“When you get a good look at the law, you know you can’t save yourself, right? … When you get a good look at the law, you see God’s perfect standard. You see that he’s prescribed that you maintain that perfect standard. You see instead of keeping that perfect standard, you are excited to a greater and greater violation of it. You then feel heaps of guilt upon yourself and shame and remorse and anxiety for such a violation. You feel conviction. And as a result, you realize that through the law comes only cursing and, therefore, you are driven to Christ that you might be justified by what? By faith and faith alone.” Evangelicals shaming public school kids To show us God’s standard, to demand that we keep it, to exacerbate our sinfulness so it’s inescapable, and then to make us feel the weight of shame and sin because of our condition.”īut lest we become stuck in our shame, MacArthur believes our shame will point us to trust Jesus. MacArthur explains: “The law makes us feel guilty. The Ten Commandments as a driver of shameĪt a deeper level in evangelical theology, the Ten Commandments serve not primarily as a way to reveal God’s moral expectations for us, but to drive us to shame in order to reveal our need for Jesus. Thus, by posting the Ten Commandments in our schools, we would recommit ourselves to truth, authority, rules and God as our judge, which presumably will bring about moral order once more. These conservatives believe Democrats refuse to worship God in the right way and therefore reject God’s law.īy removing Ten Commandments displays from our schools, these conservatives believe our society has become like the Israelite society in the book of Judges, which states: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”įundamentalist preacher John MacArthur says our culture is “committed to the fact there’s no truth, no authority, no rules and no judge.” One evidence of this is the absence of the Ten Commandments in our public schools. In this world, God gave humans the Ten Commandments in order to reveal to us how we are to behave toward one another. Like the Arizona Republicans, many evangelicals view the Ten Commandments through a modern 21st-century political lens. The irony is, when we do this, we undermine the entire basis for modern conservative evangelical Christianity. But rather than reading them at a surface level of how they may or may not be used as a culture war weapon of 21st-century United States politics, let’s dive into the Ten Commandments for their original context. If conservatives want us to read the Ten Commandments, then let’s read them. “If conservatives want us to read the Ten Commandments, then let’s read them.”īut in the case of the Ten Commandments, one of the responses needs to be to go along with the conservative game being played here. Given how the Satanic Temple has responded to these overreaches of government by arguing in favor of religious liberty and adding their own displays or after-school programs to the existing list of evangelical options, one might wonder if a good response would be to add other non-Christian religious materials to the bill. In addition to the Ten Commandments, the law includes the display or reading of:Īnne Laurie Gaylor, cofounder for the Freedom from Religion Foundation, criticized the bill, insisting Arizona public schools have “no business telling school children how many gods to worship or what gods to worship or whether to worship any gods at all.” Anthony Kern claimed on the Senate floor. “The progressive slide down in our country right now is because we have taken the Ten Commandments away from our schools,” Sen. In the latest “Law and Order” episode of the GOP’s march toward theocracy, the Arizona Senate passed Senate Bill 1151, which would allow the Ten Commandments to be displayed and read in public schools.
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