abstract: the state of Alabama's own voices of authority--the judges of the state's supreme court--have joined with a Federal district court to deny their visible subordination to God's Bible-revealed law

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by Gary North

Judge Roy Moore, who is Chief Justice of Alabama's state Supreme Court, made a decision to bring a 5,300-lb. monument of the Ten Commandments into the state's supreme court building. The Federal court system has intervened to demand that this invasion of God-free civil sovereignty, which includes state and local civil courts, be removed forthwith. Moore has refused to comply. All of the other justices of the state's Supreme Court have concurred with the Feds. He has still refused.

Understand what this means. The state of Alabama's own voices of authority--the judges of the state's supreme court--have joined with a Federal district court to deny their visible subordination to God's Bible-revealed law.

Fundamentalists are now gathering around the Alabama Supreme Court building to protest the removal of the monument. These fundamentalists, dispensationalists to the core, have spent their lives insisting that "we're under grace, not law." Their theology rests on a rigid separation of Israel from the church, meaning Israel's civil law-order from the New Testament. It also rests on the traditional Baptist insistence on a rigid separation of church and state. Yet they now rally to Judge Moore.

I say, more inconsistency to them. The Feds are consistent. They want all traces of the God of the Bible out of the American civil court system. The fundamentalists are inconsistent. They want a symbol of the God of the Bible--just not the substance of biblical law--in the civil court system. The Feds fully understand the importance of symbols. The fundamentalists are slowly coming to an awareness of the importance of symbols. But, with respect to the actual laws of the Bible, the fundamentalists still declare, "we're under grace, not law," which means "we're under humanist lawyers." They are not yet aware that this is what "we're under grace, not law" means, but they don't trust the Feds.

This battle is analogous to the political battle over flying the Confederacy's stars & bars over state capitol buildings. The South is as committed to state-run education as ever, as committed to the use of high school textbooks written by the heirs of Yankees and published by New York City publishing houses. But they still want their one symbol of defiance against the Feds: the stars & bars.

They believe that a football game between two tax-funded schools just isn't meaningful without the good old stars & bars flying on car radio antennas. They think the same thing about humanist-run court houses. It's the symbol that counts for them, not the substance.

The humanists want both: content and symbol. They press for consistency in the courts, the schools, and everything else that the state touches, which for them means everything they can get their hands on by means of state money and state power. Their opponents resist in the name of symbol divorced from content. In a war to obtain control over a system of state power that is funded by other people's tax money, the consistent, self-conscious, full-time power grabbers whose religion is the exercise of power will defeat the inconsistent, inexperienced power grabbers whose religion is an emotion-filled escape from responsibility.

You would think from media accounts that this battle over the Ten Commandments were some recent battle. It isn't. Moore placed the Ten Commandments over his bench in 1997. He was making a statement: he is under God's Bible-revealed law. He keeps escalating the battle over symbols.

Symbols are important. They reveal hierarchies. A symbol represents a larger order. It is a kind of shorthand for that larger order. Moore has gone to the heart of the matter for civil law. It must either be under God's Bible-revealed law or some other law-order, meaning some other god. The Feds understand the implications of what Moore is doing. The fundamentalists have begun to figure it out, but only because the Feds did first.

Thus it has always been. When the Sanhedrin told the Roman authorities to place a guard on the tomb where Jesus' body lay, they offered this excuse to Pilate:

Sir, we remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive, After three days I will rise again. Command therefore that the sepulchre be made sure until the third day, lest his disciples come by night, and steal him away, and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead: so the last error shall be worse than the first (Matt. 27:63-64).

They had understood Jesus' words, and they remembered them. Meanwhile, the disciples were scattered to the four corners of Judea. They had no clue as to what Jesus had said about His resurrection or what was about to happen.

Those who are the targets of Jesus' looming wrath pay closer attention to the implications of His teaching regarding His law and sanctions than His disciples do. When Jesus taught the Jews that the kingdom was about to be removed from them (Matt. 21:43), they understood. His disciples didn't. After His resurrection, they asked Him: "Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?" (Acts 1:6 b). They were still without a clue. But the Pharisees weren't.

The fundamentalists have some vague awareness that Roy Moore is on God's side and the Federal court system isn't. One fundamentalist pastor who was interviewed by one of the network TV crews called on Christians around the country to come to Alabama to take a stand. There is nothing like outside agitators to stir the pot in Alabama!

This has been the fate of Alabama since 1861. Outside agitators are always stirring Alabama's pot: Federal troops, the Ku Klux Klan, more Federal troops, and now a non-representative enclave of fundamentalists who have begun to wake up to symbols of God's law, and who are taking a stand against that which they have spent their lives defending. Former Dallas Theological Seminary professor S. Lewis Johnson articulated dispensationalism's view of the Ten Commandments four decades ago:

At the heart of the problem of legalism is pride, a pride that refuses to admit spiritual bankruptcy. That is why the doctrines of grace stir up so much animosity. Donald Grey Barnhouse, a giant of a man in free grace, wrote: "It was a tragic hour when the Reformation churches wrote the Ten Commandments into their creeds and catechisms and sought to bring Gentile believers into bondage to Jewish law, which was never intended either for the Gentile nations or for the church." He was right, too.1

The pietist-humanist alliance has worked for over a century to silence men like Roy Moore. But, from time to time, a few fundamentalists--mostly laymen--awake from their slumber, make a few noises, and then go back to sleep.

But a few of them stay awake each time. They look around, see that the public institutions of this country have been captured by their enemies, who are now using the fundamentalists' tax money to finance the humanist agenda, and they conclude, "Wait a minute. This isn't right." They pull their children out of the tax-funded schools.

This is the crucial step. To stand in front of the court house in Alabama is a nice symbolic gesture. I'm all for it. But fundamentalists who take their stand should be aware of the obvious: this battle will be lost. It was lost in 1788 when the U.S. Constitution was ratified. Article III, Section VI forbids religious test oaths as a requirement to hold Federal office. Trinitarian test oaths were a nearly universal requirement in the colonies prior to 1788. This restriction was extended downward to the least office in the land, notary public, in 1961 (Torcasso v. Watkins). I surveyed all of this in Part 3 of my book, Political Polytheism, back in 1989. It was perhaps my least popular book.2

So, the monument will be removed from the building.

Maybe Judge Moore will resign his seat and run for Governor or the U.S. Senate. Maybe he will try to rally the fundamentalist troops, and, in doing so, will lead them out of Egypt's tax-funded schools into the Promised Land of parent-funded education. But, more likely, they will wander in the wilderness for forty years, seeking tax vouchers for their private Christian schools. I wrote about this over a quarter century ago. I even debated Milton Friedman. But my warning has yet to affect the thinking of those few Christians who defend Christian education, other than the home schoolers.3

God's people learn slowly. They learn mainly from their enemies' consistency and the application of force by their enemies. They never learn their lessons directly from the Bible. They deeply resent being reminded of their own inconsistency.

And the officers of the children of Israel did see that they were in an evil case, after it was said, Ye shall not diminish ought from your bricks of your daily task. And they met Moses and Aaron, who stood in the way, as they came forth from Pharaoh: And they said unto them, The Lord look upon you, and judge; because ye have made our savour to be abhorred in the eyes of Pharaoh, and in the eyes of his servants, to put a sword in their hand to slay us (Ex. 5:19-21).

Judge Moore may try to serve as a regional Moses, but if he does, he can expect resistance from the regional elders of Israel, i.e., the pastors of the South. He is getting away with his actions today mainly because the elders know that their allies, the Federal courts, will demand the removal of the despised monument. Those who have applauded Moore are not the movers and shakers of the ecclesiastical community. The only prominent supporter is Jerry Falwell, whose influence has waned over the last two decades. (While Dr. James Dobson has publicly supported Moore, he is not a pastor. His influence with pastors is indirect.)

Moore's followers are there because they perceive him as an enemy of the enemy: the humanist state. They are rallying because of who he is opposing, not what he is opposing them with: the Ten Commandments. This is a familiar phenomenon. Hans Sennholz has said that West Germany's economic miracle after June, 1948, was possible politically only because economics minister Ludwig Erhard, a disciple of free market economist Wilhelm Roepke, unilaterally lifted the price and wage controls that had been imposed by conquering forces. Erhard's action was seen by the German people as an act of national defiance. They had suffered under a much worse system of controls under Hitler, but Hitler, an Austrian-born socialist, had gotten away with it.

One by one, year by year, leaders arise from the ranks of the laymen, who in turn wake up a few more of the faithful who are snoring in the pews. Issue by issue, the somnambulant few awake, rub their eyes, and say, "How did all this happen?"

The broad masses of pew-sitters, like their pastors and the seminary faculties that train them, have yet to conclude that abortion is legalized murder. We should therefore not expect anything from tens of millions of Christian voters, who are the largest potential voting bloc in this country, except the usual grumbling--not against the Federal courts, of course, but against inside agitators like Judge Moore.

The Ten Commandments were the foundation of Western civilization. Legal theorist John Eidsmoe surveyed this in a recent article.4

But the Ten Commandments lead to theonomy, which means theocracy, as Rushdoony argued in The Institutes of Biblical Law three decades ago. Not many fundamentalists are ready to walk down that dusty road. So, Judge Moore will find few long-term, full-time supporters from the ranks of the fundamentalist troops. Most fundamentalists would rather live under the Feds than under the Ten Commandments and their corollaries.

Gary North is the author of over three dozen books on economics, the Bible, social theory, education, and history.

Endnotes

1. S. Lewis Johnson, "The Paralysis of Legalism," Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. 120 (April/June1963), p. 109. The book he cites is by fundamentalist Presbyterian Barnhouse: God's Freedom, p. 134.

2. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989). This book is available at http://www.freebooks.com/docs/21f2_47e.htm.

3. See http://www.libertyhaven.com/politicsandcurrentevents/educationhomeschoolingorchildren/educvouch.html, and http://www.libertyhaven.com/theoreticalorphilosophicalissues/feminism/friedmannorth.shtml

4. http://www.chalcedon.edu/report/2003feb/eidsmoe.shtml

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