This strategy allows those in power a pretense to eliminate anyone at any time, because they are surely guilty of something. Judeo-Christianity, and particularly Catholicism with its confession and priestly absolution, relies on thoughtcrime to ensure perpetual guilt. Then the guilty—everyone—must turn to the Church for forgiveness and absolution.
The coveting prohibition is fundamentally opposed to the Constitution and antithetical to our criminal laws. The only influence it may have had is as an exemplar of how laws should not be written. The founders strove to protect the freedom of thought. In his 1802 letter that memorialized the “wall of separation between Church & State,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions.”54 The Supreme Court has explicitly ruled that “the First Amendment protects against the prosecution of thought crime.”55 No truly civilized society will punish for thoughts alone.56 This is perhaps the precept at the heart of the American experiment: our thoughts are free.
The freedom of thought is the only absolute right protected under our Constitution. Every other right is limited in some respect. You have free speech, but can’t threaten others. The press is free, but the media can’t publish willful lies that destroy someone’s reputation. We have the freedom of assembly, but we cannot trespass on someone’s property to exercise that right. There may be a right to bear arms, but we can’t take those guns on planes or into courthouses. Even the free exercise of religion is limited. Every freedom we have is limited, except for the freedom of thought.
Our country has not always fulfilled this ideal, particularly during times of war and national fear. Amid the Red Scare of the 1950s, the Supreme Court upheld an anti-communist oath that labor unions forced on their leaders. In his magnificent partial dissent, Justice Robert Jackson noted that, if uniformity of thought were valid and enforceable, our country could not have revolted against Great Britain: “The idea that a Constitution should protect individual nonconformity is essentially American…our Constitution excludes…governments from the realm of opinions and ideas, beliefs and doubts, heresy and orthodoxy, political, religious or scientific.”57 Using the language of religion, Jackson warned of the “evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds—that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous…. All ideological struggles, religious or political, are primarily battles for dominance over the minds of people.”58 In short, American principles rebel against this fundamental religious principle.
In another dissent penned twenty years earlier, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.”59
The United States may not always live up to the ideal, but it is written into our Constitution. Justice Jackson again: “Our Constitution relies on our electorate’s complete ideological freedom to nourish independent and responsible intelligence and preserve our democracy from that submissiveness, timidity and herd-mindedness of the masses which would foster a tyranny of mediocrity. The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it.”60 Judeo-Christianity attempts just such a claim; I refer you again to Catholic Canon law, “a religious submission of the intellect and will.”61
The particular thought the tenth commandment prohibits—covetousness—is itself a problem for the Christian nationalist. Even Americans with no historical or legal training should recognize that coveting is the basis of American capitalism and our consumer society. Both would fail without the desire to get what we don’t have. Coveting created America. Without it, no European settlers would have come to America. Coveting is human. This particular Judeo-Christian prohibition is both anti-American and anti-human.
22
The Ten Commandments: A Religious, Not a Moral Code
“Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
— Steven Weinberg, speech, Conference on Cosmic Design, Washington, DC, 19991
“As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-Christian tradition praised as the source of our concern for human rights. In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense. They were notorious not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression but for enthusiastic justifications of slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, genocide.”
— Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “The Opening of the American Mind,” New York Times, 19892
Nearly all of the Ten Commandments conflict with America’s ideals in one way or another. America values the freedom of worship, expression, and thought, while the Ten Commandments attempt to destroy each. America has abandoned or is still trying to escape the parts of the Ten Commandments that can rightly be said to have influenced it: legalized slavery, codified sexism and suppression of the sexual impulse, and inequality among races and religions under the law. These are not the influences the Christian nationalists wish to claim, but they are all that history justifies. The American ideal is equality, though it is often unmet and progress can be slow. Judeo-Christianity’s ideal is elitism—being part of a favored class singled out for special treatment.
The Christian nationalist might still argue that, although the Ten Commandments did not specifically influence the founding, the morality featured in those commandments did.3 Or they may claim that the morality implicit in our nation’s foundations is impossible without religion and the Ten Commandments. Given the “morality” of the commandments the previous chapters exposed, this argument should be a nonstarter; but perhaps the Christian nationalist is tempted by its vagueness. The alleged moral and ethical superiority of the Ten Commandments is important to the Christian Nation myth and, like the myth, is inaccurate. The Ten Commandments are not a moral code; they are a religious code. That distinction, often lost, is crucial. A moral code is a set of principles that help us analyze and reach moral solutions in the innumerable dilemmas life presents. A religious code is a set of rules based on divine authority—its only “morality” is to obey, to follow. Those who obey are treated favorably; others are killed, excommunicated, banished, or otherwise removed from favored status. Ignatius Loyola stated this quite plainly for the followers of his monkish order. Virtue was to be secondary to obedience, and the intellect—one’s understanding—ought to be sacrificed to god: “Obedience is nothing less than a holocaust…. By obedience one puts aside all that one is, one dispossesses oneself of all that one has, in order to be possessed and governed” by god through his superiors in the order.4 At a more basic level, the confusion arises, particularly in America, because many people assume that religion and morality are the same thing.
The idea that religion is the source of morality is a fallacious assumption that underlies the claim that religion and the Decalogue influenced American foundations. Religion gets its morality from us, not the other way around.
One need only look to the Ten Commandments monuments that dot our public lands to see that they are not moral, to see that we give religion its morality. Humans have edited and abridged these monuments to “improve” the Word of God, to make it more moral. If you live in Denver or Austin, or near another Ten Commandments monument on public land, go and examine it. See if the full text of each commandment is carved into the stone. See if slavery is recognized, if women are considered chattel, and if the supposed pinnacle of morality punishes innocent children to the third and fourth generations. If the Ten Commandments were truly moral, there would be no need to edit th
ese displays to fit today’s standards. Morality evolves. These edited monuments undercut the very claim they were set up to make. They are monuments to a lie.
The Ten Commandments Monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds in Austin, Texas.
FOR THE PERSON WHO BELIEVES A GOD IS ON HIS SIDE, not only is everything possible, but everything is also justifiable. Dostoevsky famously observed that “if God does not exist, everything is permitted.”5 But that’s backwards. Everything is permitted if a god commands it: subjugating women, prohibiting two consenting adults from happily marrying, or flying planeloads of innocent people into buildings full of innocent people.
Summoning the intellectual honesty and fortitude to distinguish between religion and morality is difficult for many, particularly those who have been told all their lives that religion is morality. The point can be made if we ask ourselves—and honestly answer—a few simple questions: what would you do if one of your family members asked you to go to a different religion’s church or temple? What would you do if your child discussed her lack of religion with you, attempting to convince you she was right? More than one-third of the younger generation is nonreligious6 and 21 percent are atheist or agnostic,7 and those numbers are increasing, so there is a good possibility this will happen to some readers. What would you do if your best friend asked you to come to mass or the high holidays or morning prayers just so you could better understand their beliefs?
What would you do?
Probably not kill them. If you have any moral sense, you would not even consider murdering that family member, child, or friend. The mere hint that you might kill a friend or family member for exploring other beliefs ought to be viscerally repugnant.
Yet the bible commands you to kill anyone who would “entice” you to worship any god other than the Judeo-Christian god—especially your family members.8 There is no worming out of this order. No matter who it is, you must kill them, “even if it is your brother, your father’s son or your mother’s son, or your own son or daughter, or the wife you embrace, or your most intimate friend.”9 The death sentence is inflexible: “You must not yield to or heed any such persons. Show them no pity or compassion and do not shield them. But you shall surely kill them.”10 More grotesquely still, “your own hand shall be first against them to execute them.”11
This is one of Judeo-Christianity’s laws. That we find it abhorrent proves the point: your moral judgment is your own. It is independent from the bible and religion. If religion or the bible dictated our morality, we would not have the moral judgment to condemn this command as murder. If religion or the bible dictated your morality, the commandment to kill your family and friends who explore other faiths would be your morality. But it is not. Most believers are more moral than their god. Most disagree with the Judeo-Christian principles that inform their god’s law. This revelation should alarm us because it means that preachers claiming to know god’s moral law are simply giving their personal moral judgment a divine sanction. They ascribe their morality to a supernatural being instead of to themselves. They are claiming that their judgment is divine.
The biblical authors did the same. Biblical morality is archaic because it reflects the primitive morality of its authors, who wrote at a time when life was brutal and short. Life was cheap, and so was their morality. There was no perfect god writing down laws with moral deficits so obvious that today’s second-graders could improve them. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bible passages that conflict with modern moral judgment. Passages advocating genocide, murder, rape, slavery, subjugation of women and races—we’ve seen many in these last few chapters.12 That enlightened citizens ignore these passages shows that their morality is independent of religion. The founding fathers were more civilized than the bible’s authors, with much higher moral standards, but even they fell short of today’s standards.
AN HONEST EXAMINATION OF BIBLICAL FAMILY VALUES can also help illuminate the distinction between religion and morality. The Hebrew bible shows a distinct lack of familial warmth. The first half of the first book, Genesis, contains, among other things, fratricide,13 polygamy,14 incest,15 pimping one’s wife to a king,16 and a father offering his daughters up to gang rape and then later impregnating them himself.17
“Christian family values” are little better. During the “great commission”—when Jesus commands his apostles to spread his word—he stressed the destruction of the family:
I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.18
Luke confirms the message.19 This alone casts suspicion on Christianity’s value to healthy families. Jesus did not want to share his followers with their families. Divided loyalty weakened his influence. In one tale from the Book of Matthew, Jesus would not even allow a follower to attend his father’s funeral, saying “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”20 Jesus was no exemplar of family values himself. He rudely chastised and spurned his mom,21 thought his dad was a god, never married, never had children, seems to have ignored his brothers and sisters,22 and, if he practiced what his church preaches, remained a virgin until his death.23
Jesus died a victim of Judeo-Christianity’s filicidal tendencies. His alleged father has him tortured and murdered by the state out of some perverse love: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son.”24 The first epistle of John, 1 John 4:7–21, exalts this sacrifice and betrays the writer’s ignorance of the true meaning of love, although he uses the word nearly thirty times in the passage. In his attempt to explain that which he does not know, he bastardizes love into an exaltation of child sacrifice:
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.
The rest of the passage is just as mind-numbing and meaningless. It is a string of words that sound powerful together but mean nothing (“deepities,” as philosopher Daniel Dennett calls them).25 Nonsense like this cheapens real love.
Love does not permit child sacrifice; yet it is common in the bible. God demands that Abraham murder his son Isaac, 26 and the Israelite general Jephthah’s battle plan to defeat the Ammonites consisted of sacrificing his daughter (see page 139).27 Interestingly, Yahweh saves Isaac, Abraham’s only child and a boy, yet requires Jephthah to sacrifice his only child, a girl, unnamed as so many female characters are (including Noah’s wife and the wives of his three sons, even though, according to the bible, they must be mothers to the whole human race). This contrast offers further insight into the value of women in the Judeo-Christian family.
In the United States today, religiously motivated child murder is not a mainstream Christian family value; it has died out, but not altogether. In fact, devout parents can still get away with child murder in some states. In Virginia, West Virginia, Iowa, Ohio, Mississippi, Arkansas, Washington, and Idaho, laws for negligent homicide, manslaughter, and capital murder have religious exemptions.28 This means that if a child is sick the parent can pray instead of seeking real help. Insulin might save the diabetic child, but parents can substitute prayer. They can pray until their child dies. And not suffer any consequences. Many other states, nearly forty, have religious exemptions to child abuse and neglect laws. These faith-healing exemptions are new; most date only to the mid-1970s.29 American common law (law made in the courts through precedent
in the absence of explicit legislation or statutes) rejected the attempts to claim religion as a defense for killing one’s child.30
Religions are taking advantage of these exemptions. There are cemeteries in Idaho filled with children born to a mother and father who consider themselves “Followers of Christ,” a sect that, like Christian Scientists, considers “professional medicine an engine of the devil.”31 Over about a decade, children born to parents in the Followers of Christ had an infant mortality rate that was ten times greater than that of Idaho as a whole.32 Advocates from groups such as Child Healthcare Is a Legal Duty estimate that nearly 200 children have died since states began passing these exemptions in the 1970s. 33 Faith healing? Faith does not heal these children—it kills them. The sheriff in one Idaho county who’s been working for years to overturn this exemption pointed out that Idaho law treats livestock better than children: “If it was cattle being treated like this, no medical care, in distress, if you saw that from the street, we’d have a search warrant and we’d be kicking down doors.”34 Despite immense and mounting pressure, Republicans in the Idaho legislature refused to repeal this religious exemption every time it has been proposed. Idaho aside, states have been slowly but surely repealing these murderous exemptions.
The Founding Myth Page 28