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Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, The Humanist, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332-9416), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.
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Ronald A. Lindsay, a philosopher, lawyer, and former CEO of the Center for Inquiry, discusses secularism, religious influence on law, and the Ten Commandments’ role in American history. He argues that morality predates religious doctrines, citing historical legal codes like the Code of Hammurabi. Lindsay critiques Christian nationalist claims, noting that American law is fundamentally secular. He highlights that religious, moral frameworks often project human values onto deities. Addressing objections, he refutes the idea that atheism undermines morality, emphasizing cooperation and social trust as its foundation. He warns against individuals using religious justification to override secular law.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we are here with Ronald A. Lindsay. He is a philosopher, lawyer, and author who has worked extensively in secularism and the critical analysis of religious claims. That sounds like an interesting job. He served as the president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry from 2008 to 2016 and has been a vocal advocate for reason, science, and free inquiry. As a senior research fellow at Free Inquiry, Lindsay critiques claims about religion’s role in law and society.
His books include The Necessity of Secularism: Why God Can’t Tell Us What to Do and Against the New Politics of Identity: A Critique of the Contemporary Social Justice Movement. He frequently writes on secular ethics, legal philosophy, and the misrepresentation of religious influence in government. Is all of that correct?
Lindsay: I’m particularly proud of The Necessity of Secularism, published in 2014. I like it because it has sold better than any of my other books. I still receive royalties from it. It’s not a large check, but it’s enough to pay for a few cocktails each year, which is nice.
Jacobsen: Well, since you mentioned “royalty,” as a Canadian, I suppose I should happily acknowledge that term, given our constitutional monarchy. Now, let’s talk about the Ten Commandments. You may have heard of them.
How are people justifying the claim that the Ten Commandments are foundational to American law? A side note: American demographics have followed the trajectory of most advanced industrial economies, although the United States is an outlier due to its slow decline in religious adherence. However, Christian practice and affiliation in the U.S. have dropped significantly in recent years.
Lindsay: Yes. This myth, a misunderstanding, has likely been around for a long time. However, it has taken on special significance in the last several decades—particularly since the 1960s—when the Supreme Court clarified that the First Amendment should be interpreted strictly and that public schools should remain secular.
The Court ruled against school-led prayer and Bible readings, and many Americans have never fully accepted those rulings.
For decades, efforts have been made to reinstate prayer or incorporate religious teachings back into schools. One strategy has been placing posters of the Ten Commandments in classrooms. This effort has been ongoing for years. In Stone v. Graham (1980), the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that a Kentucky law requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms was unconstitutional.
However, in recent years, the movement has gained momentum again. Louisiana recently passed a law requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in all public school classrooms. Texas, Oklahoma, and other states are considering similar legislation.
Louisiana’s law is currently being challenged in Court, as it violates Supreme Court precedent. However, its supporters hope that the current Supreme Court, which has taken a more favourable stance toward religious expression in public life, will uphold the law.
Proponents of these measures recognize that previous Supreme Court rulings have struck down overtly religious mandates in public schools. As a result, they have attempted to frame their justification in secular terms. Their argument is, “No, we’re not trying to impose religion on children; we’re just acknowledging the historical influence of the Ten Commandments on American law.”
“No, we don’t care whether they believe in God or not—it has nothing to do with that or whether they’re Christian. But this is part of our national heritage because the Ten Commandments provide the foundation for American law.” And unfortunately, this is a misstatement, fabrication, lie—however you want to characterize it. It’s false.
It’s a falsehood that has been echoed by the House of Representatives, which has passed resolutions endorsing it. Various Supreme Court justices have echoed it. So it has, in some eyes, some currency and legitimacy, which inspired me to write the article I did for Free Inquiry. In it, I set forth, in fairly clear terms, the reasons why that claim is not true.
The Ten Commandments are in no way the foundation for American law.
Jacobsen: Now, the foundational principle appears to be the notion that God is good, that any goodness in morality or ethics comes from some transcendent or divine access point. Why is that wrong, particularly when applied to murder, theft, and perjury?
Lindsay: Yes, well, why it’s wrong, especially in the context of the Ten Commandments—I think some people have this naive idea, certainly if you take the idea that the Ten Commandments are foundational for law, that somehow before Moses came down from Mount Sinai—which is a legend anyway, but we won’t get into that—there was moral anarchy, that there was lawlessness among all people before that, which is not the case.
Human society could not have survived if there were no basic moral principles—whether intuitive, outlined in writing, or what have you—that governed interactions among people, right? You have to be able to, among other things, refrain from knocking the brains out of someone next to you, taking their property, or materially engaging in deceit.
So, laws prohibiting violence, especially murder, laws prohibiting theft, and laws prohibiting material deceit, including perjury, have existed in societies long before Moses, ancient Judea, or what have you.
The Code of Hammurabi, for example—dating to around 1700 BCE, depending on your chronology for Moses, which places him five, six, or seven hundred years later—contains detailed laws. And again, these laws prohibit what laws normally prohibit: just what we discussed—maiming, killing, theft, lying under oath, and things of that sort.
So, the core principles many people identify as fundamental to the Ten Commandments existed long before the Ten Commandments. And again, if you take a moment to reflect on it, clearly any human society—a society where people actually lived together and cooperated—would have to establish principles like these to function. It’s just basic.
So, right away, you’ve removed at least three of the Ten Commandments, depending on how you count them—and that’s a whole other issue since there is no uniform version of the Ten Commandments. But you’ve removed what many people would regard as their core elements.
Jacobsen: So, with the Code of Hammurabi, you could think of the Ten Commandments as a software update to those laws. But that software update is over 2,000 years old. So why are we trying to impose laws from more than two millennia ago on contemporary society—especially when international institutions like the United Nations base their codes on universalist ethics like human rights?
Lindsay: Well, that’s a good question. Again, I think this is a reaction to many people’s sense—that the values they once held are losing their footing. That understandably causes some anxiety and distress.
One way to relieve that distress is to try to impose those values—fundamentalist Christian values—on others and claim that this is the way it should be. This is the basis for morality and law.
That’s not a good argument. Still, psychologically, you can see why people might be motivated to take that stance. But there’s something else worth mentioning. We talked about murder, perjury, and theft.
Looking at the rest of the Ten Commandments, it becomes even clearer why they can’t be the foundation of American law. Several of them have never influenced American law—or, to my knowledge, any other legal system.
Take coveting your neighbour’s possessions. Well, that’s the basis for capitalism. Consumerism is fueled by coveting what your neighbour Joe or Mildred has.
Coveting your neighbour’s wife? Yes, it’s frowned upon, but it’s a thought crime—having a desire for someone else. That has never been the subject of law.
Honouring one’s parents? That may be a moral injunction—yes, we should be kind to our parents—but it’s never been a legal principle. And finally, the First Commandment—Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Certainly, in terms of American law, that has never been enforced.
There were established churches in some of the colonies, and even after independence, some states maintained established churches for a few years. But there was never a prohibition on worshiping outside the established church.
So, the idea that American law was built on a uniform religious belief is simply false. By this point, we’ve covered at least six or seven of the Ten Commandments, depending on how you count them. They’ve had no effect—let alone a foundational effect—on American law.
Jacobsen: Even if we grant their premise—which we’ve been analyzing already—that the Ten Commandments are well-grounded and should be imposed, what about the fundamental premise of the Bible itself? The claim that the Bible is true and that the Ten Commandments are justified as a moral document.
Lindsay: Well, if you accept that argument, you must accept that the Bible is true—and that’s ultimately a question of faith.
Of course, this leads to a whole host of swirling theological debates about how to interpret the Bible. As everyone knows, there are dozens—if not hundreds—of Protestant denominations.
The Catholic Church is much less unified than it once was. You have the Eastern Orthodox Church and then, of course, Judaism, which accepts significant portions of the Bible but interprets them differently.
So, which interpretation is correct? That becomes a whole separate issue. And finally, we arrive at the fundamental philosophical question: Is something moral because God says it is?
Or does God declare something moral because it is inherently moral? This is the dilemma Plato posed long ago—the Euthyphro dilemma.
If you take the first position—that something is moral simply because God says so—you run into the problem of differing interpretations of what God has said, right? And why is it the God of the Bible as opposed to the God of the Quran or the deities of Hindu scriptures?
So, ultimately, trying to base morality on God does not provide a stable foundation—certainly not one that is beyond question. When you dig deeper, you see that what we really believe is based on our moral intuitions.
If you discuss with someone which God is the “true” God, the argument quickly shifts. Someone might say, “Well, God wouldn’t approve of that.” Or “God wouldn’t approve of what Muslims believe.” Or, “God wouldn’t approve of what Catholics do.”
But those arguments aren’t based on divine authority but on human moral reasoning. So, ultimately, people decide what God says based on their own moral intuitions. This shows that the basis for morality is our moral framework, which we then project onto the deity.
We assume that because we see something as moral, God must approve of it. Once we believe this, we feel like we have divine approval, which gives our beliefs an illusion of legitimacy. But in reality, we’re projecting our moral sensibilities onto an imagined authority figure that we think grants us a veneer of respectability. And it doesn’t.
Jacobsen: In the United States, the Christian population is a little shy of two-thirds. However, many Christians do not identify as Christian nationalists—either explicitly by name or implicitly through their beliefs.
So how are those Christians—and others like yourself and myself, who are non-religious—perceiving this Christian nationalist movement? It’s not just about putting up giant Ten Commandments tablets at state courthouses or legislatures—where, inevitably, a Satanist group will demand to place a Baphomet statue beside them.
It’s about Christian nationalism being used to shape governance across nearly every major institution in the United States. It’s not just symbolic; it’s an attempt to enforce religious principles pervasively, even over non-religious people and Christians who disagree with that vision.
Lindsay: Yeah, well, to put it mildly, there will be some resistance.
Right now, the United States is in a volatile political moment. There are so many fast-moving efforts to reshape policy across multiple areas, particularly under the Trump administration at this time. People who oppose these moves are still figuring out the right strategy for resisting them.
But at the end of the day, both secular people and—lacking a better term—progressive or liberal Christians will likely find common cause in pushing back against the more extreme efforts to impose religious beliefs on society.
This is not just about schools—it’s about the broader attempt to influence laws and governance in general. That resistance will happen. How successful it will be remains to be seen. The unfortunate reality is that Trump has had a very compliant Congress.
He has demonstrated this by confirming his cabinet nominees, even when some were unqualified by any objective standard.
Jacobsen: I thought it was a meritocracy!
Lindsay: That’s it. Well, that’s the irony. The whole push against DEI—I want to be fair. I think some Democrats, in some ways, pushed DEI in a way that was counterproductive. Some of the interpretations that were made…
Jacobsen: Identity politics 2.0.
Lindsay: Right. And so they opened the door for this reaction. Of course, Trump isn’t using a scalpel to reform how DEI was being applied—he’s using a bludgeon and just eliminating it. But then the whole premise behind that is, “We need to go back to strictly relying on merit.”
Obviously, “merit” for him means subservience to him because otherwise, there’s no way to rationalize the selection of Tulsi Gabbard as the Director of National Intelligence. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a person who knows nothing about health and is anti-vaccine, was chosen as the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Pete Hegseth—who has had many personal issues—had only run two non-profits into the ground before being put in charge of the largest bureaucracy in the government. It’s just astonishing. So, yeah, to get back to your question, I think there will be resistance to what Trump is doing—there already is.
But in particular, when it comes to imposing religious values—whether it’s through education policy or efforts like prosecuting physicians who prescribe mail-order abortion pills—I think there will be strong resistance. And I’m hopeful, at least, that the Christian nationalist agenda will ultimately fail.
Jacobsen: Are any parts of the Ten Commandments unique compared to other legal systems?
Lindsay: I’m curious if there are any.
“Taking the Lord’s name in vain” arguably could be, as I mentioned in my article for Free Inquiry, in all fairness, that may have influenced early American law because blasphemy laws were on the books in several states.
They were rare, but there were occasional blasphemy prosecutions. By the end of the 19th century, most states had abandoned those laws. And when the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment applied to the states—not just the federal government—those laws became dead letters anyway.
But for some time, that commandment may have been unique. I can’t say for certain—I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of legal systems in every country, particularly in Asia—but it may be unique. Again, that’s a long way from saying the Ten Commandments had a foundational effect on American law.
Jacobsen: I see a lot of this. I’ve tried to characterize it for a long time as a situation where most of the world espouses some form of transcendentalist, divine, religious ethics.
You have Hindu nationalists, Muslim-majority countries, Christian-majority countries—huge portions of the global population. Buddhists could be included in that as well.
However, the one ethical system that everyone adheres to in practice—one that is not confined to a region, a country, or a small rural community—is what I would consider secular because it does not invoke religion: human rights.
Human rights are based on principles of universalism. These universal, secular human rights are not necessarily in fundamental opposition to religious and moral systems. Still, they are much fairer because they incorporate freedom of religion and belief.
So, is there anything comparable in biblical teachings that leans toward a universalist point of view—something similar to what we see in modern ethics, like human rights?
Lindsay: Some people have tried to argue that there is.
But if we look at what Christians call the Old Testament—the Torah for Jews—there is nothing in it that is truly universalist. Ancient Judaism was very much a tribal religion, as evidenced by how non-Hebrews were treated. The slaughter of the Canaanites, for example, was explicitly sanctioned by God.
Some people have claimed that Jesus preached something resembling universalism, and you can interpret certain Gospel verses similarly. There may be a hint of that. However, regarding how Christendom interpreted Jesus’ teachings for centuries, universal human rights were never part of the equation.
That’s made clear by the fact that Christian churches fully accepted slavery. Slavery was not just tolerated—virtually all Christian denominations gave it explicit approval until the anti-slavery movement gained momentum in the 1700s.
So, for 1,700 years, the Christian Church not only failed to oppose slavery but, in many cases, actively justified and supported it. And it’s not just church history; biblical texts themselves reflect this.
Not so much in the words of Jesus, but in the Gospels and epistles, you see clear indications that slavery was accepted. For instance, some of Paul’s letters explicitly instruct enslaved people to obey their masters.
So, today, we recognize slavery as morally repugnant—certainly in light of universal human rights, as embodied in the UN Charter. But historically, Christianity did not lead the way in establishing those rights. Instead, it accommodated and even reinforced systems of oppression that modern human rights frameworks have had to dismantle.
That’s something that is regarded as morally repugnant. It’s highly immoral and impermissible. Again, to be fair, some of the sayings attributed to Jesus of Nazareth might hint at respect for humanity in general. However, the Enlightenment produced a well-developed theory of human rights as we understand it today.
The notion of human rights didn’t truly emerge until the late 1700s when people started writing about it systematically. With some exceptions—some of the Stoics talked about global rights—the human rights movement didn’t take shape until the 18th century as a broader movement, at least among the educated classes.
Jacobsen: What counterarguments do you usually encounter when making secular, skeptical, and humanistic arguments?
Lindsay: The most common one is easily refuted, but you hear it often.
And, usually not from well-educated people. It’s the idea that “If you don’t believe in God, then anything goes. If there’s no divine authority, people can do whatever they want.”
You’ll hear things like, “It’s all subjective. So if you say it’s okay to rape a child, then it’s okay, right?” Or, “If morality is subjective, then Jeffrey Dahmer eating someone is just his personal choice, and you can’t say it’s wrong.”
That conversation usually ends quickly. Among more sophisticated believers, the argument is more nuanced. They’ll often say, “There has to be some objective foundation for morality. We’re not saying atheists can’t be moral—we know they can—but they’re still relying on the moral heritage of Christianity or Judaism.”
A common analogy I’ve heard is that atheists are like people living in a house that Christianity built. They didn’t build the house but still got to live in it, even though they no longer acknowledged the source. This argument is framed in a more diplomatic and intellectually engaging way, as opposed to the outright hostility of those who claim, “You’re a horrible person if you don’t believe in God.”
But at the end of the day, it still comes down to the same assumption—that you need a deity to have an objective foundation for morality. The real foundation of morality is this: people need to ask, “What does morality do?” Because if morality doesn’t do something practical for us, why would we even have it? Morality serves a function. It helps societies thrive, regulates behaviour, and fosters cooperation.
It allows us to live together in peace, to foster cooperation, to foster trust, and to enable us to work together to improve our conditions. That’s really why we have all these moral rules—to enable us to progress together because progressing together makes things much easier.
We have to rely on each other, especially in a society with so much division of labor and specialization. And to rely on each other, we need trust. To have trust, we need to count on others—they will do what they say they will do.
I don’t have to worry about this person stealing from me or killing me, or what have you. So, morality’s objective basis is simple: it allows us to live together in peace and prosperity. You don’t need anything more objective than that.
Jacobsen: What about those who use religious ideology—like the Ten Commandments—as an ethical justification for completely abrogating authority and ignoring the secular law that everyone else abides by? The idea is, “It’s a law for thee, but not for me, because God is above all that, and I am merely a conduit and instrument of God. Therefore, I can justify my actions through that.”
Lindsay: Sure, and there are people like that. Fortunately, at least nowadays, in the West, that remains a minority viewpoint. But yes, some people do believe that “God’s law” prevails over secular law—whatever that secular law happens to be.
And obviously, we can’t tolerate that. The United States is a secular republic. Most Western democracies, even if they have religious traditions—Britain, for example, still has a monarchy that supposedly rules “by the divine grace of God”—are fundamentally secular.
Secular law has to govern. Because ultimately, what you’re saying when you claim divine authority is that someone can decide for themselves what the law is. If you’re invoking God, what you’re invoking is your idea of what is right and then attributing it to a deity. So, in reality, you’re just asking for an exception from the law for yourself.
You’re trying to make yourself a law unto yourself. For obvious reasons, we can’t tolerate that—not if we want to live together in a cohesive, prosperous, and cooperative society. We can’t have individuals deciding they can circumvent the law based on whatever they believe God or some figure whispered to them in their sleep.
Jacobsen: Ron, thank you for your time today. I appreciate it, and it’s nice to meet you.
Lindsay: Thanks. Thanks for inviting me. I enjoyed the conversation.
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