Does JD Vance Actually Know What The Ten Commandments Are?

It doesn't seem like it!

I didn’t actually watch the part of the podcast where JD Vance makes this gesture, but I think we can fairly assume he was demonstrating how Trump likes to greet the ladies.

It was just the other day that I posited to a friend that JD Vance might make an even more dangerous president than Donald Trump, on account of the fact that he is smarter and more of a true believer in certain things than Trump is.

I would like to take a moment now to walk that all the way the fuck back, after hearing Vance on an appearance on The Joe Rogan Show trying his heart out to justify Texas mandating that every classroom in the state slap the Ten Commandments up on the walls. The man tried every possible argument in existence, even several it seemed he did not actually believe himself. It would have been impressive, had all of those arguments not been very, very stupid.

The conversation started when Rogan brought up Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, who is himself not just a Christian but who is literally in seminary getting his Masters of Divinity (not a fudge-related degree, as I once thought). Talarico — again, a seminarian — believes not only that it’s unconstitutional to put the Ten Commandments in public schools, but that forcing religion on kids will have the opposite of its intended effect and push kids away from Christianity. You know, because people generally don’t like to have religion pushed on them.

The convo starts at about 47 minutes in.

“Yeah. I mean, I think you'd never want to force things on people,” Vance responded. “And I do I think one of the core Christian contributions to Western civilization is the idea of freedom of religion. It's actually very much a Christian idea because you recognize the dignity of each individual. And part of recognizing that dignity is that each person has to find their own pathway to God. You can’t force this on anybody. I don’t think putting the Ten Commandments up in school is like forcing things on anybody.”

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Rogan then pointed out that we’re talking about public schools, we’re talking about a mandate, and noted that they’re not also putting up anything about Buddhism or Islam or the tenets of any other religions. Vance said having only Christian tenets plastered on the wall in every classroom is fine because the Founding Fathers were inspired by Christianity. What that has to do with algebra (which, by the way, was invented by Muslims), I could not begin to tell you.

“Does seeing the Ten Commandments force religion on a non-Christian child?” he pondered aloud, “I mean, my argument would be ‘no.’ And I’d illustrate this by saying, well, there are all of these ways in which you actually could try to force religion on a child, right?”

To his credit, Rogan pointed out that while it’s not the worst way to force religion on a child, it’s still very clearly a way to force religion on a child. He then noted that Talarico said that the people who were pushing for this are the same Christian Nationalists who are pushing to get rid of public schools and non-Christian private schools entirely, in order to replace them all with Christian schools.

“I hear you,” Vance responded, “but if I’m a non-religious student and I’m sitting in there and I see the Ten Commandments, at the very least, I think I can appreciate it … what I would see that as as a non-religious person or a different religion is, I would say this is like an important cultural element of the western civilization which is the foundation of the classroom that I’m sitting in. And this idea that the law is sort of above any man, even if you don’t believe in God yourself, I think that’s like an important concept.”

Well, any man other than Donald Trump, of course.

It is at this point, however, at which I questioned whether Vance actually knows what the Ten Commandments even are.

“I mean, if you look at the Ten Commandments,” he says, “probably eight of them are something that I would hope that everybody would agree with, even if they’re not themselves religious.”

So, first of all, only two of the things in the entire Ten Commandments are actually against the law in the United States of America: Murder and stealing. (Okay, and bearing false witness when it is libel, slander, or perjury.) Those things are, as far as any of us know, illegal pretty much everywhere, regardless of the religious foundation of those who established the country. Second, four of the 10 are very specifically about people not being allowed to practice other religions. That is something that they want on the wall of every classroom, regardless of the subject matter being taught. This is something JD Vance wants up on these walls at the same time he is arguing that “freedom of religion” is not a liberal concept, but a Christian concept.

That didn’t seem to land, so Vance moved right back to the the fact that he, personally, would not be offended by it if he weren’t a Christian, and if his kids weren’t Christian, he’d tell them to look at it as a “learning experience.” Because it’s not about forcing religion on anyone, just about exposing kids to different ideas, and isn’t it nice to expose people to different ideas? To have an open mind? Why do you hate ideas?!

“I understand what [Talarico]'s saying. I just I think that part of living in a society where you have different people of different perspectives, but you do have I mean Christianity is the majority religion of the United States. It is the religion that was extraordinary influential to our founding to the constitutional principles.

“Again, freedom of religion is itself not really a liberal concept. It was originally derived from from a Christian idea about free will and the dignity of the person. I think part of that is that you accept that you're going to have exposure to different things.

“And if a, if a state legislator in a majority Christian state wants — it's not like they're putting the Ten Commandments in front of these kids and saying, ‘You have to read this and, you know, write it 500 times a day.’ They're exposing kids to something. And I'm comfortable with kids being exposed to a lot of different things. I think that's part of living in a society where there's a free exchange of ideas. […]

“Isn’t part of just living in a like pluralistic democracy that people are going to be exposed to different things?”

Well, this would be an example of being exposed to the same thing, over and over again, because it is legally mandated to be in their classrooms. The idea that this is just about exposing kids to “ideas” is patently absurd. I mean, first he’s suggesting that it should be allowed because a majority of Americans (62 percent) are Christian, but also suggesting it should be allowed because it’s a “different thing” that kids need to be exposed to. Which is it? Does he legitimately think that this is the only way those kids will be “exposed” to such “different ideas”? That, otherwise, they’re just going to go their whole lives without ever hearing about the Ten Commandments? I doubt it.

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Vance then equivocated by saying that over the last few decades, no one allowed religion in the “public square” and that this “poses its own problems,” and that mandating that the Ten Commandments be posted in classrooms is merely a course correction to make up for all of that.

And yet, Americans have always been free to stand in the middle of the public square and attempt to convert others to their religion. Hell, for years, there was a guy who stood on State Street in Chicago with a microphone, telling us all that we were evil whores who were going to burn in hell. (He’s still around, but I hear he’s mostly annoying people somewhere else now.)

At least once a day, I see Jehovah’s Witnesses sitting outside on a street corner somewhere handing out copies of The Watchtower — and if you live in the ‘burbs, there is every chance that they or the Mormons will come right to your door to godbother you. For decades, the Westboro Baptist Church has stood outside people’s funerals holding up signs reading “God Hates F*gs” and other charming slogans. And, when I was growing up, my mom had to regularly pull me away from Hari Krishnas handing out flowers in downtown Boston. And that’s just the “traditional” public square, nevermind the decades of Christians trying to legally force their religious beliefs on the rest of us.

All we have had, really, was the promise that our money and our publicly owned facilities would not be used to promote religion. And we do not have that anymore, at least not in Texas.

The fact is, there isn’t an actual reason for putting up the Ten Commandments in classrooms beyond “we want to force Christianity on kids in the hopes that those who are not Christian will convert, because we want to live in a country where everyone practices our religion.” That’s it, that’s the whole reason. And JD Vance might want to very thoughtfully consider whether or not that is something he really wants to support, because while the Christian Nationalists promoting this shit may think that atheists like me are bad, they also frequently believe that Catholics like him practice witchcraft and violate the Ten Commandments by “worshiping” Mary and the saints. They’re not too fond of Hindus like his wife, either. In fact, while Vance believes that aliens might be demons (a topic discussed later in the program), many Christians believe that Hindus worship them. Demons, not aliens.

The fact of the matter is, they are free to believe that, but it’s also not something we want to promote with public funds and resources. This is not hard. If you don’t promote one religious idea with public funds and resources, you don’t have to promote any other religious idea with public funds and resources. If you do promote one religious idea with public funds and resources, there’s no reasonable place to draw a line and say “Well, that idea is okay, but this one is not.”

I have a feeling that what’s going to happen is that the only way people like JD Vance are going to see exactly why the establishment of religion is a bad idea is when it does go so far that it ultimately hurts them and people who share their beliefs — and, unfortunately for all of us, that time does not seem all that far off.

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