The Truth about Roy’s Rock
By Randall Balmer

Much to the consternation of some, Roy’s Rock, the two-and-one-half-ton monument emblazoned with the Ten Commandments, has been relocated to a storage area in the Alabama Judicial Building. The removal, in compliance with a federal court order, has prompted all manner of wailing and gnashing of teeth on the part of conservatives, many of whom call themselves Baptists. This is a clear indication, they insist, of the moral decline in American society. One hysterical screed circulated by e-mail predicted that the depiction of Moses and the Ten Commandments in the U.S. Supreme Court Building would soon disappear. A protester in Montgomery loudly declared that if you wanted to see the future of America – by which he meant, presumably, a future devoid of religious sentiment – consider the blank space in the lobby of the Judicial Building where Roy’s Rock once sat.

I was one of the expert witnesses in the Alabama Ten Commandments case, and I believe these sentiments couldn’t be more mistaken.

The reason that the depiction of Moses and the Ten Commandments will not be chiseled from the U.S. Supreme Court building anytime soon is that, unlike the case in Alabama, the frieze in Washington portrays one of several sources for American jurisprudence – and those sources are many, including the Code of Hammurabi, Confucius, the English Common Law tradition, and so on. Judge Roy Moore, on the other hand, sought to enshrine only one source (what he calls the Judeo-Christian tradition), and he steadfastly (even belligerently) refused to honor any of the others. On that basis, Judge Thompson – reasonably, I believe – concluded that both the intent and the effect of the monument was to give the place of honor to one tradition, to the exclusion of all others. That, clearly, represents a violation of the First Amendment proscriptions against religious establishment.

What Judge Moore and his supporters fail to recognize, apparently, is that the First Amendment is the best friend religion ever had! The founding fathers, in their prescient wisdom, concluded that it would be foolish to ordain one religious expression as the state religion. They decided instead to set up a free market of religion, where religious entrepreneurs (to extend the metaphor) are constantly competing with one another for popular followings. This has lent a dynamism to religion in America that is unmatched in any other western nation. In Great Britain, for instance, where Anglicanism is the state church, roughly 3 percent of Britons attend the Church of England on any given Sunday, and in Sweden, leaders of the state Lutheran church actually appealed to the parliament several years ago to be disestablished. We Americans are an extraordinarily religious people by almost any standard; 94 or 95 percent of us tell George Gallup that we believe in God or a Supreme Being, a figure that has remained fairly constant since World War II. Put simply, religion has thrived in this country for more than two centuries precisely because the state has (for the most part, at least) stayed out of the religion business. The examples of other western nations suggest that once you begin to dictate religious belief or behavior – as with prescribed prayer in schools or Roy’s Rock in Montgomery, Alabama – you kill it.

Finally, although I am an evangelical Christian, I am not a Baptist, and I wonder whatever happened to the Baptists? (As a historian of religion in America, I think I know the answer, but I raise this as a rhetorical question.) Roger Williams, founder of the Baptist tradition in America, was a dissident in Puritan Massachusetts who was expelled from the colony and went to Rhode Island to form a religiously tolerant society. It is to Williams that we owe the notion of the separation of church and state. He recognized the perils of state interference in religious affairs (he wanted to protect the “garden” of the church from the “wilderness” of the world), and, as a religious minority himself, he sought also to protect the rights of religious minorities from the government. He cherished the notion of “soul liberty,” which, ostensibly, at least, is one of the cornerstones of Baptist beliefs (along with, of course, adult as opposed to infant baptism). Throughout American history, at least until the late 1970s, Baptists have been fierce guardians of the First Amendment and the separation of church and state.

And yet, Judge Moore and many of his followers claim to be Baptists. How peculiar! I want to know why every Baptist in the state of Alabama didn’t storm the Judicial Building after Judge Moore installed his monument (under cover of darkness, by the way) and demand that it be removed immediately – not merely because the monument itself became the subject of a kind of perverse idolatry but, more basically, because it violated bedrock Baptist principles of soul liberty and freedom of individual conscience. Shame on every Baptist in Alabama who sat by silently and put up with this nonsense!

Quite properly, Roy’s Rock has been removed from the lobby of Alabama’s Judicial Building. The First Amendment has prevailed over religious sectarianism and political chicanery. I do think it’s a shame, however, that it sits now in a storage room. The appropriate place for such a monument might be in one of Montgomery’s many churches or even in Judge Moore’s front yard, as an expression of his personal convictions. Let him deal with the neighbors and the zoning board rather than tampering with the Constitution and with the principle of church-state separation that has served this nation remarkably well from more than two centuries.

About the author… Randall Balmer, is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of American Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University. Mr. Balmer has published widely both in academic and scholarly journals and in the popular press. He is editor-at-large for Christianity Today, his commentaries on religion in America, distributed by the New York Times Syndicate, have appeared in newspapers across the country. He comments frequently on religious matters for national and international news sources, including CNN, PBS, and Fox. He was an expert witness in Maddux v. Moore, the so-called Ten Commandments case in Montgomery, Alabama.

October 2003