Indoctrinating Schoolchildren

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | June 29, 2024

The Louisiana Legislature, with both feet firmly planted in the past, has mandated that every public K-12 school, community college, and university shall prominently display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. They claim it is “a foundational document of our country.”

No, it isn’t, which is why no references to any god of any kind can be found in our Constitution. It was not an accident that it was excluded.

You might be among those who were taught the earliest colonists arrived fleeing religious persecution back in England. Well, sort of. The Pilgrims wanted to establish a church separate and distinct from the Church of England and were often called Separatists. But the Puritans were a different matter. Pursuing the harshest of Calvinist beliefs, they fled persecution in one country, then created their own brand of persecution in a new country.

In fact, religious tolerance was in short supply for some time. With church hierarchy as the primary source of law and enforcement, harsh rules were the order of the day. The wildly misnamed Maryland Act of Toleration of 1649 required people there to be Christians or they could be executed. Puritans even outlawed Christmas in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1659 and 30 years later were responsible for the Salem Witch Trials, in which 19 people were convicted and executed for witchcraft. (It is a myth that they were burned at the stake, a uniquely European horror. We hanged 14 women and five men and “accidentally” killed a 20th, an 81-year-old man we tortured to death by covering him with heavy rocks.)

So it was no wonder that when the Founders got around to our Bill of Rights, the First Amendment starts, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...” Neither Congress nor any other government can endorse any specific religion, nor can they prevent us from practicing how we see fit within some obvious exceptions.

Despite repeated attempts by various government entities and elected individuals, our courts have successfully kept religious preferences out of our laws, our government buildings, and, particularly, our public schools. While the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has previously ruled specifically against the placement of the Ten Commandments in courtrooms, we now have a different SCOTUS that may have a different view of the so-called establishment clause of that First Amendment.

The Louisiana Legislature would appear to have no view of that part of our Constitution at all, as some of their advocates claim the Ten Commandments are foundational, historical, and are somehow intertwined with our Constitution, which is pretty close to the opposite of the truth.

This news includes a touch of irony, since Louisiana has been one of those states removing teaching from classrooms and books from school libraries because, they claim, some of those subjects are better discussed and taught in the home. But not religious preferences and beliefs, which the Louisiana government now forces on public school students. (Good luck explaining coveting and adultery to first graders. And good luck explaining to the rest of us that if these tenets are so overwhelmingly important, then why are your state leaders supporting a man who has violated most of them?)

Maybe Louisiana is just clinging to a fading reality. According to the Pew Research Center, fewer than two-thirds of adult Americans now self-identify as Christians or Jews. The fastest growing religion in the U.S. is Islam, but the biggest gains are being made by people being described as “nones;” they identify with no specific religion.

It’s not even clear the Ten Commandments are uniquely Judeo-Christian concepts that started with Abraham and then Moses.

A number of scholars believe the Ten Commandments, and other sections of the Old Testament, aren’t exactly original but have been lifted or paraphrased from the Code of Hammurabi’s 282 laws. That code was produced around 1754 BCE, or more than 1,700 years before the Bible was being put together. Don’t kill, lie, steal, or be mean to your neighbors were already old rules.

(We think it was Hammurabi, a Babylonian leader treated as a living god in his time, who first suggested the idea of innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately, he also suggested a three-tiered punishment system based on the Babylonian caste system, so there was no equal justice for all.)

Louisiana’s attempt to religiously indoctrinate schoolchildren is offensive at best, a clumsy attempt by the government to establish a religion by exposing those children to a very specific belief system. Their claim it is an “historical” document is true only if that history is religion-specific. Telling students to behave themselves need not involve the Bible, the Quran, the Vidas, or the Tripitaka. And it need not involve politicians trying to force their beliefs on our schoolchildren.