Civil Reactions: Why Rules Rule
Debates on the Ten Commandments expose our culture's ultimate rift
Stephen L. Carter | posted 9/03/2001 12:00AM
When I became a Christian, I learned a happy truth that I previously had not quite believed: Morality is a matter of fact, not opinion. Correct moral rules are established by God, not by man. They are not human constructs, but facts that God has revealed about himself and his order for the world.
Christians often disagree with each other over the right answer to tough moral questions, but the dispute is in a sense empirical: either God commands A or God commands B. The disputants might both be wrong, but they cannot both be right.
A couple of years ago, I made this point in a talk I delivered to an audience of Episcopalians, fellow members of my own denomination (at least for the moment). During the question-and-answer session, a woman asked me whether I think God has only one will with respect to abortion. I repeated my point: God has only one will with respect to every moral question. She went away unsatisfied, never even asking me what I thought God's single will on abortion is.
Her unhappiness was not surprising, because America is more and more a nation that hates rules. The dominant American culture looks at life as a seamless web of choices, and the only form of wrongdoing the culture is willing to acknowledge is the wrong of interfering with somebody else's freedom to choose. When it comes to matters of sex and reproduction, the cultural message is aggressive almost to the point of tyranny.
To the devout Christian, such a theory of life offers a gruel so thin it would likely lead to spiritual starvation. The Bible commands us to be holy as well as righteous. God places restrictions on our freedom that are quite independent of the effect of our acts on others.
This distinction between ways of looking at the moral world is what is really at stake in the proliferating cases about the display of the Ten Commandments in town halls, courthouses, or schoolrooms. At first blush, the strict separationists would seem to have the better of the argument: the exhibition of the Ten Commandments on a wall or bulletin board certainly looks like an endorsement of religion.
But matters are not so simple. The Ten Commandments are also an important foundational document for understanding American history and culture. Consequently, displaying the Ten Commandments may be viewed as less about endorsing religion than about acknowledging and honoring what America stands for.
One thing for which America has traditionally stood—although the dominant culture seeks to deny this simple truth—is that moral obligation flows from a source greater than the self. If we ban from our public places all acknowledgments of this part of America's history, we reinforce the already overwhelming cultural message that our moral obligations (other than tolerance, of course) are only those we choose for ourselves.
In that sense, the argument over the propriety of displaying the Ten Commandments may fairly be characterized not as one over constitutional meaning but over ideology. And if we understand ideology in the German sociologist Karl Mannheim's sense of the filter through which we distill what is presented to us as reality, then we see why such disputes as this one are so hotly contested.
Nearly a half-century ago, when President Eisenhower said that our public institutions presuppose the existence of a "Supreme Being," he was taking sides not in a religious argument but in an ideological one. The notion that we are, in effect, self-created, our choices bounded only by tolerance, is not a rule of public life required by the Constitution; it is simply the other side in the ideological battle.
September 3 2001, Vol. 45, No. 11
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