Posting the Ten Commandments in our schools will breed cynicism, might backfire on conservatives
I see Texas is about to force its public schools to place the Ten Commandments into every classroom in the state. It’s being done with President Trump’s blessing. He wrote last year in his Truth Social site, all in caps, “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER. READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG??? THIS MAY BE, IN FACT, THE FIRST MAJOR STEP IN THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION, WHICH IS DESPERATELY NEEDED, IN OUR COUNTRY. BRING BACK TTC!!! MAGA2024.”
That amounts to quite a screed, actually, considering that Trump has a track record of having very publicly broken at least three of those commandments. In fact, his ringing endorsement of them is a little weird. To be specific, Trump has broken commandments six (“you shall not commit adultery”), seven (“you shall not steal”), and eight (“you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor”).
The obvious hypocrisy of Trump and his supporters is clear, but much more troubling is the way this whole exercise will affect young people who will be coming face-to-face with the commandments every school day in every class.
Kids know the score and the score is that Trump has been a serial violator of the Old Testament’s code of conduct.
Presumably our kids are being raised and taught in our schools to respect our country’s leadership but those lessons are undone when they know that their president has ignored many of the very principles that the commandments enshrine.
I mean, how many young people will look at the commandment condemning adultery and smirk at the thought that you can go ahead and break it publicly and still rise to the highest position in our country? And how many will consider lying to be OK because, after all, our president has been documented to have lied tens of thousands of times?
We’re kidding ourselves if we think this isn’t going to be the reaction of our students. I’m surprised that even Trump himself seems to be blind to the consequences of forcing our students to confront the hypocrisy every single day in their classrooms.
As if we need more cynicism, this is a sure way to embed it even more deeply in our young people.
As to “the revival of religion” that Trump thinks is “desperately needed,” the president might want to think twice about that. If collective religious commitment were anything close to what it once was in America, I doubt that Trump, with his baggage of contra-commandment behavior, would have had much of a chance at attaining the presidency.
Heck, I remember when back in ‘64, Republican Nelson Rockefeller, once thought to be a serious contender for the GOP nomination, was hooted off the convention dais because he had married a divorced woman. Here’s the recap from a wikipedia article on Rockefeller: “Rockefeller's popularity plummeted when he remarried on May 4. Rockefeller had been divorced from Mary Todhunter Clark for about one year. His new wife, Margaretta Large "Happy" Filter, was eighteen years his junior, had worked as a member of his office staff, and had been married to Rockefeller's close friend, with four children, just one month prior. They left for a honeymoon in Venezuela and the Virgin Islands.[4]
The marriage was instantly the subject of scrutiny and criticism from the press, fellow Republicans, and even the United Presbyterian Church.[c] Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut, speaking at a prep school graduation, asked, "Have we come to the point in our life as a nation where the governor of a great state can desert a good wife, mother of his grown children, divorce her, then persuade a mother of youngsters to abandon her husband and their four children and marry the governor?"[4] When the newlyweds attended the convention of the National Federation of Republican Women convention later that year (by then a loyal Goldwater organization), they were received with silence, and several women staged a walk-out.”
Rockefeller got politically gob-smacked by the religious ethos of the day, which makes me wonder why Trump, whose morality-free personal behavior hasn’t been much of a political handicap in this day and age, yearns for a “revival of religion.” He certainly runs the risk of a Rockefeller-style backlash if the country starts taking those Ten Commandments, not to mention the Sermon on the Mount, to heart again.
I think, and so does author Jonathan Rauch in his book Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy, that the decline of Christianity in this country has much to do with the rise of contemporary conservative politics as manifested by Donald Trump and his followers. It’s a provocative read, one that should give second thoughts to the Trump-enamored conservatives pushing a Christian revivalist movement.
John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam. Republish with permission.
Photo: public domain, wikimedia commons
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