Category Archives: Religious Liberty

The Ten Commandments

 A  Judge recently struck down a Texas law, modeled after one in Oklahoma that was also ruled unconstitutional, requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

This effort surfaces every few years, as Christian Nationalists try to use government buildings to send a message that only certain people are “real Americans.” Given the periodic eruption of this effort, I thought I’d just share what I’ve previously posted about these efforts–and why they are blatantly inconsistent with the Bill of Rights.

Way back in 1997, I wrote:

If I believed passionately that everyone would be better off for reading the Ten Commandments, what would I do? 

I would probably start by distributing leaflets containing the Ten Commandments everywhere I could–on street corners, at the grocery store, at sports and entertainment events. I might ask local churches and individuals to erect replicas of the Ten Commandments on their lawns or porches.

I would ask local newspapers to reproduce them; if the papers would not do so as a contribution, I would try to raise the money to buy a paid advertisement, which would stress the importance of the Commandments to the development of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

I would use the Internet to find others who agreed with me on the importance of widespread distribution, and would engage them in my project. Or I might sell tee shirts printed with the Commandments if I could afford that or could raise the money. 

I would find a group of young people to form a Ten Commandments Club, to spread the word. Or I might hold a rally, and bring in people to speak about the importance of the Ten Commandments in their lives.

And of course, I would do my very best to live up to the principles of the Commandments and other great religious precepts.  (“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” comes to mind; there are many others.)

Every single one of these methods for promoting the Ten Commandments and righteous behavior is protected by the Free Exercise Clause.

If, however, all I really want is for my government to send a message that my particular beliefs are the proper ones, I won’t bother with any of these time-consuming activities. I will petition my local county officials to post the Commandments so that everyone visiting a public building will know who really belongs in this country and who doesn’t. It will be important that my document appear on government-owned buildings, so it will be very clear what my government approves–and by implication, what (and who) it doesn’t.

Unfortunately for those who wish to be more equal than others, the First Amendment forbids government from issuing such endorsements, just as it would forbid the passage of laws requiring the posting of the Bill of Rights in all churches. The First Amendment protects our right to advocate in the public square, but it forbids us to enlist the help of the 800 pound gorilla– the public sector.

And about that “sacred” text? In 2024, I wrote,

Most of us have seen the news that Louisiana now requires posting the Ten Commandments in that state’s schoolrooms. What I hadn’t seen reported–until I read a fascinating article from Salon–is that the version to be posted comes not from the Bible, but from Hollywood. Rather than go to any of the biblical texts, Louisiana opted for Cecil B. DeMille’s, taking the version to be posted from “The Ten Commandments.”

Well, Christian Nationalists aren’t known for consulting original texts. Or for honesty.

The cited article quoted a scholar who pointed out that The Ten Commandments recounted in Exodus 34 are nothing like the list with which most people are familiar. It starts off: “Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land where you are going, or they will be a snare among you.”

As he noted, the version passed by the State Senate doesn’t appear in any Bible. It is a “highly Christianized version” with “Judaic elements removed.”

As I concluded in that post, Christian Nationalism has two goals: to signal to the MAGA base that they are culture warriors fighting “leftism, Marxism, woke-ism, state-sponsored atheism or whatever else scares conservative white Americans;” and as a distraction from Republican policy failures. It’s notable that US News recently ranked Louisiana dead last among all 50 states, and 47th in education.

The Christian Nationalist’s Ten Commandments agenda stands for the proposition that America is a Christian nation, and Christians (of the right variety) should control every facet of it.

It’s hard to get more unAmerican than that.

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The Choice Really is Simple

Every day, in every conceivable way, the Trump administration is waging war against equality–rooting out that hated effort to replace tribalism with acceptance of diversity and difference. Media outlets report on “DEI” assaults daily; the mediocre (and worse) White males of the administration are busy scrubbing government websites of evidence of the accomplishments of women, gay people and non-Whites and issuing discriminatory edicts. It is impossible for any fair-minded observer to miss the ferocity of their White “Christian” Nationalist effort to roll back any movement toward civic equality.

MAGA’s hatred of “others” recently manifested itself in an executive order barring transgender people from the military. As a soldier who is a self-described Evangelical described that order in an op-ed for the New York Times,“The order may be legally sound, but it is neither moral nor ethical. I believe that it is my duty as an officer to dissent when faced with such an order.”

I may not be the sort of person you would expect to oppose a ban on transgender troops. I am a conservative evangelical Christian and a Republican. Though I have deep compassion for people who feel they are in the wrong body, I do not think that transitioning — as opposed to learning to love and accept the body God gave you — is the right thing to do in that predicament. But my views are irrelevant to the issue of transgender troops.

This soldier understands–as so many do not–a foundational principle of American democratic governance: individuals have the liberty to believe as we choose, but no right to impose those beliefs on our fellow citizens. 

The executive order barring transgender troops is a legal command that provides cover for bigotry. It delivers hate in the guise of a national security issue, dressed up in medicalized language.

The meek compliance of military leadership with the ban sends a chilling message to all service members — namely, that our ranks are open only to those who fit a specific ideological mold, regardless of their ability to serve. Equally concerning is the message that military compliance sends to policymakers. If officers accept this kind of unethical order, where does it end? I fear that the White House will ask members of the military to perform increasingly loathsome tasks.

And indeed, since publication of this op-ed, the military has been asked to perform other loathsome tasks–and it has obeyed, as citizens of LA and Washington, DC, can attest. This soldier resigned rather than allow his continued participation to serve as implied concurrence with a policy he found morally reprehensible. As he concluded:

I am just one officer in a large military organization. I do not expect my resignation to persuade the president or the secretary of defense to reconsider the policy. I do hope, however, that my actions will prompt some reflection among military leaders about what it would take for them to disobey a lawful but unethical order. Most important, when my children grow up and look back at this moment in history, I want them to see an example of someone who chose the harder right over the easier wrong.

And there we have it. That–in a nutshell–is what each of us must decide, and sooner rather than later: where we draw the line between resistance and accommodation. Between the American Idea and “blood and soil” fascism.

It’s depressing to see how many people are willing to “go along to get along.” History will not be kind to them.

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Out Of The Closet

Gay folks came out of the closet several years ago. These days, it’s “Christian” Nationalism that is emerging, “out and proud.” A number of “Christian” congregations (note quotation marks) have decided to ignore that “woke” stuff in the Sermon on the Mount–not to mention biblical admonitions about widows, orphans and strangers–and have chosen to refashion religion as political ideology.

I’ve previously written about the book published in 2023 by Tim Alberta, titled “The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory,” in which Alberta–himself a very devout Evangelical–shared his horrified observations of that transformation, and the thousands of Evangelical churches that have essentially jettisoned theology for the political ideology of the MAGA movement. 

Here in my city of Indianapolis, just a couple of weeks ago, the Sure Foundation Baptist Church recently advocated for the death penalty for LGBTQ+ individuals. The pastor, Stephen Falco, suggested they should kill themselves. (He made these remarks during a “Men’s Preaching Night,” and his “sermon” was streamed online.) 

Talking Points Memo recently reported on an Idaho church that has moved to Washington, D.C., where it “ministers” to MAGA movers and shakers like Pete Hegseth and assorted Republican operatives. Pastor Jared Longshore opened the initial service by declaring that “The option before you is quite plain. It is Christ or chaos, Christ or destruction.”

According to the reporter who wrote the piece, the church in D.C. is part of a growing, international network of churches that someone named Doug Wilson founded. It is called the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC).

I attended what the CREC called the “planting” of a D.C. church on Sunday after spending months growing increasingly fascinated with Wilson and his influence on the New Rightthat is ascendant in Trump’s Washington. America is full of people with big, apocalyptic visions and hardline views on how the country can redeem itself. But Wilson is a rare bird: along with the CREC, he’s built a small, theocratic empire in Moscow, Idaho, far away from D.C. And yet, through his own sermons, those of affiliated pastors like Longshore, and a publishing house, Christ Kirk (also known as Christ Church) has managed to bridge the geographic divide and gain a following among right-wingers across the country. It’s spawned what some call the “Moscow Mood” — a postmillennialist view that the Christian right should employ a new level of aggression in fighting to dominate the culture, and use the government to enact policies in accordance with its religious teachings…

Planting a church in the nation’s Capitol follows naturally from the organization’s vision: just as a member must incorporate their religious belief into every aspect of their personal life, so too must they fight for the group’s favored ideas in politics and culture: banning homosexuality, embracing more patriarchal family structures, ending abortion, and removing female soldiers from combat roles. In a phone interview after the sermon, Longshore told TPM that he wants a Christian government in the most direct sense: all government officials must “acknowledge that Christ is Lord and then actually listen to what he is telling them to do.” That would include the need to “execute the wrath of God against the wrongdoer,” he said. 

Members of this church–like so many of those described by Alberta– are self-described “warriors” of the Christian right. They believe they are fighting a war against modern America. Those members see themselves, as the author of the report notes, as “underdogs, besieged on all sides by a secularism that’s violent and bent on destroying the remnants of a Christian America that they’re trying to revive.” That victimization mentality has persisted, even while the influence of the Christian right as grown. (The author lists the end of Roe, the hard-right, Christian SCOTUS majority, and rising church attendance among young men.) They believe they exist within what Longshore, in his sermon, described as “a lapsed nation, a fallen nation, a nation that was Christian to the core, nearly to a man when it was founded.” (Accurate history wasn’t his strong suit.)

 In a conversation after the sermon, Longshore told TPM’s reporter that the problem he sees is the “emphasis on democracy.” Democracy, he said, leads to falsity: people start “trusting the mind of man to determine how things should go,” while “ultimately God is the one who has spoken.”

And of course, we know who speaks for God…

When I encounter “religious” people so devoid of anything remotely resembling loving-kindness or humility, I always think of that quote by Anne Lamott: “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

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What Dobbs Hath Wrought…

Lots of people cheered when our rogue Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, and began what has turned out to be a flight from constitutional principles–especially the principle that government has an obligation to protect individual liberty and autonomy.

Faux Christians celebrated the obvious fact that the decision was a win for their particular religious beliefs. Those who’d piously pretended to care about religious liberty were delighted when the Court ignored the liberties of adherents of religions that differ on the issue. (It’s been clear for quite a while that the “liberty” these Christian warriors want to advance is the liberty to impose their own beliefs on others.)

Men (and some women) whose worldviews are paternalistic celebrated the Court’s declaration that women would no longer be permitted to govern themselves. After all, those sweet little females were never meant to have self-determination; pesonal autonomy is for men. (Mostly straight and White…)

Dobbs was also welcomed by the legions of authoritarians who believe–in contrast to the nation’s founders–that  government should make life decisions for its citizen/subjects, rather than protecting their right to believe and live as they see fit.

Dobbs was handed down in 2022, so enough time has passed to see whether all that celebrating was justified, or whether the desired results have failed to materialize. A recent essay in the Guardian assessed that “progress.”

Here’s the lede:

Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the US supreme court case that rescinded the constitutional right to abortion, is failing on its own terms. Since the ruling, in June 2022, the number of abortions in the US has risen. Support for reproductive rights is on the upswing. And the rate of voluntary sterilization among young women – a repudiation of Trumpian pronatalism, if a desperate one – jumped abruptly after Dobbs, and there’s no reason to believe it will drop off.

Also rising at an alarming clip are preventable maternal deaths and criminal prosecutions of pregnant people.

The Guttmacher Institute reports that abortions rose 1.5% between 2023 and 2024, on top of a 11.1% increase in the first year after Dobbs. That’s probably a significant undercount, since Guttmacher reports only “clinician-provided abortions”, either surgical or medical (using abortion pills), and doesn’t estimate how many abortions are happening outside the formal healthcare system. As we know, numerous women are obtaining abortion medications directly from suppliers or from the multiple feminist underground networks that have been organized in the wake of the decision.

The essay notes that the 21 state legislatures that, like my own state of Indiana, have imposed total or near-total bans have failed to do anything that might give doctors legal leeway to save the health and lives of pregnant women in medical distress. Indeed, rather than trying to save lives, several are prosecuting pregnant women who handle those emergencies on their own.

The fact that we have seen more abortions, not fewer ones (not to mention increases in pro-abortion public opinion and contraception) has infuriated the anti-abortion activists, who are searching for stronger disincentives. They seem to have settled on more punishment–and have no apparent problem with more deaths among the already born. (Evidently, the death of pregnant women is an unfortunate–but acceptable– consequence of saving the “pre-born.”)

The Trump administration and MAGA want to see more babies. (Fewer immigrants, more “real American” babies…). But if one goal of banning abortion was to produce more of those babies, that’s clearly not working.

Public health researchers saw “an abrupt increase in permanent contraception procedures” – sterilization – following Dobbs among adults in their prime reproductive years, ages 18 to 30. Unsurprisingly, the increase in procedures for women (tubal ligations) was twice that for men (vasectomies).

As the essayist notes, the carrots haven’t been appetizing enough, and the sticks not effective enough, so Red-state legislators “are bringing out the AR-15s.” Republican lawmakers in at least 10 states have introduced bills defining abortion as homicide, and criminalizing both the provider and the patient. The bills are based on “fetal personhood” – the strategy of conferring full legal rights to a fetus from conception. By 2024, 39 states had fetal homicide laws.

While they work toward criminalizing the ending of a pregnancy, anti-abortion lawmakers and prosecutors are making creative use of existing law to punish miscarriages.

A 31-year-old South Carolina woman who miscarried and disposed of the tissue in the trash was arrested for “desecration of human remains”, a crime carrying a 10-year sentence. In March, a woman found bleeding outside her Georgia apartment after a miscarriage was jailed for “concealing the death of another person” and “abandonment of a dead body” for placing the remains in the bin. 

Rational people have always known this movement isn’t “pro-life.” It’s anti-woman.

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It’s All About Bigotry

When Trump was elected in 2016, I was regularly reprimanded for insisting that MAGA was all about racism. People kinder than me (and that’s a lot of people) wanted to see MAGA voters as folks voting pocketbook issues, not as a re-emergence of the Confederacy or KKK.

The political science research that just keeps coming, however, supports my much less polite analysis. 

Let’s face it: we are fighting a new version of the Civil War. This time, the people who stand to benefit most from defending  bigotry aren’t the owners of plantations–they are the plutocrats and grifters dismantling the American system for profit–but like those plantation owners, our contemporary would-be overlords are using racism to enlist the support of a population desperate to believe that their religion and/or skin color makes them superior.

The evidence is overwhelming. There are the efforts to erase that hated DEI, the constant war on “woke-ism,” and the very unsubtle movement to substitute nationalist mythology for accurate history.

A recent example: An administration that has hollowed out the ranks of rangers who tend our national parks is now insisting that those who remain scrub park gift shops of “corrosive ideology.”

Remaining staff members have been ordered to report the presence of any retail item that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living” or that includes in its description “matters unrelated to beauty, abundance or grandeur.” (It will be interesting to see how park leaders follow the administration’s directive in parks established to pursue an individual mission–for example, parks created to inform the public about the civil war, Indigenous history, slavery or other topics the Trump administration considers “defamatory” of historical Americans.) 

Hardly less obvious is the scorn and contempt constantly heaped by MAGA on urban America. As Paul Krugman has recently–and accurately–noted, these ugly assaults on the nation’s cities are both vile and dishonest–and all about bigotry. What really bothers MAGA about urban life is the idea that non-white people are exercising political power.

After Mamdani won New York’s Democratic primary, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declared that New York is about to turn into “Caracas on the Hudson.” As Krugman observed,

Bessent isn’t really deeply worried about Mamdani’s economic ideas. But he feels free, maybe even obliged, to slander a foreign-born Muslim with language he would never use about a white Christian politician, even if that politician were (like some of his colleagues in the Trump administration) a total crackpot.

Krugman points to the resurgence of raw racism emanating from the Trump administration. That racism is apparent in the cuts at the National Institutes of Health, which are

so tilted against racial minorities that a federal judge — one appointed by Ronald Reagan! — declared he’d never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. You can see it in the renaming of military bases after Confederate generals — that is, traitors who fought for slavery. You can even see it in a change in the military’s shaving policy that is clearly custom-designed to drive Black men — who account for around a quarter of the Army’s new recruits — out of the service.

One problem with bigotry is that it feeds on itself. The definition of “my tribe” contracts. We saw it in Nazi Germany, where–as Martin Niemoller famously wrote, eventually there is no one left to “speak out for me.” As Krugman writes,

Now, maybe you imagine that you yourself won’t suffer from this new reign of bigotry and imagine that everyone you care about is similarly safe. But if that’s what you think, you’re likely to face a rude awakening.

I personally don’t have any illusions of safety. Yes, I’m a native-born white citizen. But my wife and her family are Black, and some of my friends and relatives are foreign-born U.S. citizens.

Furthermore, I’m Jewish, and anyone who knows their history realizes that whenever right-wing bigotry is on the ascendant, we’re always next in line. Are there really people out there naïve enough to believe MAGA’s claims to be against antisemitism, who can’t see the transparent cynicism and dishonesty?

The fact is that the Trump administration already contains a number of figures with strong ties to antisemitic extremists. The Great Replacement Theory, which has de facto become part of MAGA’s ideology, doesn’t just say that there’s a conspiracy to replace whites with people of color; it says that it’s a Jewish conspiracy.

There really is no “middle ground” between White Christian Nationalism and the American Idea.  Which of those will prevail is what this iteration of the Civil War is all about.

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