Our Founding Fathers placed much emphasis on religion and morality when structuring the laws of our nation, and the Bible was their primary educational tool. From the Old Testament comes the Ten Commandments. Our first President, George Washington, warned us in 1789 that “religion and morality are indispensable supports for political prosperity”, cautioning against “assuming that morality can be maintained without religion.” The Bill of Rights amended the Constitution in 1791, and the First Amendment confirmed religious freedom: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Our second President, John Adams, said our Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious people as it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” For 170 years it was clear that religious freedom was an important pillar of America’s founding and tradition. Nowhere in the Constitution is there a provision requiring the separation of church and state.
In the 1960’s God and prayer were removed from public schools, and the Great Society programs were implemented which increased family dependence on government welfare programs which removed fathers from homes. In the 1970’s the Supreme Court set precedent when they ruled that (1) in the Lemon case that a law must have a primarily secular purpose to avoid running afoul of the First Amendment’s establishment clause, and (2) in the Roe case that there is a constitutional right to abortion.
However, in 2022 the Supreme Court set new precedent when they ruled in the Kennedy case saying the new standard is that a law must be consistent with the country’s “original meaning and history” in order to comply with the First Amendment, and going forward the Court will be abandoning the Lemon Test—which brings us back to George Washington and John Adams. Why were they so adamant about religion and morality?
Our Founding Fathers were rather educated and religious and came to America for religious freedom in their practice of Christianity. Their study of history included the collapse of ancient Greece in the second century B.C., and the fall of the Roman empire in the fifth century A.D., both of which resulted from the slow collapse of family structures and society. Historians noted that early Romans valued marriage, fidelity, and honor and looked down on self-indulgence. However, late Rome had an epidemic of divorces, sexual freedom, and frequent remarriages such that they became a form of legal adultery-prostitution resulting in low birth rates with the practice of infanticide and abortion. Translation, they lost all morality which resulted in population and society collapse—with a smaller tax base, declining economic productivity, declining military, eroding families— which made them susceptible to eventual invasions.
So, are the Ten Commandments important?
.Steve Gardes is a Certified Public Accountant and Certified Valuation Analyst with over 40 years of public accounting experience.
