Thou Shalt Not Establish a Theocracy

Chris O'Carroll

My personal preference would have been for Rosa Parks, but what were the odds of that design being approved? I should be grateful they didn’t choose Bear Bryant, since I’m pretty sure the state has a warmer spot in its collective heart for University of Alabama football than for the Montgomery bus boycott.

Alabama could have opted for a cotton boll, taking a botanical cue from Georgia’s peach and Mississippi’s magnolia. But given the, how shall I say, troublesome labor history associated with the state’s signature crop, that image would have been nearly as inflammatory as a burning cross, the Confederate Stars and Bars, or George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. Also, “Peach State” and “Magnolia State” are traditional nicknames associated with the states that flank Helen Keller’s birthplace to the east and west. Alabama does not style itself the “Cotton State.” Nor the “Camelia State,” although that was my guess before I looked it up. Not even the “Crimson Tide State,” which would probably score a lot of votes if the question were put to a statewide plebiscite. The preferred nickname is “Yellowhammer State.” The yellowhammer (which sounds like the name of a B-list comic-book crime fighter) is the state bird, and “Yellowhammers” was the affectionate slang term used by other Confederate soldiers to denote troops from Alabama.

For a while there, I was worried that the state might hammer out a design featuring Ten Commandments tablets and the deranged Decalogue demagogue Roy Moore. As it turns out, though, some things are so stupid that even the Alabama state government won’t support them. Not enough things, but some.

Moore, as you probably know, is the (now suspended) chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, who has become a hero of the Christian Right by using his office for the last couple of years as a bully pulpit from which to take God’s name in vain, denouncing as enemies of the Lord all who take issue with his publicity-seeking religious and political antics. In a display of truculent godliness, Moore had a two-and-a-half-ton Ten Commandments monument installed in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building. Because nothing says reverence for the God of Moses quite like a humongous graven image. The shallower the fundamentalism, the more profound the obliviousness to irony.

People who equate the will of God with their own cultural and political preferences are usually good for a laugh. (As long as they’re not, you know, running the country or anything.) True to form, Moore has made some hilariously grandiose and idiotic statements in support of his anti-constitutional pet project. “This case,” he has declared, “is not about a monument, it’s not about politics or religion, it’s about the acknowledgement of God.” That statement is not about faulty logic, it’s about saying something that makes no damn sense. Not about religion, about acknowledging God - you’ve gotta love that kind of reasoning. It’s not about alcohol abuse, it’s about binge drinking. It’s not about domestic violence, it’s about beating my wife.

When a U.S. district judge reached the obvious conclusion that Moore’s idol, prominently displayed in a government building, stood in violation of the First Amendment ban on establishment of religion, the self-appointed tribune of God’s will refused to comply with the federal court’s ruling against the monument. The eight associate justices of the Alabama Supreme Court unanimously overruled him and instructed state workers to remove the monument in compliance with the higher court’s order.

The big stone now sits in storage, Moore is suspended from his position on the court, and Alabama’s attorney general, himself such a foe of all things liberal and secular that George W. Bush has nominated him to the federal judiciary, is watching his support from the Holy War wing of the Republican Party evaporate as former soul mates revile him for his failure to stand with Moore’s crusade. Faux-Christian kookiness, in all its America-hating glory, doesn’t get much more entertaining than this.

“We must acknowledge God,” the Prophet Roy has said in defense of his decision to spirit his gigantic stone icon into the Judicial Building in the dead of night, and to keep it there in defiance of mere earthly law. In those four words we hear the Christian Right’s loathing of American values as clearly as we hear it in Jerry Falwell’s endorsement of Osama bin Laden’s view that Americans are a godless people who got what they had coming on September 11, 2001.

Moore and the fanatics of a feather with whom he flocks together are setting themselves up in opposition to a humble but glorious truth: In the United States, there is no “we must” where religious belief is concerned. There may be an “I must” dictated by my individual conscience, and a “you must” dictated by yours. But the only “we must” backed up by the power of the government is the constitutional imperative that we must leave each other unmolested in matters of faith.

You may, if you feel so inclined, ring my doorbell to evangelize me on behalf of your religion. You may rail against me as an apostate and preach on the street corner or over the airwaves that I and all who believe like me are going to Hell. I am equally free to denounce or ridicule your doctrines as the spirit moves me. Each of us may expend all our treasure and our energy to persuade our fellow citizens of the shining correctness of the faith that we embrace and the stygian wrongness of all those that we reject. But we are not at liberty to move from attempts at persuasion to attempts at coercion.

If we believe that abortions and blood transfusions are sinful, then we cannot be required to undergo those medical procedures, but we may not forbid them to others who do not share our beliefs. If God has told us not to drink alcohol, then we are free to live our lives as teetotalers, but we may not outlaw those sects that use wine in their rituals. And if the religion we practice happens to be the same one practiced by the majority of our neighbors, we may not use our superior numbers to pass laws abridging the liberty of minority faiths, nor requiring non-adherents to support our church.

A town with a Christian majority cannot pass zoning laws to ban the construction of mosques and synagogues. A city council dominated by Catholics cannot appropriate public money to erect a statue of the pope. And a judge who regards the Bible as the Word of God has no authority - no matter how many fellow citizens may share his views - to stake out space in his courthouse for a monument that implicitly establishes biblical doctrine as the official belief system of the entire community. In explaining why we as a nation must acknowledge God as He has revealed Himself to Roy Moore, the embattled jurist enunciates the doctrine that “our Constitution says our justice system is established upon God.” It would be courteous to assume that a statement as loopy as that is merely delusional, but it seems far more likely that it’s a piece of deliberate dishonesty, unbecoming any believer in a divine edict against bearing false witness.

Born-again foes of secular humanism love to point out that the words “separation of church and state” do not appear anywhere in the Constitution, so it’s hard to imagine them unaware that the words “our justice system is established upon God” are likewise absent from the text of that document. And anyone who has followed the public debate on this issue is certainly familiar with the Christian Right’s fondness for a Big Lie strategy. The U.S. is a Christian nation. The Ten Commandments are the foundation of our civil law. Chant those mantras relentlessly and they will become as good as true. And keep insisting that any contrary arguments based such trivialities as reason or historical fact are nothing but the spawn of a diabolical secularist conspiracy.

I have even seen it argued that this must be a Christian nation since government documents are dated according to a “year of our Lord” calendar. OK, I’ll buy that if you’ll buy that the names of our months demonstrate our national allegiance to the gods of Rome, and the names of our days prove that we officially worship ancient Norse deities.

As for the claim that our laws are founded upon the Ten Commandments, that silly construct crumbles under the slightest objective scrutiny. When Exodus describes God speaking to the Israelites at Mount Sinai (Chapter 20) and again when Deuteronomy describes Moses reminding his people of that incident (Chapter 5), the words of commandment attributed to the Lord include injunctions not to kill and not to steal. American civil law includes rules against murder and theft. For the simpleminded true believer, that’s all the necessary evidence that the Bible and the laws of our land are one and the same. But killing and stealing are also crimes throughout the Muslim world, and in Hindu-majority India, and in Shinto and Buddhist Japan. They were crimes in the officially atheist Soviet Union, in Confucian imperial China, and in the pagan empires of the ancient world. For as long as there has been human society, it seems, people of many different metaphysical persuasions have figured out that social order requires prohibitions against taking the life or property of one’s fellow citizens. It would be accurate to say that laws on the books in the 21st-century United States coincide on some points with the Ten Commandments (as they do with legal codes derived from a variety of other sources, sacred and secular), but to claim that they are based on the Ten Commandments is pure hooey.

Furthermore, there are some commandments among the Ten that legislators in the United States are explicitly forbidden to enact into law. Take that whole business about worshipping only one God, for example. Some Jews regard the Christian doctrine of the Trinity as a violation of that commandment. Some Christians see Islam as sinful on the grounds that Muslims worship only one God, but not the right one. Yet any law requiring all citizens to bow before the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or forbidding the exercise of non-theistic and polytheistic faiths, would be invalidated by any court in the land. Well, any court on which Roy Moore did not cast the deciding vote.

Legislation against taking God’s name in vain would be similarly invalid. We have laws that safeguard the right to keep the Sabbath, but none that require citizens to devote every seventh day to prayer and rest. It’s been a long time since adultery was punishable by court-imposed scarlet letters. And I’m not even sure how lawmakers might try to codify honor for one’s parents or abstention from covetous thoughts vis-à-vis the house, the wife, the manservant, the maidservant, the ox, the ass, and the other possessions of one’s neighbor. In short, those who maintain that we live under a system of laws founded upon the Ten Commandments are putting forth a claim that is nothing but an advertisement for their own willful ignorance or intellectual dishonesty.

Roy Moore is perfectly within his rights to acknowledge his God by displaying the Ten Commandments or any other religious symbol in his home, or even in his private chambers in a public court building. He is free, should he so choose, to tattoo five commandments on each buttock, though it would probably be best if he refrained from dropping his pants to engage in faith-based mooning from the bench. But he makes himself an enemy of the Constitution - in particular of the ideal of religious freedom embodied in the delicate balance between free exercise and non-establishment - when he usurps public funds or public display space for his personal theocratic agenda.

It seems virtually a sure bet that Moore will use the notoriety arising from this case to fuel a run for national office. Whether he ends up in the Senate or as a star on the Jesus-and-jingoism lecture circuit, we can be certain that we have not heard the last of his crusade to chase his fellow Americans from the sunlit plazas of pluralism and liberty into the fetid alleyways of fundamentalist theocracy.

Christian fundamentalists in the United States have not yet staged the same political conquest as, for example, their Muslim and Hindu brethren in Saudi Arabia and India. But they aspire to nothing less than the fusion of religious and state power that works so well for the BJP in New Delhi and the Wahabis in Riyadh. Religious freedom is for the Christian Right their freedom to make the dictates of their faith binding on all of us. They embody the all too prevalent human tendency to create God in our own image. And never the image of us at our best - always at our pettiest, most narrow-minded, least loving, and most vindictive. Dazzled by their own brilliant self-righteousness, Christians of Moore’s stripe flatter themselves that they are basking in the light of God’s countenance. Helen Keller was never blind like this.

Chris O'Carroll