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Judging from his critics on campus and elsewhere, you would think that suspended Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore of Ten Commandments fame has just about lost his mind. Not that his opponents would ever put it that way, at least not publicly, but their statements of his stand in Montgomery make Alabama’s top judge look pretty foolish.
After all, what in the world was he doing, placing a monument of the Ten Commandments, of all things, in the rotunda of the Alabama state courthouse, of all places? Has he not read the Constitution? Does he not know about the separation of church and state? And who died and made him king so that he can defy a federal judge’s order to remove the monument from public view? Has he not read the Bible, which says we should obey the government? Does he not care about the rule of law? Why, this man is so out of touch and so near anarchy, that it’s scary.
Let’s be more specific. Justice Moore is “acting completely contrary to every moral and legal standard in the United States,” said Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. This contrariness is a bad thing, of course, because “you can’t run a country if every elected official gets to decide which decisions of other courts he or she is willing to obey,” Lynn told host Chris Matthews on Hardball. What is at issue here? “The rule of law,” said Lynn.
And if you’re an American who treasures freedom, then you had better pay close attention to Judge Moore’s arguments, stated a letter in the Washington Times: “because of their potentially devastating threat to our liberty.” A history-challenged message posted on the website of Auburn University’s Plainsman raises the specter of government-imposed religious belief: “Our nation was . . . based on the fact that not everyone in this nation would be Christian, therefore we have laws to prevent the government from forcing religious belief upon its citizens.”
As some see it, this justice who was duly elected to office in November 2000 by 55 percent of the vote is downright frightening — and Auburn University Professor J. Wayne Flint says he knows why. It’s because Moore “lives in a world where there isn’t any gray,” the professor told the Associated Press. “I think he really believes that is true — which makes him really scary.” But lest you think that it’s only the hostiles who are upset, incoming friendly fire has also been thwumping the judge’s position. “To say that, because in conscience he cannot abide the law, he’s going to defy it, leads to anarchy,” said Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention. “We have a government of law, not of men.”
Are the critics right? Has Moore gone too far? If you are a secularist or atheist who wants to remake America in your image, then clearly the judge has gone too far and needs to be put back in his place, along with the rest of those uppity Christians who normally are so easy to command. But if you stand by the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the rule of law, the freedom to question authority, and the duty to resist any power that seeks to take the place of Declaration’s Creator, then maybe the man in Montgomery is more to your liking.
No Moore Standards?
Is Judge Moore really “acting completely contrary to every moral and legal standard in the United States”? Not quite. The whole point of the American Revolution was that the Founders staked everything on God: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” says the Declaration of Independence.
This content is precisely what one would expect, given that the vast majority of the signers of the Declaration were orthodox Christians, some fifty-two out of fifty-six, according to scholar M.E. Bradford of the University of Dallas, which David Limbaugh notes in his new book Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity. (For purposes of full disclosure, I highly recommend this book, which I edited.) The avant-garde of colonial society did not look to nature, to the cosmos, to the state, or to humanity itself, as the basis upon which to build a nation. This classically educated group did not embrace the polytheism of the Greeks or Romans, the pantheism of the East, or the Deism of the French Enlightenment. Rather, they appealed to the “Supreme Judge of the world.” They relied on the “protection of Divine Providence.” They pledged not just their honor but their “sacred honor.”
Turning to the Constitution, the First Amendment says nothing about the separation of church and state, which may surprise many of those indoctrinated by the standard liberal history lesson on this matter. What it does say is that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Notice the limitation is on Congress — not the states, not on state governors, judges, local schools, individual citizens, public parks, or Roy Moore. The Framers were mostly Christians, and they had seen the abuses of an unbiblical consolidation of political and ecclesiastical power under one roof in the Church of England. This is what the establishment clause is meant to prevent: The creation of a national Christian denominational church of the United States of America.
Turning to the “free exercise” clause, the Framers again placed a limit on what Congress is allowed to do: “Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise of religion” (emphasis added). The Framers wanted in America what they did not have in England: Freedom to express their broad range of Christian convictions across the whole of life, including public life, including the establishment of state churches at the state level, without interference from the central government in union with a single denomination. Not that the Ten Commandments would have been an issue back then, but the First Amendment would allow the placing of a Ten Commandments monument or plaque wherever it pleased a people endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights.
Has Chief Justice Roy Moore violated the First Amendment? Well, does putting a monument of the Ten Commandments on public display in the Alabama courthouse establish a national state denominational church of America, say, the Presbyterian Church of America, to which all citizens are required by law to pay tithes, and so on? Of course not. The Creator God of the Declaration, who endowed every single human being with unalienable rights, also gave to humanity the Ten Commandments. Despite the attempts of modern secularists to rewrite history and impose their personal viewpoint on America, Judge Moore has the God-given human right and First Amendment right to the “free exercise” of his Christian commitment. Those who would deny those rights are the ones acting contrary to the Declaration and the First Amendment.
They Shoot Jews, Don’t They?
But what about the rule of law? Surely, we cannot allow a state judge to defy an order from a federal court, can we? Well, yes. We can allow a state judge — or a policeman, mayor, and so on — to defy a court order, if that order is not lawful. For example, let’s say a judge in another country in another era commands you, as a policeman, to shoot a Jewish man guilty of nothing. You rightfully disobey, because it’s wrong to murder even if the authorities back you up and all the documentation is in order. The rule of law says no one is above the law, and that includes everyone — kings and peasants, individual citizens and presidents, those in authority and those under authority. Thus, if a federal judge issues an unlawful order, as was issued to Judge Moore, because the order violates the Declaration, and the First Amendment, it is within the God-ordained rights of an individual to refuse to comply with that order.
Friend or foe of Judge Moore alike needs to realize that the rule of law is about the possibility of an appeal to a higher authority — and not just an appeal to a higher human authority, for if the rule of law ends with merely human authority, what really is supreme is humanity and not law. The Nuremberg war crimes trials at the end of World War II in many ways were marked by that cold phrase uttered by Nazis who excused their organized, state-sanctioned slaughter by saying, “I was following orders.” In contrast to this and other forms of secularism, in the American experiment, the rule of law reaches beyond the highest of human authorities, to the Creator God Himself. A transcendent basis for law establishes the rule of law over the rule of men.
This reality is evident in the monotheism of the Declaration of Independence and should be of little surprise to students of American history. “The institutions of our society are founded on the belief that there is an authority higher than the authority of the State,” wrote Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in McGowan v. Maryland in 1961. “There is a moral law which the State is powerless to alter,” he continued. This is because “the individual possesses rights, conferred by the Creator, which government must respect.” We see much the same perspective expressed much earlier in the following “National Prayer for Peace,” offered by Thomas Jefferson as President in 1805: “Endow with Thy Spirit of wisdom those to whom in Thy Name we entrust the authority of government, that there may be justice and peace at home, and that through obedience to Thy law, we may show forth Thy praise among the nations of the earth.”
Life under law under God produces good things. The result of such a perspective is not the chaos or tyranny that some critics see on the horizon, but freedom, the kind of freedom that resulted when the Colonies defied mere human authority on the basis of rights conferred by the Creator. “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends,” says the Declaration, “it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government.” This is the spiritual-intellectual framework that gave a basis in reality for the birth of a nation that has seen, however imperfect she may be, blessings of liberty that still have the world beating a path to America’s door.
Wild Things
It is true that the Bible calls for submission to the state, because the state as a structure is ordained by the Creator (this does not mean, however, that God approves of the content of each political state). This is why Romans 13 can say, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities.” But when the state, or any power or any authority, seeks to take the place of the Creator, or calls for submission that violates the law, love, or lordship of the Creator, then the proper human and Biblical response is resistance. This is why Moses could resist Pharaoh, David could resist King Saul, and Peter and the Apostles in Acts 5 could refuse to submit to Jewish authorities demanding that Christians quit filling “Jerusalem with your teaching.” “We must obey God rather than men,” came the famous reply. And this is why Judge Moore and an entire generation of people like him can properly rise up to resist any authority that would limit our God-given freedom and duty to apply the Creator’s truth across the whole of life and thought, indeed, in every sphere of created reality, public and private.
No doubt this scares some people. But whom really shall we fear? The man with the Ten Commandments in the public square, let us say, or the man who says such things belong safely tucked away in the prayer closet and away from public life? We saw in the 20th Century the bloodbaths of a once-fashionable fascism that denied the Hebrew and Christian God, and with logical consistency legalized the murder of millions, its intellectual groundwork so well described in Gene Edward Veith’s Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview. We saw in the 20th Century the Soviet gulag with its millions imprisoned and tortured in the name of atheistic materialism and the New Man of Communism. We see in post-sixties America a country where Jew and Gentile, male and female, white and black, by the millions may be liquidated with near impunity, if the abortionist can get at them early enough.
No one is saying the man with the Ten Commandments is perfect or some kind of superior being. Or that the society created by the Founders was all sweetness and light. But it can be said that, when such an individual errs — whether you, me or Roy Moore — there is a recognition that the Creator holds us accountable and challenges us to overcome evil with good, in our personal lives and in our public service. There is form to society without smashing the individual, and there is freedom without chaos.
It’s not about black versus white, but about right versus wrong. It’s about not being lost in a sea of gray on an American campus, but about discovering the difference between diversity and deviancy on the basis of liberating information from the Creator. It’s also not about a government that has made itself king, but rather about creatures made in the image of God, born to be governed but not tamed, wild not wimpy — called to be good but not safe, especially from the viewpoint of a tyrant looking for a balcony from which to command the masses.
Secularists must guard their domains vigilantly against the likes of a Roy Moore. All Heaven could break out at a moment’s notice.
Copyright © 2003 J. Richard Pearcey. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
Photo Copyright © 2003 Pixel Dance, Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved.
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