Religion > Christianity

Shrinking the Ten Commandments

The 5th Circuit’s ruling allowing the Ten Commandments in schools is not as encouraging as you might think.

Fay Voshell | April 3, 2026

Many Christians are rejoicing over a court ruling allowing the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools.  As the Tulane Hullabaloo and other news outlets report, the commandments must be displayed in every Louisiana public school and university after the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an injunction that had blocked the display.

It is better to see the commandments posted instead of a blank wall.  But there is little cause for jubilation.  The strictures placed by Louisiana’s attorney general, Liz Murril, concerning the postings of the commandments make them merely symbolic — a gesture of appeasement directed at Louisiana’s huge evangelical and conservative Catholic communities.

The posters are in effect announcements proclaiming the near irrelevance of a core foundation of the Jewish and Christian ethic.  They demonstrate contempt for and disregard of the persuasive spiritually and intellectually forceful Christian worldview that once dominated America and the West.  They are, in short, a politicized and tokenized gesture of condescension from the dominant leftist elite’s viewpoint that has seized public education for decades.

Even the visuals are indications that the measure is merely a token.  Murril has mandated that the posters be 11 by 14 inches, not to exceed 18 by 24.  She has also mandated that the displays not be posted behind teachers’ desks.

The measurements reduce the visual impact of the posters.  Further, the placement to the side of the teacher indicates that the commandments have no special relevance to his teaching, to the education of the children, or to the entire public school system.  In short, as the original decision indicates, the display is meant to be entirely passive, and in no way integrated into the public educational system, lest it be regarded as coercive.

The enterprise certainly indicates that for those in control of America’s public school system, the Ten Commandments are a diminished relic of the past that has stood in the way of the now prevalent educational philosophy of relativism, as the dissenters in the decision clearly articulate.  The commandments are seen as inhibiting the autonomy of the individual as well as an antique obstacle to a secularist ideology that requires no reference to transcendence.  A new anti-Christian worldview is considered triumphant — a view that prevails in all major law schools, which has filtered down to politics and every other major sphere of influence.

Who among our institutions, including the churches, will defend the Giver of the Law as summarized in the Ten Commandments?  

Who among our educators, politicians, medical personnel, and clergy will proclaim that it was the supernaturally gifted genius of the Hebrew peoples that codified the heart of the divine law into the form of the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mt. Sinai? Who will defend that Law, which, though simple in form, has been applicable in myriad and infinite ways for millennia?  Who will once again promote that Law that informed and guided the legal systems of the Hebrew nation and the institutions of the Christianized West — that Law summarized by Christ, who according to the gospel of Matthew said this?

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.

The Law is in principle applicable to king and commoner alike — the rule of Law extends to Everyman.  All are regarded as equal under the Law.  No one is regarded as above it.

That consensus, always frail and always in need of vigilant reform, has been shattered under the sway of ideologies characterized by relativity and dissipated by a diversity agenda designed to consign the Ten Commandments to equivalence to other legal systems.

The pitfalls of the equivalence arguments were addressed by pastor Abraham Kuyper, who was also prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905.  He pointed out the dangers of deserting the Jewish and Christian concept of the Law in his Lectures on Calvinism, saying, “No political scheme has ever become dominant which was not founded in a specific religious or anti-religious conception.”  Defending Christian governance, he added, “Humanity, without division of states, without law and government, and without rule and authority, would be a veritable hell on earth.”

Kuyper, who spoke to the still largely Christianized West of 1898, might today point out just where systems of governments unattached to the Jewish and Christian concept of the rule of Law have become “hells on earth.”

Were he alive today, he might well look back on the twentieth- and now twenty-first-century fascist and communist ideologies that deliberately forsook the Jewish and Christian ethic characterized by the Ten Commandments and pronounce them as creators of “hells on earth.”

He might ask once again, just which system of law will the Western nations now choose?  Almost certainly he would note that when the Jewish and Christian ethic is jettisoned, a harsher, more authoritarian system of law will be put in place.  Certainly, he would note his beloved Netherlands and other European nations once Christian are asking that question today, as vocal and increasingly influential minorities aim for the establishment of sharia law and the establishment of communist authoritarianism.

Kuyper might note that when the law becomes whatever the prevailing and most powerful earthly authority says it is, and punishment is given out according to power without the mercy and love of the Law as profoundly articulated by Christ.  Certainly, he would find himself in agreement with Doestoevsky’s observation concerning anarchists: “If there is no God, everything is permitted.”

Kuyper also might point to those minorities in Western nations who tacitly or overtly approve of the religious system represented by the penal code of present-day Afghanistan.  There, it is now legal under Article 32 to grant a jail sentence of only 15 days for a husband who beats his wife with “obscene” force (fracture of bones, bruising, and/or open wounds).  The penalty is exacted only if the wife can prove the abuse before a judge in a courtroom designed to ensure her invisibility.

As the prime minister pointed out, the Ten Commandments, viewed as odious restrictions by anti-Christian systems of all stripes, are designed to display mercy and love of God, as a means by which the human heart and society are ordered and made functional.

Part of a nation’s survival is national identity.  Western nations need to reclaim their Jewish and Christian identity and, with it, the practice of law as summarized by the Ten Commandments.  Those commandments are not a historic relic confined to a poster on a wall.  Rather, they have informed and infiltrated the entire legal system and other institutions of the West for centuries.

The answer to the postage stamp approach to the Ten Commandments is difficult but worthwhile.  It amounts to the restoration of cultural Christianity, including the Law.  Such should be a major effort of the Christian Church, which by and large has deserted its role as the salty preserver of Western civilization.

But a start would be repudiation of the public school system in favor of establishing alternative educational institutions, reflecting and upholding the transcendent nature of the Ten Commandments.

Fay Voshell holds an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary.  She is a regular contributor to American Thinker and may be reached at [email protected].

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