US Issues of church and state
surrounding Supreme Court on 10 commandments
American Wahabbis and the Ten Commandments
By William Thatcher Dowell
An alternative lens for viewing the Decalogue cases.
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March 8, 2005
Introduction by Tom Engelhardt
Whether the Ten Commandments, graven in stone, sit on a lawn by a
government building or in a courthouse, isn't for me exactly a
life-and-death issue -- and I think I'm not alone on this, which is why
the Ten Commandments cases at the Supreme Court right now are so
dangerous. The Bush administration and its various fundamentalist allies
(religious and political) have proven especially skilled at finding
wedge issues that, because they only seem to go so far, successfully
challenge and blur previous distinctions, thereby opening yet more
possibilities. The Supreme Court's decision in these particular cases
holds great promise for further blurring the lines that once separated
church and state in our country.
We're in a period, of course, when lines of every
sort, involving civil rights, privacy, foreign and domestic spying,
presidential power, Congressional rules, the checks-and-balances that
once were such a proud part of our political system, and so many other
matters are blurring radically. We also have a President who is in the
process of casting off the constraints of any presidency, while placing
religion with powerful emphasis at the very center of Washington's new
political culture. He is now adored, if not essentially worshipped, by
his followers as he travels the country dropping in at carefully vetted
"town meetings"; and the adoration is often not just of him as
a political leader but as a religious one, as a manifestation of God's
design for us. It's in this context that the modest Ten Commandments
cases are being heard; in the context, that is, of the destruction of
what's left of an authentic American republican (rather than Republican)
culture.
Below, William Dowell, a former Time magazine Middle
Eastern correspondent and, at present, editor of the Global Beat
("resources for the global journalist"), a weekly on-line
review of international security affairs published by New York
University's Center for War, Peace, and the News Media, widens the
religious lens to include the Middle East and so suggests another
context in which the Ten Commandments cases might be considered. (A
shorter version of this piece will appear Tuesday, March 8 on the op-ed
page of the Los Angeles Times.)
American Wahabbis and the Ten Commandments
By William Thatcher Dowell
For anyone who actually reads the Bible, there is a
certain irony in the current debate over installing the Ten Commandments
in public buildings. As everyone knows, the second commandment in the
King James edition of the Bible states quite clearly: "Thou shalt
not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is
in heaven above, or that is in the earth below, or that is in the water
under the earth." It is doubtful that the prohibition on
"graven images" was really concerned with images like the
engraving of George Washington on the dollar bill. Rather it cautions
against endowing a physical object, be it a "golden calf" or a
two-ton slab of granite, with spiritual power.
In short, it is the spirit of the commandments, not
their physical representation in stone or even on a parchment behind a
glass frame, which is important. In trying to publicize the
commandments, the self-styled Christian Right has essentially forgotten
what they are really about. It has also overlooked the fact that there
are several different versions of them. The King James Bible lists
three: Exodus 20:2-17, Exodus 34: 12-26, and Deuteronomy 5:6-21.
Catholic Bibles and the Jewish Torah also offer variants.
If the commandants are indeed to be green-lighted for
our official landscape, however, let's at least remember that
Christianity did not exist when the commandments were given. It might
then seem more consistent to go with the Hebrew version rather than any
modified Christian version adopted thousands of years after Moses lived.
Since the Catholic Church predates the Protestant Reformation, it would
again make more sense to go with the Catholic version than later
revisions.
It is just this kind of theological debate which has
been responsible for massacres carried out in the name of religion over
thousands of years. It was, in fact, the mindless slaughter resulting
from King Charles' efforts to impose the Church of England's prayer book
on Calvinist Scots in the 17th century which played an important role in
convincing the founding fathers to choose a secular form of government
clearly separating church and state. They were not the first to
recognize the wisdom in that approach. Jesus Christ, after all, advised
his followers to render unto Caesar what was Caesar's due and unto God
that which was due God.
The current debate, of course, has little to do with
genuine religion. What it is really about is an effort to assert a
cultural point of view. It is part of a reaction against social change,
an American counter-reformation of sorts against the way our society has
been evolving, and ultimately against the negative fallout that is
inevitable when change comes too rapidly. The people pushing to blur the
boundaries between church and state are many of the same who so
fervently back the National Rifle Association and want to crack down on
immigration. They feel that they are the ones losing out, much as, in
the Middle East, Islamic fundamentalists fear they are losing out -- and
their reactions are remarkably similar. In the Arab Middle East and
Iran, the response is an insistence on the establishment of Islamic Law
as the basis for political life; while in Israel, an increasingly
reactionary interpretation of Jewish law which, taken to orthodox
extremes, rejects marriages by reform Jewish rabbis in America, has
settled over public life.
In a strange way, George Bush may now find himself in
the same kind of trap that ensnared Saudi Arabia's founder, King Abdul
Aziz ibn Saud. To gain political support, Saud mobilized the fanatical,
ultra-religious Wahabbi movement -- the same movement which is
spiritually at the core of al-Qaeda. Once the bargain was done, the
Saudi Royal Family repeatedly found itself held political hostage to an
extremist, barely controllable movement populated by radical ideologues.
Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has found himself in a similar
situation, drawing political power from the swing votes of the
ultra-orthodox rightwing religious and fanatical settler's movement, and
then finding his options limited by their obstinacy to change. President
Bush has spent the last several months cajoling evangelicals and trying
to pay off the political bill for their support.
In Saudi Arabia, the Wahabbis consider themselves
ultra-religious, but what really drives their passions is a deep sense
of grievance and an underlying conviction that a return to spiritual
purity will restore the lost power they believe once belonged to their
forefathers. The extremism that delights in stoning a woman to death for
adultery or severing the hand of a vagrant accused of stealing depends
on extreme interpretations of texts that are at best ambiguous. What is
at stake is not so much service to God, as convincing oneself that it is
still possible to enforce draconian discipline in a world that seems
increasingly chaotic. We joke about a hassled husband kicking his dog to
show he still has power. In the Middle East, it is often women who bear
the brunt of the impotence of men. Nothing in the Koran calls for the
mistreatment of women or even asks that a woman wear a veil. What is at
stake here is not religion, but power, and who has a right to it.
The Christian Right, the evangelical movement that
provided the added push needed to nudge President Bush past a tight
election, is equally prone to selective interpretations of scripture.
The Ten Commandments are used as a wedge to put across what is
essentially a cultural protest against social change, but in the bitter
disputes that have followed these seemingly ridiculous arguments the
message of the commandments is usually lost. The Christian Right
pretends to be concerned about the life of an unborn fetus, but
expresses little interest for the fate of the living child who emerges
from an unwanted pregnancy, and is even ready to kill or at least
destroy the careers of those who do not agree with them. Although the
commandments prohibit killing, and Christ advised his followers to leave
vengeance to God, the fundamentalists seem to delight in the death
penalty, and in reducing welfare support to unwed mothers who are
struggling to deal with the results of pregnancies that they could not
control and never wanted to have.
In the United States as in the Middle East, the core
of this Puritanism stems from a nostalgia for an imaginary past in our
case, a belief that the U.S. was a wonderful place when it was peopled
mostly by pioneers who came from good northern European stock, who knew
right from wrong, and weren't afraid to back up their beliefs with a
gun, or by going to war, if they needed to.
The founding fathers, of course, had a very different
vision. They had seen the damage caused by the arcane disputes which
triggered the religious wars of the seventeenth century. They preferred
the ideas of the secular enlightenment, which instead of forcing men to
accept the religious interpretations of other men, provided the space
and security for each man to seek God in his own way.
The idea that religious values should affect, and
indeed control politics, is something that you hear quite often in the
Islamic world. But perhaps the strongest rationale for separating these
two dimensions of our daily lives is that politics inevitably involves
compromise, while religion involves a spiritual ideal in which
compromise can be fatal. The conflict is easy to see in contemporary
Iran. Iran's rulers have had to choose whether they consider politics or
religion to be most important. Ayatollah Khomeini himself once stated
that if forced to choose between Islamic law and Islamic rule, he would
choose Islamic rule. The effect of that decision was to betray Islamic
law and ultimately God. Iran's genuine Islamic scholars have found
themselves under continual pressure to change their understanding of God
in order to conform to political realities.
The appointment of Ayatollah Sayyid al Khamenei to
replace Khomeini as the supreme guide, is a case in point. Khamenei's
credentials as a religious thinker are comparable to a number of other
Iranian ayatollahs. But his real power stems from his political status.
Because of that, he is in a position to affect and ultimately censor the
religious writings of religious scholars who may be more thoughtful than
he is, but whose thinking is considered threatening to Khamenei's vision
of a theocratic state.
Politics inevitably trumps religion when the two
domains are merged. Religion, when incorporated into a political
structure, is almost invariably diluted and deformed, and ultimately
loses its most essential power. Worse, as we have seen recently in the
Islamic world (as in the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem witch trials
in the Christian world), a fanatical passion for one's own
interpretation of justice often leads to horror -- as in the obsession
of some practitioners of Sharia law to engage such punishments as
amputations or stoning women to death.
The fact is that, as Saint Paul so eloquently put it,
"Now we see through a glass darkly." We have a great deal of
religious experience behind us, but only God can understand to the full
extent what it really means. Men have their interpretations, but they
are only human and, by their nature, they are flawed. We see a part of
what is there -- but only a part. In that context, isn't it best to keep
our minds open, the Ten Commandants in whatever version out of our
public buildings or off our governmental lawns, and to lead by example
rather than pressuring others to see life the way we do. As Christ once
put it, "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's
eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
William Thatcher Dowell is the editor of the Global
Beat, a review of international security affairs published weekly over
the internet by New York University's Center for War, Peace, and the
News Media. He has worked for NBC News, ABC News, and TIME magazine. He
was a Middle East correspondent based in Cairo for TIME from 1989
through 1993.
Copyright 2005 William Thatcher Dowell
This piece first appeared at Tomdispatch.com
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