Thou shalt not ...

Shattered Tablets: Why We Ignore the Ten Commandments at Our Peril, by David Klinghoffer (Doubleday, 256 pp., $24.95)

WHEN entering the chamber of the U.S. Supreme Court, visitors walk past a massive wooden door. On the door's lower half, beautifully engraved into the oak, is an image of two tablets, each squared off at the bottom and rounded at the top. One tablet bears Roman numerals one through five, and the other six through ten. The symbol is immediately recognizable. It stands for one of the oldest and most cherished pillars of our civilization: the Ten Commandments, which, according to the Bible, God gave to Moses and the Israelites at Mount Sinai.

That symbol has been a matter of great controversy in the Court behind the wooden door, and in American culture and politics more broadly. Public displays of the Ten Commandments have been challenged repeatedly in recent years, and the ensuing jurisprudence has yielded a bewildering array of rules about where and when they may be exhibited. But these controversies have been all about the symbolism, not the substance, of the Ten Commandments. As with the version on the door of the Court, with its numerals but no text, we have come to think of the Ten Commandments as an abstraction standing in for all of Judaism and Christianity, and of their display in public as a large and assertive statement of faith.

The Ten Commandments themselves, though, are not a symbol. They are ten specific statements of principle, which lay out very particular requirements and prohibitions. The fight over the Ten Commandments has been full of spectacle and irony--as defenders of civil liberties have argued for censorship and religious fundamentalists have demanded freedom of expression and worship--but it has been almost entirely devoid of any reference to the particular substance of the Ten Commandments.

In his new book, Shattered Tablets, David Klinghoffer worries that we have lost sight of that substance more generally. We ignore the Ten Commandments, he believes, not just in our struggles over religious expression, but in our lives, as individuals and as a nation; and doing so carries great risks.

Klinghoffer, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle and a former literary editor of NATIONAL REVIEW, is a pious and intellectually serious convert to Judaism who has written several books on questions of God and man. His concern in this book is with America's fading commitment to God and to the moral code of our Judeo-Christian heritage--a code he believes is well encapsulated in the Ten Commandments.

The book has two aspirations: first to show just what the commandments actually mean, and second to show how America's abandonment of them points to disaster. It carries off its first aim well, with force and erudition. But it falls far short of making the case for the second, stretching and reaching to find fault with every facet of American life, and missing the rich and sturdy religious spirit of the nation that is, if anything, the last best hope for the Judeo-Christian traditions.

At its best, the book serves as a guided tour of the commandments themselves. Each of its ten chapters treats one commandment, thinking through the Hebrew injunction, asking why the commandment in question should be given such prominence, and suggesting what role it might play in the moral life of a society. It dispels any notion that the commandments are anachronisms. Klinghoffer shows, for example, how "taking the Lord's name in vain" was understood by the prophets and the Jewish sages in a way that makes it powerfully relevant to the present day, and how the call to observe the Sabbath speaks to problems we mistakenly think of as new and unprecedented.

The overarching conceit of these analyses is that the division of the Ten Commandments into two tablets of five tells us something critically important about how to read them. "If the main point I hope to leave you with in this book can be crystallized in one sentence," Klinghoffer writes, "it is that how people think about God, which is the general topic of the first five commandments, determines a society's moral health, which is the subject of the second five." Understood this way, the two tablets are to be read horizontally as well as vertically, so that the first and sixth commandments (that God is Lord, and that murder is prohibited) should be understood together, as should the second and seventh (the prohibitions on idolatry and adultery), and so on.

At times, this analytical device is wonderfully clarifying. Klinghoffer's connection of idol worship and the betrayal of the marriage vow, for instance, sheds great light on both, and makes masterly use of both the ancient Jewish sources and the latest headlines. But at other times, this device forces Klinghoffer to stretch his argument to the breaking point, or else to make a patently weak case to force a complex picture into a neat and simple pattern. To the arrangement of the fourth commandment (to keep the Sabbath) across from the ninth (against offering false witness), for instance, he has nothing more to say than that in a society that routinely violates one we should expect to see the other ignored as well.

Klinghoffer also seeks to help us see how the commandments might speak to the most pressing matters of our day--how the Bible's notion of paganism relates in complex but illuminating ways to some forms of modern secularism, for instance. But these contemporary applications are also where the book too often gets carried away. In his eagerness to show that we are straying from the path laid out in the commandments, Klinghoffer paints far too dark a picture, and often strains for examples. After a fascinating discussion of the notion of "spiritual adultery," for instance, he reaches for a modern illustration and comes up with this peculiar formulation:

   A great day for such spiritual adultery was
   October 3, 1965. In New York City, sheltered
   beneath the Statue of Liberty,
   President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into
   law the Immigration and Nationality Act.
   The act opened America's gates wide to
   immigrants, whose numbers previously
   had been restricted, immigrants bringing
   with them--beside the gift of their talents
   and love of freedom--a variety of religions
   that previously had, for the most
   part, been unknown in the United States.

He then argues that American religion will be overrun by the heathen faiths (his term) of these immigrants. Some other contemporary examples do not fare much better. Klinghoffer argues that the popularity of Wicca among confused young snobs in the Pacific Northwest portends a pagan awakening in America. He equates all gambling with theft, and insists upon a simple opposition of Darwinian biology and Biblical religion, calling those who accept Darwin's doctrine "our day's most prominent opponents of the first commandment."

With all of these examples, Klinghoffer aims to argue that America is sprinting toward Gomorrah, suffering gross decay and decline in every facet of public, private, civic, moral, and spiritual life. By the time it reaches the concluding chapter, called "The Wayward City," the book has descended into a grumpy jeremiad, and lost sight of all the many ways in which America still stands as a shining example of how Judeo-Christian culture, with the Ten Commandments at its core, can make for a strong and thriving society. There are, after all, two sides to the battle around public displays of the Decalogue, and there are everywhere around us examples of religious awakening, moral courage, and civic virtue.

There is certainly some truth to Klinghoffer's basic case about the Ten Commandments, that "these ten great statements about reality reveal the gravest threat America faces--not from terrorism, global warming, or pandemic influenza, but from our own vapid ideas about God, morality, and the meaning of life." But he despairs too easily and thoroughly. The greatest threat to the West today is indeed that we might lose confidence in our civilization, by losing our grasp of just what it stands for. But surely America remains the foremost bulwark against that grave threat, and not the leading exhibit of its gravity. Along with examples of how we fail to observe the commandments, Klinghoffer's book--and his effort to clarify the meaning of the commandments themselves--would have benefited from examples of where we succeed in meeting their high standards.

In the end, though, this book does a great service by its thoughtful and well-articulated conception of the Ten Commandments as broad public and private principles, and not just simple, narrow rules. Klinghoffer puts the matter plainly. "Belief forms behavior," he writes; "in three words that is the thesis of this book." It is a wise and timely thesis, and a valuable book.

Mr. Levin is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and a senior editor of The New Atlantis.