Can a government official erect a massive monument to the Ten Commandments in a government building by asserting that they have a secular rather than a religious purpose? What if that official has a long history of supporting displays of the Ten Commandments for religious reasons?
Court Decision
On November 18, 2002, a U.S. District Court ruled against Roy Moore, finding that the Ten Commandments constituted a violation of the Establishment Clause of First Amendment — indeed, that the evidence of this was “overwhelming.”
It was clear that the purpose of the monument was in no way, shape or form secular. Moore made that evident when, at the public unveiling, he stated that it was there to remind people that the moral foundation of American law came from the Judeo-Christian God. Moore also made this purpose clear in trial over the monument:
- The Chief Justice gave more structure to his understanding of the relationship of God and the state, and the role the monument was intended to play in conveying that message. He explained that the Judeo-Christian God reigned over both the church and the state in this country, and that both owed allegiance to that God. ...The Chief Justice also explained at trial how his design and placement of the monument reflected this understanding of the relationship of God and the state. His design concerns were religious rather than secular in that the quotations were placed on the sides of the monument instead of on its top because, in keeping with his religious belief, these statements were the words of man and thus could not be placed on the same plane with the Word of God. Similarly, he rejected the addition, along side the Ten Commandments monument, of a monument containing Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, not for secular reasons but because the speech was not “the revealed law of God.”
There is no question that Moore’s purpose was religious. He wanted to tell everyone entering the Alabama State Judicial Building — including the judges, lawyers, and other public employees who work there — that the god Moore believes in is sovereign over them and over the laws which Moore interprets when rendering his decisions.
That this monument was intended to depict the Ten Commandments as a sacred document was made evident when the judge visited them:
- The court was captivated by not just the solemn ambience of the rotunda (as is often true with judicial buildings), but by something much more sublime; there was the sense of being in the presence of something not just valued and revered (such as an historical document) but also holy and sacred.
This makes Moore’s Ten Commandments display dramatically different from displays in other public contexts. Other displays try to emphasize secular aspects of the Ten Commandments, for example their role in the development of law and legal codes in Western civilization. Moore was utterly opposed to such a display because he regarded the Ten Commandments in purely religious terms.
Judge Thompson further found that the monument was a violation of the principle that government action must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion. It is not simply that a “reasonable observer” aware of Moore’s history and beliefs will understand that the monument is designed to endorse particular religious views, but the monument even violates the “coercion test” proposed by some of the harshest critics of the endorsement test, like Supreme Court Justices Kennedy, Rehnquist and Scalia:
- [The monument] is nothing less than “an obtrusive year-round religious display” installed in the Alabama State Judicial Building in order to “place the government’s weight behind an obvious effort to proselytize on behalf of a particular religion,” the Chief Justice’s religion.
Significance
Roy Moore is a celebrity for the Christian Right in America. Moore’s perpetual court cases over his various Ten Commandments displays were a popular cause for fundamentalists around the country. Because of this, the decision has played an important role in the relationship not only between church and state, but also between separationists and America’s religious right.
What role can the Ten Commandments can play in American law and American politics? People want to display the Commandments to encourage people to either remain or become faithful to Judeo-Christian traditions and Judeo-Christian religious beliefs. How overt can the religious proselytization be in fundamentalists’ efforts to remake America in their own image of a godly society? Display of the Ten Commandments can be justified by a secular context, but here that justification was abandoned in favor of an explicit religious tone.
