c. 2000 Religion News Service

SEAMAN, Ohio _ Dorothy Glasgow never intended to start a movement or pick a fight. She just thought young people needed some moral guidance.

So three years ago, when Adams County built four new public high schools, Glasgow told her United Methodist Church pastor that it sure would be nice to post the Ten Commandments at those schools. The Rev. Ken Johnson took her idea to the local ministerial association, which purchased three-foot tall granite tablets engraved with the commandments to stand outside each school.

“It was pretty easy getting them there,” said Johnson. “The fight’s been keeping them there.”

Today, the school system in this southern Ohio county is embroiled in a federal lawsuit with the American Civil Liberties Union, which calls the tablets an unconstitutional effort to promote religion. Ministers are raising a defense fund for the cash-strapped school district.

Glasgow, who spent three years in a one-room Adams County schoolhouse where she memorized a Bible verse each week, explains her efforts this way: “When they decided to build those schools, I just thought it was God’s will to have his word out before those young people. We’ve lived too loosely, and we have a sick society. Maybe this’ll help.”

Glasgow is not alone in turning to the Ten Commandments as a way of restoring an ethical compass in American life. Related efforts include:

_ In 1997, an Alabama judge, Roy Moore, refused to remove a wooden plaque bearing the Ten Commandments from his courtroom. Moore is now running for chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court, and polls show him leading the Republican field.

_ Legislatures in Indiana, Kentucky and South Dakota this year approved public display of the commandments. Nearly a dozen other states considered similar proposals. As required by their new laws, both Indiana and Kentucky will dedicate Ten Commandments monuments outside their capitols this summer.

_ After last spring’s murder spree at Columbine High School in Colorado, the House of Representatives amended the juvenile crime bill to let states display the Ten Commandments on public property. The Senate did not agree, and the crime bill is stalled in a conference committee.

A Gallup Poll last summer found three-quarters of Americans support display of the commandments. When the issue arose in Kentucky and Indiana, support in those states hit 90 percent, despite warnings of constitutional obstacles.

Interest in promoting the commandments surged in the wake of another trend: the wave of school shootings. Virtually everyone who tracks the issue has a one-word explanation for why it kicked into high gear a year ago: “Columbine.”

“America’s in an interesting time,” said Gregg Quiggle, professor of theology at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute. “Economically, things are as good as they’ve ever been. But there’s a sense that something’s gone wrong. I think religion has traditionally been a major player whenever the country has been in what it perceives to be a moral crisis.”

But Patricia O’Connell Killen, a historian at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., cautions that religious freedom in America has been rooted in religious tolerance. As the nation lurches into a new century more diverse than ever, Killen wonders if “we’ve reached a point where people are not so sure they want to be tolerant anymore.”

Many efforts to display the commandments, she notes, arise in areas where religious diversity is quite limited. In Adams County, for example, the Yellow Pages list 35 Protestant churches, two Catholic parishes, no synagogues. Small wonder folks in such places seem truly amazed that anyone might oppose display of a code the Bible teaches came to Moses directly from the hand of God.

“The part of me that wants to think the best of people would say that some of this movement is driven by genuine concern for young people, a feeling that we have lost our way and that the Ten Commandments would guide us back,” said John Krull, who as executive director of Indiana Civil Liberties Union lobbied in vain to defeat that state’s law and will sue to get the Statehouse monument removed.

“My less charitable side,” he added, “tells me there are a lot of organizations on the religious right who’ve seen their membership flat-line or even drop and see this as a useful way to raise money and re-energize their base.”

Activists in the commandments movement say Krull’s wrong about that, and there are few signs of a coordinated campaign.

Only when the bandwagon got rolling did some national players jump aboard. The Revs. James Dobson and Pat Robertson used their broadcasts to highlight local initiatives. The Family Research Council, which Dobson started, began a “Hang Ten” campaign aimed at getting public figures to display the commandments. The council has also distributed hundreds of thousands of book covers with the Ten Commandments.

The book covers get the commandments into schools in a way civil libertarians support. “When individual students make a religious statement, that’s constitutionally protected, absolutely,” said Cincinnati attorney Scott Greenwood, who is suing the Adams County schools.

Indiana now allows the commandments to be displayed with historical documents such as the Magna Carta and Declaration of Independence. The idea, says Micah Clark, policy director of the Indiana Family Institute, is to recognize the Ten Commandments as “one of the foundations of our country,” a document that transcends religion.

Kentucky’s new law takes a similar approach, and Adams County officials may propose a like compromise.

Critics say this is an attempt to dress the commandments in secular clothing. That distresses Derek Davis, director of the Institute for Church-State Studies at Baptist-run Baylor University: “When you take a sacred text and try to secularize it, you trivialize religion.”

It may not work, either. U.S. District Judge Jennifer Coffman has ordered three Kentucky counties to remove “historic” displays that include the Ten Commandments because the biblical admonitions are religious, whatever surrounds them.

“These aren’t the Ten Suggestions,” said Greenwood. “They are religious. They should be religious. And government ought to keep its hands off people’s religious icons.”

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One peril of government-sanctioned religious displays is that all religions must get equal treatment. School officials learned that in Altoona, Pa., where officials agreed to allow display of religious documents as part of a district-wide character-building program. The commandments went up for the allowable 25 days last fall. Then came texts from Wiccans, atheists and secular humanists. The program was suspended.

Michael Josephson agrees with those who feel American society has suffered “some serious moral erosion.” But Josephson, whose California-based Josephson Institute of Ethics created the “Character Counts” program used in scores of school districts, argues that merely displaying the Ten Commandments won’t change that.

Even supporters concede the commandments can’t be taught in public schools. But Josephson says nonsectarian character education can incorporate many of the principles embodied by the commandments into regular classroom work, and do so without offending those who don’t share Judeo-Christian traditions.

“If people believe the only way to reverse moral decline is to re-introduce religion, they start religious wars,” said Josephson. “And that’s a very dangerous trend.”

In Vanceburg, Ky., across the Ohio River from Adams County, a yellowed version of the commandments has been on the wall of the Lewis County Courthouse for long as anyone can remember. George Plummer, Lewis County’s judge-executive, said he’s never had anyone question its presence.

“Not one,” he said. “But I assure you, if we were told to take it down, a whole lot of folks would show up.”

In Adams County, high school students hurry past the granite markers with scarcely a glance. They say the displays were a big topic of conversation when the suit was filed and 1,600 people showed up to make sure the school board did not buckle. Now, for most students, the tablets are just there.

“We may not talk about it much, but I think kids appreciate them,” said Amy King, who will graduate from Peebles High School this spring. “It makes me feel safe that we have a school that stands up for those principles.”

SI END FROLIK

(Joe Frolik is a national correspondent for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland)

AP-NY-05-26-00 1317EDT