transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:04] It's Thursday, April 23rd, 2026. I'm Albert Mohler, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. We've been talking about some big court action in recent days, and now we have to go to the 5th Circuit, the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals. That traditionally has been a pretty conservative court, but it was narrowly split. It was an eight and nine decision just days ago in which this 5th Circuit upheld the right of the state of Texas to require the Ten Commandments to be posted in public school classrooms. It's part of a larger display, also mandated by the government. And so you have Texas, and Texas really became the lead. Other states began to do the same thing, requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments. Some of you have a memory that this has been going on as a matter of public controversy for a long time, and you're exactly right. But what happened this week at the 5th Circuit is setting up what almost assuredly will be a very significant Supreme Court battle. Now as we've often discussed, the Supreme Court gets to decide which cases it's going to take. And one of the things that makes it more likely that the Supreme Court will take a case is if there is a divide at the circuit level. So you have the Federal District Courts, and then you have the circuits, and then you have the Court of Appeal, then you have the Supreme Court of the United States. If you have a difference, a disagreement at the lower level, at either the District Courts or the circuits, that's more likely setting up a scenario in which the Supreme Court will decide to take the case. There is another situation, and we could add two here. One of them is if the situation directly relates to an explicit constitutional issue. And at least in terms of this argument, well, that's done. But the other issue is when you have a case very narrowly divided. And let's just say nine to eight is about as narrow a division as you can get. All right, the Washington Post reported the story this way. Quote, an appellate court ruled Tuesday that Texas may require that public school classrooms display the Ten Commandments a significant win for the conservative campaign to break down the legal walls between church and state and inject more religion into the public square. The next sentence, the nine eight ruling, came from the conservative court of appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans. The case is widely expected to head next to the Supreme Court where the conservative majority has been steadily removing restrictions on government support for religion. Okay, this is a bigger story than it might even appear to be from the beginning. And that's because there are huge constitutional issues that are invoked here. And we're also looking at the fact that something had to more or less be discarded or put aside in order for the 5th Circuit to rule as it did. And that takes us back to the year 1970. It takes us to a Supreme Court case known as the Lemon Case, and that presented what was known as the Lemon Test. And the Lemon Test was adopted by a far more liberal version of the Supreme Court in a far more liberal age, in which they actually made the argument, and this again was a majority opinion. This was the decision of the US Supreme Court. Going back to that era, the Supreme Court majority actually said that in order to pass muster, that legislation is not an establishment of religion prohibited by the Constitution, then the substance and even the motivation, the purpose of the legislation could not be remotely religious. Okay, just think about that for a moment. So for a number of decades in the United States, the highest court in the land was operating by a legal principle of its own invention that stated that legislation was suspect and could be stricken at the state level if it had to any degree a religious purpose or even a religious motivation. Now, you can see exactly where this is going. Pro-life legislation, legislation concerning marriage, legislation on a host of moral issues, and not to mention posting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, all of this could come with an explicitly religious motivation. In fact, it's hard to imagine that there's no one who would accuse someone of holding to a religious motivation or a religious purpose. So the current majority of the Supreme Court has made very clear that living test is dead, D-E-A-D, dead. I think both sides in the looming litigation here, now going at least on appeal to the Supreme Court, I think both sides know it. It is interesting that the clash of worldviews here is just really very clear. For example, you had lawyers for the state of Texas who said, look, we're trying to do this in order to remind Texas public school students of the heritage of this nation and the origin of its laws. And that became very important. The majority on the court, now again, it's a 9-8 majority, went on to say, quote, students are neither catechized in the commandments, nor taught to adopt them, nor are teachers commanded to proselytize students who ask about the displays or contradict students who disagree with them, end quote. So the majority of the judges here in the 5th Circuit simply said, look, this isn't proselytization. No one's evangelizing these students with the Ten Commandments. Teachers are not required to say something that is mandated by the state. And so it isn't a violation of the US. Constitution for the state of Texas to require the Ten Commandments in the classrooms. On the other hand, you had people coming on the other side who had a very different argument. One of the most interesting of those arguments came from Heather Weaver, who's senior counsel with the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union. She said, quote, the key issue is whether or not the state can impose biblical scripture on children. Very interesting. That's a smart argument. It is not, I think, a compelling argument. It shouldn't be the winning argument, but it is an interesting argument. It's a smart argument. If you're going to be making the secularist argument, I'm going to say that's the smart way to make it. Again, I quote, the key issue is whether or not the state can impose biblical scripture on children. Imposing scripture on children, that sounds bad. If you're talking about the government having the power to do this, and you can immediately understand why, people will come along and say, well, what if it was the imposition of the Hindu scriptures or the imposition of the Quran? The word imposed was used by this attorney. Now, I think it's an intelligent argument. I think it's pretty brilliant to come in this form. I don't think it's a compelling argument. The reason has everything to do with American history. It has everything to do with the fact that I think the state of Texas is on very solid ground for saying that if you want to understand the United States of America, if you want to understand our political order, if you want to understand our constitutional system, if you want to understand our understanding of law and the moral law, then the Ten Commandments are essential to that understanding. So essential, by the way, that the Ten Commandments were not only posted, I'll just say this metaphorically, on classroom walls, they were a part of the curriculum of the schools. The McGovern readers, you just go back to the 19th century, explicitly taught scripture, you talk about imposing scripture, it was in the textbook. You also have another fundamental issue here, and again, I would say here, the ACLU is doing its best to make its argument. The Washington Post adds a very interesting statement, listen to this, quote, The first of the Ten Commandments is, I am the Lord thy God, and the second is, thou shalt have no other gods before me, end quote. Now, that was basically put forward as an argument by Heather Weaver, the Senior Counsel of the ACLU, as the basis for which the court should strike down the Texas policy. Now, remember, the court did the opposite, even by a margin of one vote. But it is very interesting that what this particular attorney thought was the killer argument was to go to the Ten Commandments and say, look, some of them are pretty religious. Well, of course, as a theologian, I want to come back and say, you bet they are. But it is another thing to understand that what you have here is an allergy to the very idea of the existence of God and God the lawgiver. And we just need to acknowledge that that allergy, which is quite typical of a secular age, and certainly of a secularist organization, that flies in the face of the fact that if you're looking for, let's just say, the civic posting of the Ten Commandments, let me tell you one of the places you can find them. And by the way, this cannot be incidental to the question. One of the places you can find a government display of the Ten Commandments is in the main chamber of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, where the commandments are carved into stone on two tablets. Moses is portrayed as the law giver in a history of other legislators and law givers in the history of humanity. In other words, if the Supreme Court is going to apply this to classrooms in the state of Texas, it's going to have to do so while privileging its own physical setting as an exemption. Presumably, by the way, you're going to have the ACLU and others making the argument that the unique vulnerability of children, just think about that argument, children are uniquely vulnerable to the imposition of a biblical text. That's going to have to be the argument the secularists will use. Very, very interesting. All right, so let's just say you had a genuine clash of worldviews, you have a genuine constitutional battle and it's shaping up over the Ten Commandments. Tell me to say as a Christian, I don't believe that the posting of the Ten Commandments is, let's just say, a powerful evangelistic tool. Simply because, number one, the gospel is not there. On the other hand, it is a very good reminder, I think, to school children. Now I know if the Lemon Test was in place, I'd be in big trouble here. The legislators in Texas, the governor of Texas would be in big trouble if the Lemon Test still applied because I think there very clearly is a motivation to remind school children the fact that there is a right and a wrong. There are thou shalt and there are thou shalt nots. And that those are rooted in something higher than mere human law. Insofar as that testimony is given, I would say we need to hope for message sent and message received. We as Christians need to understand, however, that our task of evangelism goes far further than this and has to center in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now, let's just talk for a moment about the Ten Commandments and how they've operated throughout the history of civilization. Now, of course, we're talking first and foremost about the giving of the law through Moses to Israel. And the law becomes the center in so many ways of Israel's understanding of society and culture, and so much so that in Scripture you have Israel and the prophets and leaders of Israel asking questions such as, does any other people have laws so sweet, so righteous, and so pure? The law of God, the giving of the law of God, the giving of the Ten Commandments is a part of what set Israel apart from all other nations by God's grace for God's glory. It's an astounding thing. But we also need to understand that there has been an influence from the Ten Commandments all the way through the history of Western civilization. Now, we understand there's an even bigger context in terms of the law written on the heart, but when it comes to the explicit historical influence of the Ten Commandments, it is absolutely massive, and has been so throughout the history of what we now know as Western civilization. Now, of course, not so much in Greece and Rome, but that's one of the reasons why Christians understanding even the classical age, we can't stop with Greece and Rome, we have to say Israel, Greece, and Rome. And when it comes to Western civilization, a lot of modern historians completely ignore the Hebrew roots of this civilization. And one of the things I just love pointing out is that kings and queens and emperors were quite aware of the need for the Old Testament and the authority of the Old Testament. For one thing, that's where they gained many of the images and understandings of what it means to be king. I'll just go to another issue, and as you know, this is one of my favorites, when Henry VIII, the King of England, declared his independence from the Pope and established the Church of England, looking for models of how this could be legislated, you have the recovery in the English-speaking tradition of a massive authority of the Old Testament. It was at that very time that even the chairs of Hebrew were established at Oxford and Cambridge University, and it's the reason why the coronation ceremony for an English king or queen is so filled with Old Testament scripture. Right down to the moment of coronation when the music played with the anointing of the Bible is Zadok the Priest, immediately derived from the Old Testament. Well, okay, the Ten Commandments were so central that the text of the Ten Commandments, along with other scripture, but the Ten Commandments clearly, that was among some of the first texts that children were taught to read. Again, it was in readers, in the books that children were expected to read in order to demonstrate that they could read and could master reading. And the reason for that was quite simple because the Ten Commandments were considered essential and central to Western civilization. Okay, now we're living in a very secular age, so I'm going to fast forward. We're living in a very secular age. And now we have open resistance, and this is new because what we had was at first, open resistance to the first table of the law, and explicitly that means the first four commandments, which are explicitly theological, having to do with monotheism. We must have no other gods before him. And write down to remember the Sabbath, and just keep in mind that especially, let me just take the first four commandments explicitly, if you refer to that as the first table of the law, and then the other six commandments and the second table of the law, at least even going back to the 1960s, the secular opposition to the Ten Commandments wasn't about the second table of the law, but about the first table of the law. Now it's also about the second table of the law. Now you have a revolt against marriage. You have a revolt against the command, thou shalt not commit adultery. In other words, it's a comprehensive revolt. And yet, right now we are in a very interesting political and moral moment when all kinds of things are happening. And I think as Christians, we ought to pause for a moment and recognize. We have had a series of high-profile resignations just to take members of Congress, three in the last several days. And so, you had Tony Gonzalez, a Texas Republican, and Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat. They have both now resigned just before they would face an investigation and removal process in the House of Representatives. But then now we've also had Representative Sheila Sherfilis McCormick, who was a Democrat of Florida, now charged with embezzling $5 million in federal disaster aid and using it for her campaign. She resigned this week on Tuesday to avoid the investigation and prosecution in the House. By the way, none of these will forestall any kind of legal criminal investigation. But when it comes to the sexual issues, those are probably less likely. It could lead to civil litigation. That's another issue. But the point is we've had three members of Congress who have resigned just in recent days, three members of the House of Representatives who have resigned just in recent days over issues of moral behavior or more specifically immoral behavior. Two of them related to sex, one of them related to money. It's also very interesting that also in the news in recent days, you have former US Senator Kirsten Sinema, a Democrat formerly from Arizona who is now in the news for allegations that she had a sexual affair with a member of her security detail. When we're looking at the Secretary of Labor at the beginning of the week, it was Lori Chavez de Rehmer. She has resigned and once again, there are at least allegations of sexual impropriety with a member of her security detail. Okay, so I think the new thing here is that Americans just historically aren't so used to having female legislators involved in such allegations. So let's just say right now, it's on both sides, male and females on both sides, Republican and Democrat. It turns out that there's an awful lot of misbehavior going on. That explains also why The New York Times ran a very interesting headline story, Ethics Panel Urges Victims to Report Misconduct. So The New York Times is telling us that the Ethics Panel, and here we're talking about the Ethics Panel in the House of Representatives, known as the House Ethics Committee, it has now come forward and on Monday called on persons to report known misbehavior when it comes to members of Congress, in this case specifically members of the House of Representatives. Okay, it's hard to tell whether that's a serious request or just something they know they have to say, but let's just say we're talking about all these scandals breaking at once, three members of Congress resigning in a matter of days. And you know, in some of these situations, you'd have Republicans pointing at Democrats and Democrats pointing at Republicans, in this case, just guess what? I want to point to the enduring power of the moral law, because I want to tell you what's interesting to me right now. It's not that people in powerful positions will will sin grievously. It's not that there are unique temptations when you look at positions of power and the opportunity for sexual misbehavior. I just want to say, I think right now, the most interesting thing to note is that nobody's saying this doesn't matter. Nobody's saying that the sexual misbehavior here is of no consequence. Nobody's saying that embezzling money or taking money is not morally significant. It turns out that in an age in which we've been told that most Americans are embracing some form of moral relativism, let me just say that if that's true, it is selective. Because when it comes to something like this, you'll notice even the secular media, liberal on so many issues, they somehow seem to imply they think it's in some degree wrong for a member of Congress to be involved in adultery. Now you'll note that they will often say it's not so much the adultery as the manipulation and the misuse of office yet. Well, let's just say what everyone understands, whether they are willing to articulate it or not, is that we're talking about sexual misbehavior in the majority of these cases, explicit sexual misbehavior. And you know what? It turns out that even if you are very powerful and you're a member of Congress, being exposed in this way is morally devastating. I mean, Eric Swalwell, by some accounts, was the leading candidate for the upcoming primary in California for the office of governor in the Democratic Party, the Democratic nominee for that office. He has just not only lost all of that, he's lost his entire political future. He had to resign from Congress and you say, well, why the timing of the resignation? It was largely to avoid the beginning of an official investigation because that was going to become very problematic. Frankly, in legal terms, for all these people, life is going to be very problematic. That's another very interesting moral lesson of our times. And that is that there is a limited reach of criminal prosecution. It's real, but it's limited. There is a limited set of options when it comes to, say, even the House of Representatives bringing action against one of its own members. It can censure them, it can sanction them, it can even with the ultimate penalty remove them. But Congress doesn't have a jail. And by the way, if it did, it'd probably be regularly filled. No, it has the power of limited sanctions, most ultimately just removing a person from office and perhaps forwarding issues to the appropriate prosecutor. But let me tell you, in a litigious society, there are at least a couple of things that follow you if you are involved in this kind of scandal. Number one, now, especially in the digital age, people are going to bring that up every time they bring up your name. It's not like you can move to a distant part of the country and get away from all the headlines. The headlines are going to be downloaded to the smartphone nearest you. You can't get away from this. And the second thing is the world of litigation. All kinds of things Christians should note about the moral complexities of that world of litigation. But I'll tell you at least one thing it does represent, and that is you can't get away from your misbehavior. The vulnerabilities will simply haunt you down. That's a good thing for all of us to know. But again, it certainly underlines the fact that moral behavior, as it turns out, even in what we are told is an age of moral relativism, it turns out it's only relatively relative. When it comes to a lot of these issues, there's an immediate moral judgment. I think we need to notice, Christians, that comes from somewhere. We ground that in the law of God and in the fact that he made us moral creatures in his image. Okay, one more headline along these lines. This one's also from The New York Times. Ohio State Reveals Details Behind Leaders' Resignations. Such as political leaders, here we're talking about a man who had served for two years as president of Ohio State University. In higher education, big top ten university like this, that's a plum job. You can work your entire life up to a job like that and then to blow it after two years. In this case, we're talking about the now former president, Walter Carter Jr, who resigned last month after it became known that Mr. Carter, who is married, acknowledged the relationship with a female associate of his. I'm not going to mention her name, it doesn't matter for the story here. He did that when he resigned. The report concluded that the former president used his position to make wide ranging and extensive efforts to assist her both inside and outside the university. That meant jobs, money, business, etc. I want to make two points on this. Number one, just as Christians, we understand the sinfulness of sin and the fact that given the opportunity, then it will seize the opportunity. That's a good New Testament phrase. And so it shows up again and again and again in this kind of thing. It also shows us that power really does come with certain temptations and certain opportunities, vulnerabilities. But you know, it's also interesting here that the authorities at Ohio State University felt that this was an egregious moral problem to the extent that they removed this president from office, they forced his resignation. Okay, but here again, it gets a little complicated and the complication is interesting. The complication is that their report was not about whether or not he committed adultery, because after all, that's his private business, that's his private affair, literally. But rather, it's about whether or not he misused his office to give his adulterous partner, the woman with whom he was having the romantic relationship, if he gave her illicit support and tilted university business to her, et cetera. In other words, we live in a society that at least at some levels doesn't really know what to do with moral issues when it comes down to sex, but you know what? They really seem to know what to do on moral issues related to money. And so it is interesting, one of the congressional leaders, also some other leaders in national politics, and here the leader of a state university, let's just face it, the public is primarily focused on the moral revelation when it comes to the sex. And I think as Christians we understand that sexual misbehavior is indeed such an explosive and disclosive factor when it comes to understanding character. But for the legislators, for the board, it might actually come down to money. And again, we shouldn't be surprised that the two of them go together. Let's just state the obvious, that union is downright biblical. Just one final observation, I think it is really important that Christians recognize, as we find in Scripture, there is really nothing new under the sun. Not when it comes to sin. There are new opportunities for sin, there are new contexts for sin, there are new consequences to sin in terms of temporal law and consequences and all the rest. But when it comes to our understanding of all things most important, when it comes to our understanding of morality as revealed in Scripture, we also come to understand that when it comes to sin, just about everything that could be imagined was imagined even in Biblical times. Things after that have to do with the expansions of opportunity given technology and other developments. But when it comes to human nature, nothing has fundamentally changed. And that's why as Christians we understand that looking at all of this, yes, we need to confirm in our own understanding the truth of God's Word is revealed and the moral judgment even implicit in all of these headlines. But it also reminds us that there is only one answer to this and it is nothing legislative. It is nothing judicial. It is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It's good for us regularly to be reminded of that as well. Thanks for listening to The Briefing. For more information go to my website at albertmohler.com. You can follow me on X or Twitter by going to x.com/albertmohler. For more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com. I'm speaking to you from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and I'll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.