Is the Speaker of the House the next Moses?
It’s a silly question, I know, but some teachers in Louisiana may be involuntarily pushing exactly that message soon.
Louisiana is currently in the process of implementing a law that requires teachers to post the 10 Commandments in every classroom. Since the law broadly appears to violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause, the matter is still being litigated in federal courts. The state attorney general, however, has issued guidance saying that all school districts in which a lawsuit challenging the order has not been filed still have to comply with it. Only five districts are excluded from that guidance because of the pending litigation.
The attorney general’s office also offered districts four possible 10 Commandment posters from which to choose for display in each classroom. Because those who drafted the law insist that the goal is to educate students and not offer them any specific religious guidance, the posters contain the text of the Commandments and additional factoids about their importance in American history. The posters are labeled “The House of Representatives & The Lawgivers, “The Supreme Court & The Lawgivers,” “Religion’s Role in American Public Education,” and “The Supreme Court & The Religion Clauses of the Constitution.”
From a design perspective, the posters look like they were designed in PowerPoint ’98. From an educational perspective, they fare worse. For example, the poster about the Constitution’s religion clause lists five Supreme Court cases and notes that some cases found displays of the Commandments constitutional and that other cases found displays unconstitutional; without explaining the background of any of the cases, the court’s logic, or any of the nuances between the varying rulings. It serves as little more than a bullet-point list of cases that have addressed the topic broadly.
All of the posters contain a blurb about how the 10 Commandments were printed in The New England Primer and the McGuffey Reader. Proponents included the paragraph because they say they want the 10 Commandments displayed because of how important they have been not only in the history of the country but in public education as a whole. It’s all about teaching students history, they say, and not about indoctrination.
Other than the poster specifically about education – which is still a stretch – the inclusion of the story about the New England Primer confuses the messaging. The poster that stands out the most with what I think is the intended message of the series, however, is “The House of Representatives & The Lawgivers. “
In addition to the text of the 10 Commandments and the blurb about the reader, it contains this text:
“Twenty-three marble relief portraits hanging over the gallery doors of the House Chamber in the U.S. Capitol depict historical figures noted for their work in establishing the principles that underlie American law. These lawgivers include notable figures like Hammurabi, Solon, and Thomas Jefferson. When the Speaker of the House assumes his position on the dais, he looks directly at yet another lawgiver, Moses. In fact, the Architect of the Capitol emphasizes that the 22 other lawgivers lining the Chamber walls are oriented “so that all look towards the full-face relief of Moses in the center of the north wall.”
On the poster itself, nine of the lawmakers in question are depicted in miniature, in addition to Moses. A second, large picture of Moses’ relief is placed to the left of the text of the commandments, while House Speaker Mike Johnson’s portrait is placed in the same size to the right. Above the picture of the relief is the text “Moses the Lawgiver,” while above Johnson’s portrait is his name and title. (I suspect that if Nancy Pelosi were still the speaker, she would not have been given the same prominence.)
Visually, the design gives Moses and the Speaker equal weight. Paired with the text, the layout communicates a message not about the history of how the 10 Commandments were used in schools. Instead, it places the Congress and especially the Speaker in the role of being direct successors to the great lawmakers of history and implies that – just as God handed down the law to Moses – God now dispenses the law through them. It is apostolic succession for a national religion that pays lip service to God because being able to claim divine inspiration baptizes all.
The Supreme Court poster makes similar hay about how Moses overlooks the Supreme Court (though it neglects to mention that Mohammad is also there), but it also makes a curious use of a quote by John Marshall: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” The quote is placed to the right of the 10 Commandments text, granting them both primacy of honor while saying that – deliverance by a prophet notwithstanding – the law is a matter of judicial application rather than authorial intent.
While that is, in reality, the truth of how things operate (at least assuming that people don’t feel free to ignore judges), it’s a strange text to place next to the 10 Commandments. Perhaps less strange, though no more illuminating, is the choice to place an image of William Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the Laws of England” to the left. The image has no additional explanation about why the commentaries are important other than the gloss at the top of the poster that mentions that Blackstone is etched in the Supreme Court’s bas-relief of historical lawgivers.
The text of the Commandments draws the eyes because it’s the biggest piece of gray space on the poster, but the placement of the Blackstone image to the left and the Marshall quote to the right immediately pull the viewer’s eyes to the side, implying that they are an obvious succession, a curious conclusion considering that Moses delivered the Commandments as part of a divine initiative, while Blackstone’s work was an 18th-century treatise on England’s common law — that is, law developed through judicial precedent rather than statutory language. Blackstone and Marshall make obvious complements, but the three together do not.
The message is, again — if one could be drawn from images presented without meaningful interpretation and a blurb about New England colonial education — incoherent at best. At worst, it disrespects the faiths that revere the Ten Commandments by placing them as only a waypoint in the development of the common law. It misses the obvious that in the biblical narrative Moses did not develop the laws through precedent.
Paired with the poster about the Congress, however, it’s a perfect encapsulation of a nationalist ethic trying to self-baptize: The laws we make by either legislation or litigation must be good because we are part of a long line of people descended from the prophets.
In the end, the people pushing the laws that required these posters are doing so because they believe, in some sense, that they have a divine mandate to convert the nation-state into one that is explicitly religious, where “freedom of religion” means that some religions are still favored over others. Some will admit it out loud. Others, however, will use poor public art pushed on a captive audience to try to make their case.
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