The First Table of the Law
THE FIRST TABLE OF THE LAW
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
The sort of religious fundamentalism that would really or virtually conjoin church and state in unholy matrimony that they might live in the sin of theocracy is obviously the greatest threat to human liberty and world peace today. From that ungodly constitution certain legitimate Christian fundamentalists disqualify themselves by rendering unto Caesar his worldly due and unto their god their spiritual faith, wherefore we exclude them so that we may speak only of the monstrous offspring of the marriage of church and state, called by Thomas Paine a "mule-animal."
"All religions are in their nature kind and benign," quoth Paine in Rights of Man, ".... How is it that they lose their native mildness, and become morose and intolerant? ... By engendering the church with the state, a sort of mule-animal, capable only of destroying, and not of breeding up, is produced, called the Church established by Law. It is a stranger, even from its birth, to any parent mother, on whom it is begotten, and whom in time it kicks out and destroys."
Paine thus voiced his objection to the "antipolitical doctrine" of the father of modern conservatism, Burke, who was preaching tradition over reason and chanting "Church and State." Then as today the regressive fraction ignored history or lied about it to maintain their tyrannical way. The ill effects of the satanic doctrine over the centuries were horrendous and disgraced Christianity even after what Heinrich von Treitschke identified in his Politics as "the great deed of Martin Luther." Treitschke was a premier propagandist of the doctrine that led Germany into the Great War and its sequel; despite the prejudices of his day, and the patriotic duty of German historians to express them, he was in many respects a good historian with considerable insight into politics. As far as he was concerned, a modern state is by definition secular - it cannot be Christian. Of course a nation of people without religion had never existed, and Germans were a Christian people - he said the slight admixture of Jew counted for nothing. Furthermore, he points out that the superiority of the Church over the State was once "neither inconsequent nor unnatural. It met, however, with the opposition of every sound secular state."
"In the freedom which followed upon the great deed of Martin Luther," wrote Treitschke, "the old doctrine was broken with forever, and not in Protestant countries only. It would, of course, be impossible to make a Spaniard understand that Spain owes the independence of her Crown to Luther. Yet it was he who first gave utterance to that great thought that the State is itself a moral organization, which need not rely uon the supporting arm of the Church. In doing so he rendered the greatest of all political services."
Alas, shortly after Luther's great deed, Protestants politicians proceeded to burn their own heretics at the stake over one doctrinal trifle or the other, and nations established Protestant religions which were in turn intolerant of dissent from the establishment's vain doctrines and injust laws.
"The resounding act of Martin Luther reawakened the inborn impulse of self-defence in the secular power," continues Treitschke. "State-supported churches were everywhere established, which at first sight bear a superficial though imperfect resemblance to the Caesaro-papalism of Eastern Europe. The temporal State put forward no claim to be deified, but became aware of its civilizing mission although with all the narrowness characteristic of new movements. This claim of the State was thus formulated by Melanchthon; the duty of the secular sovereign is the custodia utriusque tablulae (custody of the Two Tables of the Law), therefore also the guardianship of the First Table of the Law, which contains the first duty of man - to God. To preserve and uphold this pure doctrine of God and the things of God is one of the fundamental duties of authority.
"From this it follows that the sovereign is the head of the Church, and must himself conform to the true faith, moreover that unity of belief is the natural aim of political life. The French summarized these principles in the phrase, une foi, une loi, un roi (one faith, one law, one king), while the legal maxim in Germany is even more apt: cujus regio, ejus religio (whose region, his religion)."
That is to say that one should adopt the religion of the region in which he settles down; in those days that meant, "Like sovereign, like religion." The sovereign by divine right held the sword of life and death and it was therefore his duty to regulate both temporal and eternal affairs: supervise men's duties toward god, maintain moral order pursuant to religion, and so forth. There was a spiritual sword above the secular sword: the word of God, as it was interpreted and misinterpreted by the sovereign and his advisors from the kept classes.
Indeed it might be wise for a traveller when in Rome to do as Romans do, and to observe all religions in every region he passes through with the theoretical understanding that all religions worship one god; but today we would rather live in a free country where no man or combination of men can stand between a man and his god or conscience and blasphemously dictate to him the arbitrary will of a indefinite deity. Establishment religions, as Thomas Paine knew and every attentive schoolchild knows, whether they be Catholic or one of the Protestant cults, were abused by the kept classes and used as instruments of oppression. And that is one important reason why people emigrated from Europe to settle in North America.
But the pilgrims took their baggage with them, and the aspiring many were confronted by an intolerant few with charters and those few established virtual theocracies. Setting themselves up as landlords, the leaders spoke of Zion and of the terrifying land-god of Israel, using the old political religion for their own spiritual and material aggrandizement. The bigoted leaders of Massachusetts, for example, went so far as to hide the charter that provided all freemen with certain political powers. Membership in the Puritan church replaced the purchase of stock as the means of becoming a freeman. A prospective member had to undergo an ordeal of three-fold inquisition to gain entry, and then only by a special vote of the General Court might he become a freeman.
The colonial aristocrats called themselves Christians yet they were frustrated Hebrews with a vested interest in the First Table of the Law and the claim of its indefinite Lord, before or beside which no other landlord was allowed. "If any man after legal conviction shall have or worship any other God but the Lord God, he shall be put to death," read the 1642 Connecticut law. Ironically, many of the good people of Connecticut had fled Massachussets. They got their own government after proving their mettle in the Pequot Indian War. The 1639 charter of the "people" stated their goal: to preserve the purity of the Gospel; to discipline the churches; to provide civil laws. Some colonies were more tolerant than others: Rhode Island seems to have been most tolerant; Pennsylvania was not bad for Protestants; Maryland 's Lord Baltimore was a Catholic - to get settlers, he had to tolerate all sorts of Christians.
Something more was wanted in America than tolerance. Paine made a good point when he declared in the Rights of Man that, "Toleration is not the opposite of Intolerance, but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding Liberty of Conscience, and the other of granting it.... Toleration... places itself, not between man and man, nor between church and church, nor between one denomination of religion and anothers, but between God and man; between the being who worships, and the BEING who is worshipped; and by the same act of assumed authority which it tolerates man to pay his worship, it presumptuously and blasphemously sets itself up to tolerate the Almighty to receive it.
"Were a bill brought into any Parliament entitled, 'An Act to tolerate or grant liberty to the Almighty to received the worship of a Jew or a Turk,' or 'to prohibit the Almighty from receiving it,' all men would startle and call it blasphemy."
We might hope that every American schoolchild has learned that the struggle for liberty in the American Revolution was not only for freedom from political oppression in the form of monarchical tyranny but freedom from its traditional spiritual sword: the intolerant, one-god religion with its national landlord who says, "Take that land; it is yours, let the present inhabitants be damned to hell," then, once the land is seized, enslaves the people and kills them if they object or dare to look to another landlord or god. That strategy came in handy during the development of civilizations forged in bloody conflict, but that old-fashioned one-god and other one-gods after him are now dead although not completely rotted away. It is from that putrefying, blood-red carcass that the regressive faction which adores death would regenerate religious and political intolerance and destroy one of the most important accomplishments of the enlightened citizens of the living United States: the separation of Church and State. We speak not only of the formal, constitutional separation, but of the "virtual" separation we might enjoy by virtue of education and practice.
The separation of church and state has fostered our extraordinary plurality of faiths, our democracy, our prosperity. And the separation is not complete, hence there is room for further progress. Yet the regressive faction, fearful and jealous of freedom, would close the gap and abolish everyone else's freedoms but their own, wantonly casting aside the broad distribution of liberty so many have died for. The bigots are not satisfied with freedom of religion and conscience. The intolerant fundamentalists are not satisfied with having the word "god" identified with Coin so that all children get the blasphemous idea that God is Money and proceed to adulate and obey those who have the most of it. The religious right do not really care for the religious symbols they fight over; they worship Power and what they want is the power to destroy life and liberty in the name of the idealization of their self-hatred and resentment.
And that is precisely why anyone in their right mind will resist the strategic national and local campaigns of the religious right to establish a dead tribal-god theocracy, whether it be virtual or real, in any political division of the United States. The recent refusal of the Ten Commandment Judge - the now suspended chief justice of Alabama - to obey a legal order to remove a two and one-half ton shrine to the Decalogue from the courthouse rotunda, where he had inserted it in the middle of one night, is certainly an obvious albeit minor case that illustrates the regressive egoistic motive behind the scene. Evidently certain superstitious priests of the judical order still believe they are the sovereign's medieval custodians of the tables of the law, especially the First Table establishing the theocracy. We hear obiter dicta from the cloister that the United States is a Christian state; yet one of the greatest Christian insights is that those who depend on the law as if it were the rock of their salvation are damned. Furthermore, our state is in fact secular, not Christian; the state is by definition secular and must be just to all its citizens; there is no reference to "God" in our Constitution, and it expressly prohibits laws establishing religion. To designate the United States as a Christian state and to claim that its power is derived from a particular god, thus denying its legitimate source in the people, is exceedingly dangerous and even seditious.
The religious symbols are significant but the arguments over them of late serve more to distract attention from the born-again, right-wing authoritarian movement in the United States. A government office can be as devoid of religious trappings as a Quaker meeting house, yet that office can still have a right-wing, war-mongering, fanatic fundamentalist presiding in it - he might even claim that he is a Quaker whose political oath of office requires him to take off his religious hat in order to wage war on an evil empire of godless infidels. And a bigoted Christian judge can find a way to discriminate against homosexuals, Muslims, blacks and others regardless of the uniform laws under which all are expressly equal. No burning cross in the courtroom, or bible-thumping judges, or huge patriarchal shrines of the Decalogue inserted in public rotundas is really required to bridge the separation of church and state. Only the vigilance and wisdom of the people can maintain a wall between the two. People are falling down on that job lately with the rise of the religious right.
The danger of mixing right-wing power politics and old-time religion has been made more terrifying to many since the religious right helped get their favorites into the White House and other high offices - the elected and appointed all swore the usual ungodly hypocritical oath of office to set aside their personal principles and promises and to work for the whole people. They break almost every campaign promise yet they seldom work for the whole people. They are however true in one regard: they will not set aside the old-time god of land and war, of hypocrisy and self-contempt. And now the apocalypse preached by fundamentalist Christian and Muslim fanatics given over to the death instinct is increasingly likely to come true as more of them take office; in fact, their self-fulfilling prophecy, their wish for the world their god hates is dawning upon the world. It is no wonder that Pat Robertson could not help blurting out admiration for the diabolical work of Osama binLaden. And the presidential candidate Robertson supported, after saying he had "no mercy" for refusing to give a born-again Christian a thirty-day stay of execution - all he could give - speaks of "crusades" and of "good and evil." He says to our objections to war, "You are either for us or against us," as if all opposed are traitors. He lied about the reason for waging war. He spit in the face of the world assembly twice - he now begs for its help because things are not going as planned. He ignored the majority of his own people and the civilized world at the crucial moment. And he will not rest until he uses his pre-emptive presidential power to kill anyone deemed to be a threat to America. In the interim he plunges the nation into a deficit, gives hand-outs to the rich, and worries a lot about sodomy - he urges a law against same-sex marriage and reminds everyone else that they should not persecute sodomites as he would by law because everyone is a "sinner." Finally, he is said to be the best and most popular president that has ever lived, and that finally people have the leader they deserve.
We can thank god that the United States is not a theocracy at present given the gullibility of the fawning electorate. The United States seems to be becoming a virtual theocracy by default. Nonetheless, there are grounds for hope in future elections, that Christians and other lovers will not be fooled by the First Table of the Law. They will remember that the first thing YHWH had his magistrate do was to have 3,000 relatives and friends murdered for idolatry, that the killers be made holy baptized in the blood shed contrary to the first injunction on the lesser, Second Table of the Law: Thou shall not murder.
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