Rewriting the Ten Commandments

I’ve testified over 40 times against Christian Nationalism in legislative hearings at the Missouri Capitol. And I’ve only cursed one time — well, only once out loud. But I promise I was just quoting the Bible. And ironically, I did so while opposing a bill whose sponsor falsely claimed it would lead to the biblical Ten Commandments showing up in public school classrooms across the state.

Lawmakers in more than 20 states have proposed bills over the last couple of years that purport to mandate the posting of the Ten Commandments in schools. Like the unsuccessful one in Missouri, those that passed in Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas include the word-for-word language of the commandments that schools must put on the posters. But there’s a problem: you will not find that language in any version of the Bible.

Lawmakers are actually mandating a gerrymandered version, as the image below on the left shows. The parts in yellow are to be kept on the posters, the parts in red must be deleted, and the parts in green are to be added into the required text. This includes replacing “ass” with “cattle.” Or, if you’d rather think about it in terms of redacting like with the Epstein files, the image below on the right shows what the bills do to Exodus 20 by removing nearly two-thirds of the text.

Yet, lawmakers and journalists keep claiming the various bills would mandate the posting of the Ten Commandments. An NBC headline last month even declared, “Bible’s Ten Commandments are to be displayed in some Louisiana classrooms, appeals court rules.” That misstates the facts and falsely presumes there even is a universal version of the text that can be adopted.

So I decided to dig deeper into this, where the edited language came from, why such legislation is an attack on religious liberty, and the legal battles over these laws in the first episode of “A Trick of State,” a special occasional series from Dangerous Dogma. In this series, I’ll investigate underexplored issues at the intersection of church and state that expose the false promises of Christian Nationalism.

To unpack the rewriting of the Ten Commandments and what it means, I interviewed Mark Chancey (a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University and an expert in how the Bible is taught in public schools) and Rachel Laser (president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, one of the groups suing to stop these laws — and where I serve as vice chair of the national board of trustees).

In the episode, you’ll learn from Mark and Rachel, and I work in some clips from legal and political debates. I also offer other ways to consider the problems with these laws on the “Ten Commandments,” including by grading the posters with an historical quiz.

The legislation pushing this edited version of the commandments proves a warning offered by John Leland, a colonial Baptist leader who knew James Madison and Thomas Jefferson and who advocated for the First Amendment protections of religious liberty for all. Leland warned in 1791 against uniting church and state: “These establishments metamorphose the church into a creature, and religion into a principle of state; which has a natural tendency to make men conclude that bible religion is nothing but a trick of state.”

You can listen to the show wherever you get podcasts, including on Spotify, iTunes, or YouTube. Or just click the player below. Thanks for listening!

As a public witness,

Brian Kaylor