The Ten Commandments and the Apostasy of Modern Law

The Ten Commandments and the Apostasy of Modern Law

A federal judge has blocked Texas from enforcing its law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. District Judge Fred Biery argued that the measure risks coercing children into religious observance and even suggested that schools might instead display secular aphorisms such as those found in Robert Fulghum’s All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has vowed to appeal, insisting that the Commandments are “a cornerstone of our moral and legal heritage.”¹

This ruling follows a similar setback in Louisiana in 2024, when a federal court declared that state’s Ten Commandments law “coercive.” By contrast, Oklahoma has required Bible instruction in schools, citing its cultural and historical importance.² The conflict reveals a deepening divide over whether the United States may still acknowledge the religious roots of its moral order.

A forgotten foundation
The Decalogue has never been merely a religious ornament but the revealed law of God, confirmed in natural law, and once embedded in civil order. Medieval Christendom made its principles the basis of both canon and civil codes: Sunday rest, protection of family and marriage, the criminalisation of perjury, theft, and blasphemy, and the recognition that all authority is ultimately accountable to God. Monarchs swore coronation oaths to uphold God’s law, and judges were bound to measure their rulings against it.

America too once shared in this inheritance. The 1641 Massachusetts Body of Liberties criminalised blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking; the 1646 New Haven Code explicitly grounded its statutes in biblical texts.³ Even into the nineteenth century, “blue laws” mandating Sunday rest reflected the conviction that divine law was the necessary structure of public life.

The U.S. Supreme Court itself affirmed this heritage. In Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States (1892), Justice Brewer declared: “Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. This is a Christian nation.”⁴ What was then considered the common foundation of civil society is today treated as unconstitutional.

Revolutionary precedents
This apostasy is not unique to America. Revolutionary France abolished the Lord’s Day, replacing it with a ten-day “décade,” and redefined morality as civic utility. The consequence was the Terror, where the state itself dictated virtue and vice.⁵ In nineteenth-century Mexico, the Leyes de Reforma stripped the Church of legal standing, imposed secular marriage, and banished the Decalogue from civil law. The result was decades of instability and persecution, culminating in the Cristero War of the 1920s.⁶ In both cases, the rejection of God’s law brought not liberty but violence, tyranny, and disorder.

Modern deficiencies
So too today: where the Fifth Commandment once safeguarded the sanctity of life, modern law authorises abortion to birth and euthanasia on demand. Where the Sixth and Ninth Commandments upheld marriage and family, law now redefines marriage and refuses to distinguish between moral and immoral sexual conduct. The Seventh Commandment’s defence of property is betrayed by systemic usury and exploitation; the Eighth Commandment’s demand for truth is flouted by disinformation and perjury that go unpunished.

The consequence of severing law from God’s law is that morality becomes a matter of consensus. If murder is wrong only because society presently agrees it is wrong, then society may just as easily agree tomorrow that it is right. Law, untethered from the divine, becomes merely an instrument of power.

The Catholic response
The Church has consistently warned of this danger. Pope Leo XIII declared that true liberty is not license but obedience to the eternal law.⁷ Pope Pius XI taught that states which reject Christ’s Kingship “hasten to their ruin.”⁸ To remove the Ten Commandments from classrooms is not neutrality but denial. It tells the young that God’s law has no bearing on civic life, and in doing so it ensures the collapse of civic life into disorder.

St Augustine warned that kingdoms without justice are nothing but bands of robbers. America now faces the same danger as revolutionary France and Mexico: a state which speaks of rights while undermining their source, and which proclaims freedom while drifting toward arbitrary power.

The Old Roman Apostolate insists that only by acknowledging the sovereignty of Christ and the binding force of His law can peace and justice endure. To exclude the Decalogue from public schools is to deny future generations the compass of true liberty.

¹ CNA Staff, “Federal judge blocks Texas from displaying Ten Commandments in public schools,” Catholic News Agency, Aug. 21, 2025.
² Ibid.
³ Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641); New Haven Code (1646).
⁴ Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892).
⁵ French Revolutionary “décade” calendar reforms (1793–1805).
⁶ Mexican Constitution of 1857 and the Leyes de Reforma (1855–1863).
⁷ Leo XIII, Immortale Dei (1885), §31.
⁸ Pius XI, Quas Primas (1925), §24.