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Heretic Adjacent | April 22, 2026
Once you strip the Exodus from Egypt out of the Ten Commandments, all you’ve got left is sanctified bossiness.
With nothing else of importance going on in the world, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that Texas can require the Ten Commandments to be posted in every public school classroom. Supporters are calling it a victory for religious freedom.
I want to suggest that it’s closer to the opposite.
But I need to say something first, because I know how this sounds. Religious progressives opposing Ten Commandments displays can look like exactly what our critics accuse us of being: people who’ve made peace with a secular age and dressed that accommodation up in theological language. So let me be clear. My objection isn’t that religion has no place in public life, but that what’s being posted on those classroom walls isn’t really religion at all. Not in any sense that the biblical tradition would recognize.
Here’s what I mean.
The Ten Commandments don’t begin with a commandment at all, but with a declaration: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Everything that follows: the commands about other gods, the Sabbath, and not murdering, stealing, or lying, hangs on that opening sentence.
The Decalogue is a covenant response to a specific, scandalous act of liberation; it’s not a law code that fell out of the sky. God took sides. Which is to say, God saw an enslaved people and got involved. The commandments are what life is supposed to look like on the other side of that intervention.
Excise that, and you don’t have the Ten Commandments anymore. You have ten commands. What you’ve got is obligation without grace, requirement without relationship, and law untethered from the God who issued it.
So, when it comes to imposing the Ten Commandments on children without any context, we’re not talking about a minor theological quibble, but a total inversion of what the text is trying to do.
If that’s true, we should ask the honest question: What exactly are the people behind this Ten Commandment initiative trying to put in front of children?
Because, if I’m honest, I don’t think it has anything to do with wanting students to encounter the God we find in Exodus. Because that God is, frankly, dangerous.
That God notices when people are being crushed and decides to do something about it.
That God isn’t interested in maintaining the social order.
That God liberates first and gives marching orders second. And the fundamental thing to understand, something that’s impossible to comprehend from laminated classroom posters, is that the instructions God gives are all focused on ensuring the community never recreates the conditions of Egypt among themselves.
Sabbath rest, on this reading, is explicitly anti-slavery legislation. “You shall not covet” covers economic ethics. The stony tablets are intended for a liberated people learning to live free within a community.
But that’s not what’s being posted on the wall, is it?
What’s being posted on the wall is a list of rules, abstracted from their story. And these rules are offered to children as the authoritative word of a God who, according to this way of thinking, is mostly interested only in their compliance.
And, let’s face it, a God like that is always useful to folks in power. But the God of Exodus, the God who issued those commandments, not so much.
Think about it: there’s a commandment, right there in the list, about taking the Lord’s name in vain. We’ve tended to domesticate that into a rule about profanity. But the older and more serious interpretation of that commandment centers on invoking God’s name in service of your own agenda. Put more politically, taking God’s name in vain has less to do with saying “Godd@mnit” than with claiming divine authority for what is, at bottom, a big ol’ human power move.
The prophets talked about this constantly. They had a specific word for the religion that serves the empire rather than challenging it: idolatry.
I’m not saying everyone who supports this ruling is cynical, trying to turn kids into evangelical Manchurian candidates. I think many of its supporters genuinely believe they’re doing something faithful.
But the road to idolatry has always been paved with that kind of sincerity. As I’m frequently reminded, it’s possible to be sincerely wrong.
The God who shows up in the first sentence of the Decalogue, the one worth actually engaging, doesn’t need the state’s help getting into classrooms. That God has a habit of showing up uninvited in inconvenient spaces and usually at the most awkward moments. It’s the same God who always seems to be taking the side of whoever’s getting bigfooted and making demands that the high octane folks find disadvantageous.
Unfortunately, a laminated poster isn’t going to do any of that.
But maybe that’s exactly the point.
Tony Dixon
The Rev. Derek Penwell
The Rev. Derek Penwell is Senior Minister at Douglass Blvd Christian Churchin Louisville, Kentucky.