The public display of the Ten Commandments was the hot-button topic at an Oct. 13 panel discussion at Samford University.
Four distinguished panelists assembled there for the dialogue, titled The Ten Commandments on Display: A Discussion on Religion, Law and Public Life. The program was a joint presentation of Beeson Divinity School and Cumberland School of Law.
The all-Christian panel provided the audience with a view of the diverse approaches to the Ten Commandments question, even among people with similar religious beliefs.
Marci Hamilton, a professor at Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York, said courts should consider believers and nonbelievers in the decision-making process in an effort not to harm either. If courts do not follow that guideline, she said, then they run the risk of disenfranchising those who don’t consider themselves religious.
“Is this only a government for people of certain religious beliefs?” asked Hamilton, a self-labeled conservative as to the exercise of free religion. “Should the government have the power to speak on behalf of a certain set of believers? We’ve really lost sight of the ball because of the political discourse.”
Impact on the law
Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice in Washington, argued that in terms of history, public displays of the Commandments make sense. “I think there’s a logical and legitimate reason for displaying the Ten Commandments and that is the impact they have had on the development of law in Western civilization,” he said. “We don’t ignore the heritage of who we are and how we got here.”
Thomas C. Berg, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, said the controversy has resulted from an evolving conflict between two basic principles on which the nation was founded. One, that the government should not take sides in religious matters, and two, the government can make general statements about God.
Those principles did not conflict when the nation was founded, he said, because the Founding Fathers believed in God. But the country’s increasing religious diversity has forced the court to look for lines to draw in order to have it both ways. Berg added a cautionary note. “It is misguided for serious believers to push for the public display of religious symbols because it can be a distraction from issues that can be far more important to religious freedom,” he said.
In his remarks, Ron Sider, president and founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, in Wynnewood, Pa., offered a two-pronged approach, outlining arguments both for and against public display of the Ten Commandments. In the “for” category, he listed society’s need for moral teaching, the contributions the Ten Commandments have made to American law and the role religion has played in the history of the United States. But the most crucial argument in favor of public display is that it symbolizes the government’s accountability to a transcendent moral law, Sider said.
On the other hand, he said, the government must not advocate inherently religious endorsements, and the Constitution’s free exercise clause does not give Christians the right to seize control of the government.
“When the government displays explicitly religious text, it implies endorsement,” Sider said. “That poses discriminatory problems and problems of social conflict.”
Although Alabama’s brush with Ten Commandments fame in the form of former Chief Justice Roy Moore was briefly mentioned, much of the discussion centered on more recent headlines. In separate 5–4 votes in late June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled a Texas display within the bounds of the law and a Kentucky display unconstitutional.
The difference in the two cases, Sekulow said, was “atmospherics.” The Kentucky case was “stormy,” he said because it involved displays that were created to promote religion.
“When the court sees something that was gerrymandered, it affects the outcome of the case,” Sekulow said. “There was no funny business in Texas; there was funny business in Kentucky. But there’s no easy solution to any of this.”
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