuries of Christianity, both note that Christianity opposed imagery of its god8—much like Islam today.
Beginning with Emperor Leo III in 726 until about 843 CE, the Byzantine Empire tore itself apart over idols.9 Iconoclasts demanded the destruction of idols and art, and the controversy is the reason different sects number commandments differently.10 Idolatry eventually beat iconoclasm, and the Eastern Orthodox Church still celebrates this glorious victory on the Feast of Orthodoxy, the first Sunday of Great Lent. Before Byzantine Iconoclasm or the Iconoclastic controversy, as it became known, the Byzantine Church dictated precisely how Jesus should be represented in art. For the first few hundred years, Jesus was typically represented as a lamb—the sacrificial lamb, killed to satisfy the bloodlust of his dad. The Quinisext Council of Constantinople in 692 CE, authorized the crucifix (not the cross) as the symbol of Christianity: “Hereafter instead of the lamb, the human figure of Christ shall be set up on the images.”11 This heavy-handed patronage would continue through the Renaissance, when the church dictated to the world’s most brilliant artists how they ought to ply their brushes and chisels. During that explosion of art, John Calvin wrote that “all the idols of the world are cursed, and deserve execration.”12
A sixth-century mosaic of Jesus as the lamb of god in the Euphrasian Basilica in Poreč, Croatia.
Failure to keep this commandment is the root of all evil, according to the Wisdom of Solomon. If you don’t recognize the name of this biblical book, it may be because not all sects include it in their bibles. Early Christians and church leaders thought the book holy and, according to scholars, it was “certainly used as Scripture by such early third-century writers as Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Pseudo-Hippolytus.”13 The book is also included in the Vulgate, the Latin translation of the bible.14 The Wisdom of Solomon sums up the religious worldview nicely:
All is a raging riot of blood and murder, theft and deceit, corruption, faithlessness, tumult, perjury, confusion over what is good, forgetfulness of favors, defiling of souls, sexual perversion, disorder in marriages, adultery, and debauchery. For the worship of idols not to be named is the beginning and cause and end of every evil.15
Also, “the idea of making idols was the beginning of fornication, and the invention of them was the corruption of life.”16 That’s monotheism in a nutshell: the world is terrible and full of evil and perversion because people are worshiping idols and/or the wrong god.
As the Nazis were stealing and destroying the art of Europe, Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1941. The objects in the gallery are “not only works of art…they are the symbols of the human spirit, symbols of the world the freedom of the human spirit has made…a world against which armies now are raised and countries overrun and men imprisoned and their work destroyed.”17 To accept the art on behalf of the people was “to assert the belief of the people of this democratic Nation in a human spirit which now is everywhere endangered and which, in many countries where it first found form and meaning, has been rooted out and broken and destroyed. To accept this work today is to assert the purpose of the people of America that the freedom of the human spirit and human mind which has produced the world’s great art and all its science—shall not be utterly destroyed.”18
Art is freedom: freedom of expression, freedom of thought, freedom to explore what it means to be human. Religion cannot thrive in the face of such freedom, so it seeks to muzzle or control it. As the Wisdom of Solomon explains, artists’ creations are “ungodly” works that mirror what is supposedly god’s creation and are therefore “a hidden trap for humankind.”19
FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AND FIRST AMENDMENT CONFLICTS are the least of the problems embodied in the second commandment. The initial command is simple: do not make idols or images. However, the rationale Yahweh gives for obeying the c
ommand is coercion of the worst kind. God promises to punish children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren for their parents’ mistakes. God’s most moral law promises to deliberately punish innocent children.
This vicarious punishment conflicts with principles underlying American justice. In Article III, the Constitution explicitly forbids punishing children for the crimes of their parents, even for crimes as serious as treason: “No Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.”20 This means that “even if all of one’s antecedents had been convicted of treason, the Constitution forbids its penalties to be visited upon him.”21 James Madison explained that the entire point of this limitation was to restrain Congress “from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its author.”22 In 1833, Justice Joseph Story described the problem the clause was meant to solve: “By corruption of blood all inheritable qualities are destroyed; so, that an attainted person can neither inherit lands, nor other hereditaments from his ancestors, nor retain those, he is already in possession of, nor transmit them to any heir. And this destruction of all inheritable qualities is so complete, that it obstructs all descents to his posterity.” Story summed up this terrible punishment in biblical terms: “Thus the innocent are made the victims of a guilt, in which they did not, and perhaps could not, participate; and the sin is visited upon remote generations.”23
The Founding Myth Page 21