The jury found Reynolds guilty of breaking a law that made it a crime to “wilfully blaspheme the holy name of God, by denying, cursing, or contumeliously reproaching His being…or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching Jesus Christ, or the Holy Ghost, or the Christian religion, or the holy word of God.”28 The fine and costs amounted to about $75, which Ingersoll himself paid, a small price to expose and mortally cripple American blasphemy laws.29
Blasphemy laws and religious restrictions on speech are un-American. This commandment stands opposed to all that makes our country great. The American who values the Constitution and the liberties it protects will stand with Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, and, as Ingersoll stated, “deny the right of any man, of any number of men, of any church, of any State, to put a padlock on the lips—to make the tongue a convict [and] passionately deny the right of the Herod of authority to kill the children of the brain.”30
17
Forced Rest: The Fourth Commandment
IV. “Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.”
— Exodus 20:8–11
“The word Sabbath, means rest, that is, cessation from labour, but the stupid Blue Laws of Connecticut make a labour of rest, for they oblige a person to sit still from sunrise to sunset on a Sabbath day, which is hard work. Fanaticism made those laws, and hypocrisy pretends to reverence them, for where such laws prevail hypocrisy will prevail also.”
— Thomas Paine, “Of the Sabbath Day in Connecticut,” 18041
The rationale for the sabbath rule is slightly ridiculous: it celebrates lazy omnipotence. If one is all-powerful, there is no such thing as toil; all is rest. Yahweh would not need six days to do anything—he’d need only the briefest moment. Nor would he need to rest. It would have been far better to declare a day of rest to spend with family and friends in relaxation from the rigorous week, rather than invent a lazy god.
Ridiculous justifications aside, at first blush this stricture would appear to have influenced America’s foundations. Perhaps so. It may be necessary to concede some influence here, but the rule was not influential in the way Christian nationalists suppose or accept. Sabbath, or, more accurately, Sunday closing laws, are part of American culture and laws, though the concept is not central to the foundations of our country. But to determine its influence, we must first understand the rule.
The biblical penalty for sabbath-breaking is death.2 The Israelites stoned a man to death for gathering kindling on the sabbath.3 At least a part of this rule is meant to encourage, or perhaps coerce, worship. If everyone has the same day off, nobody has an excuse for missing church. This need to coerce attendance at worship services undercuts the favorite argument that humans are religious beings. David Tappan, a Congregationalist reverend and Harvard theologian, gave a sermon in Boston on Election Day, 1792, explaining that preachers need the sabbath to control their flock: “Many of us [preachers] are connected with societies, which are chiefly composed of the labouring and more illiterate class; that these peculiarly need the privileges of a weekly sabbath and public religious instruction; and that many of them require very plain, and very pungent applications, in order to enlighten their ignorance, to rouse their stupidity, or to check their vicious career.”4 The sabbath exists not because people need a day to worship, but because clerics need to continually reassert their role in the lives of the credulous. If there were, as oversimplified Blaise Pascal quotations suggest, a god-shaped hole or vacuum in humans, there would be no need to mandate church attendance.5
But the American colonies, which were part of Great Britain, and their established churches, passed sabbath laws to do just that: coerce attendance. British colonists in Virginia passed the first in 1610:6
Every man and woman shall repair in the morning to the divine service and sermons preached upon the Sabbath day, and in the afternoon to divine service, and catechising, upon pain for the first fault to lose their provision and the allowance for the whole week following; for the second, to lose the said allowance and also be whipt; and for the third to suffer death.
This law is not about rest. It is about imposing religious conformity; about forcing people to worship and believe in a certain god. Nothing could be more fundamentally opposed to our First Amendment and founding principles than such a law. This is why the Supreme Court, although it has upheld Sunday closing laws in some instances, has struck down any religious aspects of or religious rationale for those laws. American Sunday closing laws have been around since the founding but are upheld in court for strictly secular reasons.7 A law like the fourth commandment would be struck down by American courts. So too, would the aforementioned 1610 law, especially after Virginia adopted the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom in 1785, which Thomas Jefferson authored. That marvelous text, upon which our First Amendment is based, directly refutes such laws:
That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time.8
The Supreme Court has catalogued “the evolution of Sunday Closing Laws from wholly religious sanctions to legislation concerned with the establishment of a day of community tranquility, respite and recreation, a day when the atmosphere is one of calm and relaxation rather than one of commercialism, as it is during the other six days of the week.”9 Even this rationale rings a bit false in America’s highly commercialized society. But as early as 1885, the Supreme Court recognized that Sunday closings were not about the sabbath:
Laws setting aside Sunday as a day of rest are upheld not from any right of the government to legislate for the promotion of religious observances, but from its right to protect all persons from the physical and moral debasement which comes from uninterrupted labor. Such laws have always been deemed beneficent and merciful laws, especially to the poor and dependent, to the laborers in our factories and workshops, and in the heated rooms of our cities, and their validity has been sustained by the highest courts of the states.10
As the United States Post Office expanded alongside the nation in the early nineteenth century, a debate erupted over the then regular delivery of mail on Sundays. The practice was halted, and a congressional committee issued a report on the controversy on January 19, 1829, that specifically stated that religious reasons did not and constitutionally could not motivate stopping Sunday delivery. The report explained that “some respite is required from the ordinary vocations of life, is an established principle, sanctioned by the usages of all nations, whether Christian or pagan. One day in seven has also been determined upon as the proportion of time; and, in conformity with the wishes of the great majority of citizens of this country, the first day of the week, commonly called Sunday, has been set apart to that object.”11 Thus, it was not for religious reasons that the government chose Sunday to close the postal department, but a matter of convenience.
The report continued, “The proper object of government is to protect all persons in the enjoyment of their religious as well as civil rights, and not to determine for any whether they shall esteem one day above another, or esteem all days alike holy. We are aware that a variety of sentiment exists among the good citizens of this nation on the subject of the Sabbath day; and our Government is designed for the protection of one, as much as for another.” The report then chastised the religious zealots seeking to shut down the government on Sundays:
T
he transportation of the mail on the first day of the week, it is believed, does not interfere with the rights of conscience. The petitioners for its discontinuance [that is, the Christians petitioning Congress to stop the delivery of mail on Sundays] appear to be actuated from a religious zeal, which may be commendable if confined to its proper sphere; but they assume a position better suited to an ecclesiastical than a civil institution…. Should Congress, in their legislative capacity, adopt the sentiment, it would establish the principle that the Legislature is a proper tribunal to determine what are the laws of God. It would involve a legislative decision in a religious controversy…. Among all the religious persecutions with which almost every page of modern history is stained, no victim ever suffered but for the violation of what government denominated the law of God. To prevent a similar train of evils in this country, the constitution has wisely withheld from our government the power of defending the divine law.
This ringing statement was followed by an even stronger defense of the separation of state and church:
Extensive religious combinations to effect a political object are, in the opinion of the [congressional] committee, always dangerous…. All religious despotism commences by combination and influence; and when that influence begins to operate upon the political institutions of a country, the civil power soon bends under it; and the catastrophe of other nations furnishes an awful warning of the consequence.
So despite their history, not all Sunday closing laws were adopted for religious reasons. And, as the Supreme Court has explained, any Sunday closing law would violate “the Establishment Clause if it can be demonstrated that its purpose…is to use the State’s coercive power to aid religion.”12
AS WITH THE SECOND COMMANDMENT punishing innocent children to the third and fourth generations, reading the entire fourth commandment reveals a darker side (again, which is typically omitted on Ten Commandments monuments). The fourth commandment recognizes that human beings can be property: “You shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock…” Surely any god’s ultimate collection of moral precepts should include an injunction against slavery, not a recognition of it? This is the influence Christian nationalists are unwilling to admit. Judeo-Christianity contributed significantly to our country’s long and shameful history of slavery.
Speaking of his former master, Frederick Douglass wrote, “His religion hindered him from breaking the Sabbath, but not from breaking my skin on any other day than Sunday. He had more respect for the day than for the man for whom the day was mercifully given; for while he would cut and slash my body during the week, he would on Sunday teach me the value of my soul, and the way of life and salvation by Jesus Christ.”13 Christianity, the bible, and, despite Douglass’s musing, Jesus, all affirm the legality and morality of slavery. This divine sanction influenced America’s founding. Both Christianity and our Constitution discuss slavery as an institution, the details of dealing with that institution, and did not prohibit it. In short, both implicitly recognized the viability of one human owning another.
The Hebrew bible is rife with slavery. Exodus and Leviticus lay out the laws for beating, selling, buying, and raping one’s slaves. Slaves who worshipped the Hebrew god were treated more leniently, some even being set free after six years.14 Religious apologists and some bible translations claim that the word “slave” actually means servant. Ownership distinguishes a servant from a slave. Slaves are owned, servants are not. While the bible sometimes distinguishes between servants and slaves, in Leviticus 25:39–46 for instance (“If any who are dependent on you become so impoverished that they sell themselves to you, you shall not make them serve as slaves. They shall remain with you as hired or bound laborers”), The Jewish Encyclopedia says, “The Hebrew word ‘ebed’ really means ‘slave’; but the English Bible renders it ‘servant.’”15 Hebrew slaves owned by other Israelites had a higher status—e.g., they were freed after a set time—but they were still owned, still ebed, and, therefore, still slaves. Hebrew girls were eligible to be sold as ebed—sold into sexual slavery—and were never to go free, so long as their father sold them and they “pleased” their new master:
When a man sells his daughter as a slave…If she does not please her master, who designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed.16
Just to be clear, “who designated her for himself” means the buyer can rape the young girl. The law is not concerned for the girl unless “she does not please her master,” in which case she may be returned like a defective product. If there is any lingering doubt about the sexual nature of this deal, it’s cleared up in the subsequent verses, which treat wives and female slaves as synonymous:
If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish the food, clothing, or marital rights of the first wife. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out without debt, without payment of money.17
Jesus endorses slavery too. He tells his disciples a story involving the appropriate force with which to beat a slave: “That slave who knew what his master wanted, but did not prepare himself or do what was wanted, will receive a severe beating. But the one who did not know and did what deserved a beating will receive a light beating.”18 Had Jesus been antislavery, this would have been a good time to mention it.
Saint Paul expanded his savior’s immoral teachings: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ…. Render service with enthusiasm.”19
The American justification for slavery was inextricably tied to Christianity and the bible. We’ll see more of this later (see chapters 17 and 24). For now, it is enough to know that our Constitution is not free from what Thomas Jefferson, himself a slaveowner, called that “hideous blot.” Just like the Ten Commandments, it legitimized slavery.
Article I, Section 2: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
Article I, Section 9: The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.
Article IV, Section 2: No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.
Article 1, Section 9, the clause protecting the slave trade until 1808, illustrates how the framers viewed the slavery problem. The southern states would not give up their slaves. They would sooner refuse to join the union. The founders thought the union more important for the moment, so they postponed the slavery fight. The failure to stand for the principle of universal equality led to the Civil War seventy-five years later. Madison thought the twenty-year waiting period protecting the slave trade until 1808 “more dishonorable to the National character than to say nothing about it in the Constitution.”20 But abolition was not a goal of the 1787 Constitution; uniting the colonies into one nation—the United States—was. During a particularly tense moment at the Virginia Ratifying Convention, when some were threatening secession over the possibility of abolition, Edmund Randolph delivered a speech noting the difference:
Where is the part [of the Constitution] that has a tendency to the abolition of slavery? Is it the clause which says that “the migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit shall not be prohibited by Congress prior to the year 1808”? This is an exc
eption from the power of regulating commerce, and the restriction is only to continue till 1808. Then Congress can, by the exercise of that power, prevent future importations; but does it affect the existing state of slavery? Were it right here to mention what passed in convention on the occasion, I might tell you that the southern states, even South Carolina herself, conceived this property to be secure by these words. I believe, whatever we may think here, that there was not a member of the Virginia delegation who had the smallest suspicion of the abolition of slavery.21
Randolph was right: the Constitution did not prohibit slavery. It would prohibit slavery later, but that would require a war and constitutional amendments. Our Constitution was not perfect when it was written, nor is it perfect now. The first African American Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, thought that the government the framers “devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today.”22 The framers recognized that they were fallible and were embarking on a great social experiment. The framers knew the document would be flawed—the inevitable result of political compromises—and would require alteration over time, so they provided procedures for future changes. Americans tend to forget that the amendments they so often cite actually amended the Constitution. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments ended slavery as an institution, while slavery’s supporters continued to cite the holy, unalterable, infallible word of god.
THE SABBATH COMMANDMENT ITSELF is a reminder to believers that they are, as Paul wrote, owned, not free. The sabbath is not meant for people to rest; it is to remind them whom they serve. The fourth commandment in the third set of Ten Commandments (see pages 164–165), very like the first, reminds readers that they were once slaves to an earthly master and are now slaves to a more powerful one: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.”23 Ownership simply transferred from Pharaoh to Yahweh.
The Founding Myth Page 23