Now, I'd always assumed that my instinctual, almost congenital opposition to governmental display of the Ten Commandments was a result of my strong belief in a clear separation of church and state -- good fences make good neighbors, eh? -- but this assumption was called into question one day when it occurred to me that I wouldn't be nearly so opposed to the public display of the Ten Commandments if they were required to be displayed with the corollary passage from the New Testament:
[O]ne of [the Pharasees], a lawyer, asked [Jesus] a question to test him. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (Matthew 22: 35-40)
So what's the difference here? Well, there's several.
In the first place, for far too many people, the Ten Commandments represent a "Dummy's Guide to Christianity." These people would rather not grapple with the contextual complexities present in both Old and New Testament narratives. Instead, they just want it all boiled down to ten "Thou Shalt Nots."
For an example of how a seemingly simple Commandment can become far more complicated when applied to actual people, consider "Thou shalt not commit adultery." When Jesus came across a crowd of people about to stone a woman for violating this Commandment, he defused the situation and dispersed the crowd, subtly directing the members of the crowd to focus more on their own sin than the woman's as they walked away. When everyone had left, Jesus asked the woman, "'Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?' 'No one, sir,' she replied. 'Neither do I condemn you,' said Jesus. 'Go away, and from this moment sin no more.'" (John 8: 10-11)
As you can see, this story raises all sorts of questions about a fairly straightforward Commandment, absolutely none of which are apparent if you just see this Commandment hanging on the wall of a school or courtroom. To the contrary, when stripped of their context, the Ten Commandments seem self-explanatory and almost self-executing -- all that they lack is an appendix with a sentencing guideline grid (though I'm sure there are many who would be happy to supply one). And that's a fairly compelling reason not to post them in such a fashion.
Which leads me to my second point. For the most part, not only are the people who post the Ten Commandments not interested in the Biblical context of the Commandments, many are not even interested in the actual contents of the Commandments themselves. Instead, people display the naked Ten Commandments as a way of signaling their belief that we, as a country, have carried separation of church and state too far and that we need to reintegrate "religious beliefs" (by which they mean puritanical moralism, not the true beliefs central to Christianity, but I digress) back into the public sphere, even if this means an implicit endorsement of religion by our government. As long as we stop short of creating a Church of the United States, they would argue, the Contitution is not violated.
Displaying the Ten Commandments along with the Great Commandment, on the other hand, sends a very different message; it provides a modicum of context, a guiding principle for the application and integration of these standards into our daily lives -- a "canon of construction" lawyers call it. And, as Jesus himself did in his encounter with the adulterous woman, a combined display of the Ten Commandments with the Great Commandment would shift the emphasis from condemning those who violate the Commandments to reminding each of us where we fall short in our lives and to continue to aspire to do better.
Actually, to take it one step further, the Great Commandment isn't the canon of construction for the law, Jesus himself is. Jesus said, "Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish but to complete them." (Mark 5:17) So the life, ministry, and teachings of Jesus are the lens though which we should study the law, and hanging the Ten Commandments alone on a wall doesn't do anything like this.
Don't get me wrong: I still oppose the posting of the Ten Commandments based solely on a separation of church and state argument. But what makes me angry at those who want to post the Commandments on every government-owned wall is that they are being disingenuous about the reasons they want them posted. As much as anything, they merely want to post the Commandments as a testament to their own piety. Jesus quotes a Pharisee as praying, "I thank you, God, that I am not grasping, unjust, adulterous like everyone else, and particularly that I am not like this tax collector here," (Luke 18:11); apparently one modern day version of this prayer is, "Thank you God that I'm not like the godless secular humanist heathen -- see, I even have the 10 Commandments hanging on my wall to prove it."
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