If only there were a list of things to do and not do

Perhaps you will think me unsophisticated with what follows. Maybe so! But --I will risk it, because the ideas are vital to our life together and need to be expressed clearly and without scholarly embellishments.

My contention is this, that a lot of philosophical debates among Christians might be avoided by agreeing on the necessary (if insufficient) importance of basing our life together explicitly on the Ten Commandments, as we did in our country up until the upheavals of the Sixties.

We could dispense as moot many endless, tiresome wrangles about whether our Founding is Lockean or Protestant or Modernist or secretly Traditional; about whether we should overthrow it and start anew with some sort of "integralist" rule, whatever that might be (and as if our hierarchy were in any condition to undertake it, could we identify it and could they be convinced). 

In any case, the debates would at least be more coherent, because the participants will have demonstrated that they take God at His word. (If you need the scholarly view to understand the importance of the Ten Commandments to any form of government, but especially to the "most perfect" one of the mixed Constitutional one, read this essay, Freedom and Decline, by Reuven Brenner.)

Today, even the most religious person forgets that the Ten Commandments were written/engraved on, over, or in every courthouse in the land and displayed on the board in every classroom. 

I am confident I can surprise you with the information that above the main door of City Hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that hotbed of Progressivism, exists to this day the following inscription in stone:

‘‘God has given Commandments unto Men. From these Commandments Men have framed Laws by which to be governed. It is honorable and praiseworthy to faithfully serve the people by helping to administer these Laws. If the Laws are not enforced, the People are not well governed.’’

Although Protestants were the majority in America and there is anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish bigotry in our history, children could be brought up in peace with each other and with reasonable hope of a decent life -- because there was a common reference point for the Good. 

Jews and Christians could agree on Thou Shalt Not, even in the breach. It's true, notably and regrettably, that there was some divorce, in violation of the Sixth Commandment. But there wasn't no-fault divorce, which came about just as the Commandments were being ripped down. The Commandments were taught in public school to every child; people knew what each commandment signified. Now even our clergy (and I include bishops!) are ignorant of them, and by any metric, moral intelligence and practice have gotten much worse.

Hypocrisy isn't the worst sin, we are discovering, as a moral vacuum threatens us. Don't misunderstand; I am aware that Modernism began before the 60s -- not decades before but at least 700 years before, with William of Ockham, some say. 

What I am arguing is that taking down the physical manifestation of the Ten Commandments from our public spaces along with the conscious teaching of them to children, something that necessarily acts as a moral "booster shot" to adults doing the teaching, has eviscerated our life together.

Our country with its Founding is what it is. Instead of wasting our energy trying to remake it, we should restore the Commandments -- we should make their restoration our keystone, our first object. (Note well that atheists target public manifestations of the Commandments whenever they have the opportunity. It matters. They weren't inscribed in actual stone for nothing.) Republics can work in that imperfect way that every society works; along with monarchies they are one possible way to organize society -- when they are based on the Ten Commandments.

Even our secular state worked, far better than many Catholic countries today. Tony Esolen makes the point that the political progressive of sixty years ago wouldn't have been caught dead defending something like "drag queen story time" because they had a lot more ordinary decency than many a conservative today. They certainly wouldn't have defended it, as some do today, on liberal grounds. 

They understood what we seem to miss, that if you don't maintain concrete (or better, stone) standards, life falls apart. Ultimately, those standards can be traced back to the irreducible standard of God's Law, made explicit in the Ten Commandments.

We sense that we need something (but strangely, we seem confused about what) to educate our children better. We lamely mention faulty catechesis and subside at the thought of the energy required to implement it and the resistance we'd find. 

If only there were a good guide of some sort, one with a truly trustworthy imprimatur... how much easier our task would be! We are hampered in finding the very guide given to us by God, however, by our tendency to reach for argumentation before we have offered principles, and by our acquiescence to the demand that we not reference Revelation.

Caught up in apologetics, which require a common moral vocabulary, we have almost abandoned reliance on revealed truth. We have cultivated the habit of looking at Revelation as less valid than logic, forgetting that God cannot be illogical or unreasonable, including in His precepts. Worried about the debunkers our children might encounter, we teach them responses to wrong thinking before we have taught them right thinking. We claim to reject relativism, but we ourselves do not accept givens.

We worry that our children will resist eternal truth, since resistance is all around us. If we begin as if they have already been subjected to spurious debunking (the kind that casts doubt on everything), and are in the post-debunked stage, we begin at the wrong end. 

In truth, children are pre-bunked and very open to precept, to receiving eternal truths as such.

This entrenched pedagogical mistake is most committed in the areas of science and morality. Science is the observation, explanation, and description of nature. Other inquiries (into causes) are not natural science, but they are still analysis. These discussions must take place, but the development of the child's scientific mind requires that first he must learn certain facts and habits, and he must learn to reason, before he can arrive at the intellectual ground from which he can discover the relationship of scientific facts to larger questions.

In the area of morality (or "religion" as we might think of it, forgetting that the object of religion is God, Who is Good -- that is, moral), we want to provide our children with explanations that protect them against errors before we provide them with precepts.

When struck by a general decay of morality in the populace, our tendency is to defend from the stance of rationalistic argument rather than to teach from the moral law; we are driven on to it by a thousand eager Masters in Theology, backed by the academic credentials of dozens of institutes dedicated to certifying them, when really we should be stating and memorizing and requiring the memorization of ... the Ten Commandments.

Remember Naaman the Syrian? He scorned the prophet's prescription for cleansing his leprosy -- he didn't expect to be told to dip in the River Jordan -- too simple. But the young servant girl pricked his pride.

We are in the same situation (but worse, because we don't even acknowledge the severity our disease; we don't see ourselves as suffering from moral leprosy). We can't help wanting the remedy for what ails us to be backed by some accredited authority. We aren't comfortable unless it involves a program administered by professionals, for which we would be required to offer payment.

Basic religion was expunged from our common life in 20th century upheavals. We see that. Yet we don't seek to remedy that tragedy by the straightforward means of restoring it. We accept the revolution and assume that a highly developed and abstract but essentially defensive replacement will bring about the desired result for those who are motivated; and those who are not motivated will have to do without, since they don't have the intellectual habits to participate. (We also continually water down the intellectual expression of the moral law in an attempt to package it for the masses, which carries its own risks.) In this way, we abandon the poor.

Today, the most devout and upright person, when asked how to combat moral decay, will respond with some lengthy involved plan that involves an intense inquiry into natural law and/or deep study of Thomas Aquinas; I have seen well meaning proposals for high school curricula that would be more suited to graduate school studies, even if our youth had familiarity with fundamentals, which they do not.

This regrettable method of teaching young people forms the habit of stressing codicils more than fundamental law, of focusing on exceptions over straightforward precepts. In this way, our young people will remain incapable of absorbing what they need most of all: that which is given. Certainly, those outside the scope of this misbegotten effort will remain ignorant of the Ten Commandments; for if the green wood knows not of them, the dry wood hasn't a chance.

Over-complication and manifest disobedience to God's expressed desire in Scripture and Liturgy for us to pass on and teach and love precisely His Law betrays the tradition handed down to us. Those who went before us did and understood what we do not. John Henry Newman, a religious thinker surely not lacking in subtlety and academic learning, put it this way:

"I am a link in a chain, a bond of connexion between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do his work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place — if I do but keep his commandments and serve him in my calling" (Meditations and Devotions, 301-2).

"If ye love Me, keep My Commandments" says the Lord. “Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. Make them known to your children and your children's children" we read in Deuteronomy. Without the Ten Commandments, we simply can't restore our culture.