Rewriting the Ten Commandments (A Trick of State)

In this episode, Word&Way President Brian Kaylor looks at legislation across the country that purports to want the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. But the version mandated by lawmakers cannot be found in any Bible. Kaylor unpacks where the edited language came from, why such legislation is an attack on religious liberty, and the legal battles over these laws.

This is the first episode of “A Trick of State,” a special occasional series from Dangerous Dogma. In this series, Kaylor will investigate underexplored issues at the intersection of church and state that expose the false promises of Christian Nationalism. This episode includes interviews with Mark Chancey (a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University and an expert in how the Bible is taught in public schools) and Rachel Laser (president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, one of the groups suing to stop these laws).

To get a better sense of the gerrymandered version of the Ten Commandments mandated by lawmakers in Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas, here are two images that show the edits. As the image below on the left shows. The parts in yellow are kept on the posters, the parts in red must be deleted, and the parts in green are added into the required text. Or, if you would rather think about it in terms of redacting like with the Epstein files, the image below on the right shows what the bills do to Exodus 20 by removing nearly two-thirds of the text.

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