Texas lawmaker introduces bill to require Ten Commandments in public schools, pastor offers alternative
Pastor suggests Beatitudes instead, says First Commandment is 'clear violation' of Establishment Clause
Should the Beatitudes be in public schools rather than the Ten Commandments?
A Dallas-area pastor is challenging Christians to rethink their position on whether to support placing the Ten Commandments in classrooms as the state of Texas takes a first step to aligning with other states on the issue.
Republican state Sen. Phil King introduced a bill Monday that would require public schools to display the Ten Commandments and mandate time during the school day specifically for students to read the Bible.
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Senate Bill 10 is modeled after similar legislation passed last year in Louisiana and Oklahoma.
Jeff Warren, senior pastor at Park Cities Baptist Church, has publicly challenged Christians to “think more deeply about the motivation” behind the push to include the Ten Commandments in schools.
In a sermon last November, Warren, teaching out of Chapter 7 of the Gospel of Matthew, talked about the challenges of sharing Christ in a culture that doesn’t seem too interested in listening. Warren compared the push in states like Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana to mandate the Ten Commandments in schools with Jesus’ warning about “casting your pearls before swine.”
“We see this in the public sphere at times, Christians trying to force their views or beliefs on others. I've talked about this before,” he told his congregation. “We see some who are demanding that we put the Ten Commandments up in public spaces. Now, I'm all for the Ten Commandments, but would Jesus? He might say, "Pearls before swine." How about living out the Ten Commandments?”
He also noted that despite the legislative push, he’s “never seen any Christians arguing to put the Beatitudes up in public spaces.”
“That's a different way to go altogether, to live that out,” Warren added. “This is what Jesus is saying to us: we're to have a discernment that comes from His Spirit.”
Known as the opening of the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes are a collection of sayings from Jesus during his earthly ministry which describes the source of true blessedness not in the pursuit of physical comforts and luxuries, but in the spiritual pursuit of God and His will for our lives.
Acknowledging his challenge was a bit “tongue-in-cheek,” Warren believes the Beatitudes offer clear insight into how Jesus would view something like a Ten Commandments mandate for public schools.
“Nowhere in the Beatitudes or the Sermon on the Mount do we see a heart posture or attitude that would make us think a state mandate would be the way of Jesus,” Warren told CP via email Tuesday. “The most explicit teaching on what it means to be a true follower of Jesus is found in the Beatitudes, leading into the Sermon on the Mount.
“It seems to me living out the Beatitudes would negate any desire to mandate the Ten Commandments being posted.”
Warren questioned the motivation behind such a push, adding that a “state mandate comes across as an act of dominance, coercion, and a forcing of one’s religion on others.”
But if the motive, rather, is to establish the influence of the Ten Commandments as a “foundational bedrock of law, morality, political theory,” Warren says that lesson should be mandatory teaching in all classrooms.
“Let it be required, as we teach American history, that we acknowledge the profound influence of Judeo-Christian principles and teachings, including the Ten Commandments, and how it has clearly influenced our morality and political history,” he said.
And indeed, for Warren, there is a direct theological connection between the Commandments and the Beatitudes, one in which Matthew presents Jesus as “the new Moses, the perfect Israelite, who has come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets” and who offers the “six antitheses” of “You’ve heard it said, but I say to you” in which Jesus expounds on what Warren calls the “purity of motivation and heart behind the commands.”
Still, said Warren, teaching the commandments out of context “does violence to the primary purpose of the Law” and risks misrepresenting the original intent behind the Decalogue.
“It must be understood in the context of a covenantal relationship between God and His people, or it makes no sense, and is easily disregarded, or even held in contempt,” he explained. “If the motivation behind such a mandate is to bring morality back into our children’s lives, we must remember that the Old Testament is mostly about how the Israelites, who knew the Law, did not obey it.”
Beyond any theological objection, however, Warren said the legal challenges to putting the Ten Commandments into classrooms are substantial: he cited the 1980 U.S. Supreme Court case Stone v. Graham, which ruled that a Kentucky statute requiring each public school classroom in the state to include a copy of the Ten Commandments violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Warren said even a case which claimed the Ten Commandments refer not to a single religion, but two, would still likely violate the Clause.
“The First Commandment points to a singular God who proclaims, ‘You shall have no other God before me.’ That is a clear violation of the Establishment Clause,” he said. “And if, in a liberal democracy, we promote one or two religions, then we must promote them all. We would need to add Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mormonism, Unitarianism, and the list goes on. This was never our Founding Fathers’ intent.”
And what about the intent behind the legislative push for the Ten Commandments?
Warren said he believes it's a symptom of a wider problem in the Church, one which he says has nothing to do with patriotism.
“The mandate to put the Commandments up in public schools seems to be motivated by Christian nationalism, and disconnected from the broader church in America and certainly from the contextual history of a covenant-making God with Israel,” he said.
“It seems to be a marking of one’s territory, which is a defining trait of Christian nationalism.”
