I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Or maybe both.
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 this 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.”
Actually, that shouldn’t be a surprise–Christian nationalists aren’t known for consulting original texts. Or for honesty.
The article is lengthy–and fascinating. It quotes several biblical scholars who have read–and engaged with–the biblical versions. As one scholar says,
The Ten Commandments recounted in Exodus 34 are nothing like the list of crimes most people know. 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 notes, this version is definitely “not the list of ten commandments which most people are familiar with, but it is the only list in Exodus which is actually called ‘the ten commandments.’” (The article notes that similar legislation passed by the Texas State Senate also uses a version that doesn’t appear in any Bible– a “highly Christianized version” with “Judaic elements removed.”)
The multitude of versions and their disputed authenticity leads to what the author calls the “vexing problem of which form of the Ten Commandments should be forced onto schoolchildren….Wikipedia even offers a chart showing how eight different faith traditions group and number the commandments.” No wonder our MAGA lawmakers opted for the Hollywood version, wildly inaccurate as “The Ten Commandments” was both historically and textually.
Well, if you are going to “edit” the presumed word of God, you might as well make your version support your political ambitions..
Louisiana’s Ten Commandments lawsuit actually disproves the Christian nationalist claim that the Ten Commandments are the basis of America’s moral foundation. One need only compare the text that will go on classroom walls with the text of the Bible. Louisiana lawmakers edited and abridged the biblical commandments to “improve” the Word of God, to make them more moral. Gone is the reference to a jealous God punishing innocent children for the crimes of their parents (Exodus 20:5); the crime of exercising their right to freely worship. Lawmakers used our modern morality to edit the word of their God. Louisiana’s heavily edited commandments undercut the very claim they are supposedly making.
There is, of course, a wide discrepancy between genuine Christianity and Christian Nationalism, as clergy friends of mine keep reminding me. The latter is a thinly-veiled political movement, and it bears less and less similarity to religious belief. As the article notes,
If this were an intellectual debate, we could stop here. But it’s politics, which is full of challenging absurdities. Trump was only a distant spectator to the Louisiana bill, but he’s both a symptom and a super-spreader of the underlying moral abyss. Eight years ago, many evangelical Christians had their doubts about Trump. His running mate, Mike Pence, clearly helped calm, as did “apostle” Lance Wallnau, whose book “God’s Chaos Candidate” compared Trump to the Persian King Cyrus, a “heathen” instrument of God’s will. But now Trump openly compares himself to Jesus and his followers eat it up, while his flagrant violations of the Ten Commandments are shrugged off, at best. Pastors who preach on the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus told his followers to “turn the other cheek,” are accused of pushing “liberal talking points.”
In short, Trump has helped catalyze a profound disorientation of Christianity, deep into gaslight territory. By comparison, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry is just a garden-variety Republican liar. “If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver,” he said on signing the bill. It’s an obviously illogical claim — you could also start by not nominating a convicted criminal for president — that’s also ludicrous and false in several different ways.
One sociologist is quoted as explaining that 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 no. 47 in education.
As the article accurately concludes, the Christian nationalist 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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