Why the Ten Commandments Should Be in Every Classroom in America

America has once again found herself plunged into a heated debate over the importance and relevance of a key historical document and its place in the public square. Yet this time, we are not so much debating over the words that founded our country, but ones that helped pave the way for Western civilization in the first place: the Ten Commandments. 

The Louisiana legislature recently passed, and the state’s governor signed, a bill into law which requires the Ten Commandments to be posted in every public school and state-funded university classroom. The public response was unfortunately predictable. Something that would have just seemed like natural common sense to our grandparents' generation now ignites a firestorm of anti-religious venom from some and hysterical pearl-clutching from others. 

President Trump threw his full support behind the effort, going much farther than the Louisiana legislature in views about where to post the Ten Commandments. And he’s right. 

I have been a proponent of having the Ten Commandments in Oklahoma’s classrooms since I took office — much to the corporate media’s disgust. Legislators in Oklahoma City have proposed legislation similar to what passed in Baton Rouge. Lawmakers will take a renewed look and we will pass this next session. In the meantime, however, I can assure everyone that Oklahoma will have the Ten Commandments posted in its classrooms. 

The United States of America, her form of government, her customs, her institutions, they are all products of Western civilization. Being heirs to that cultural, intellectual, and moral inheritance comes with responsibilities. Whether the anti-religious, anti-civilizational forces at work in our public square want to admit it — whether they even realize it — everyone who enjoys the fruits of the American experiment owes a debt to the Judeo-Christian civilization that paved the way for its tradition.

Indeed, there is simply no intellectually honest or historically faithful way to scrub the role of religion and moral values from our founding.

‘But, but, but…’ many will either stammer or smugly proclaim, what about the “separation of church and state”? To be certain, the vast majority of the anti-Christian voices that point to this phrase cannot name its true origin, and too often are completely unaware that the phrase appears absolutely nowhere in any of our founding documents. Rather, the letter from Jefferson to the Baptist Association of Danbury, CT was dredged up by the KKK member turned Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to bolster his argument in a 1948 case to deprive students of Catholic schools from public school transportation resources. 

The constitutional imperative for a “separation of church and state” is indeed a myth, yet the canard has become perhaps the most widely repeated and most poorly understood metaphor in popular constitutional law today. This is not how the founders saw things.

The fact is that our founders understood that religion was a critical component of public life and an essential voice in the public square. In George Washington’s Farewell Address, our key founder and first president makes it clear that “religion and morality are indispensable supports” of political prosperity and the well-being of a republic. 

They knew, and we have forgotten, that a republic is incapable of creating and forming the kinds of citizens it needs to preserve itself over the long term. John Adams made it clear that our constitution — complete with its Bill of Rights — was made for “a moral and religious People” and was “wholly inadequate” to the government of any other kind of people.

In the Northwest Ordinance, the Articles of Confederation Congress formally encouraged the creation of schools in the new territories, acknowledging that “religion, morality, and knowledge” were “necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind.” 

Likewise, we need to heed the seriousness that our founders attributed to this matter and apply it to our own time. Every observer of any ideological or spiritual persuasion can tell that things are gravely wrong in this country and need correction. We no longer trust our institutions; in fact, we no longer trust many of our fellow citizens for that matter. We have lost the common bonds, common values, and common understanding of ourselves as Americans that used to hold us together and made it possible to be a free and pluralistic republic. Without that kind of a common language, this experiment in self-government cannot last. 

Some wish to dismiss this as merely a “culture war” issue. But there is simply no more important war before us at this time than the war for the future of this country. We need to reset our foundations and return our focus to the first principles. Visibly placing a key cornerstone of our country and our civilization in our classrooms across this country will not fix everything, admittedly; but we would be fools not to take this step.