Texas Dem Says Putting Ten Commandments in Classrooms ‘Un-Christian’

Paul's warning to Timothy describes a condition characteristic of 'the last days' (v. 1): people who retain the external form of religion — its language, its cultural identity, its claims of faith — while functionally denying its substance and authority.

The 'power' of godliness here refers to the transforming, authoritative reality of God's Word and Spirit acting upon a life. To claim the Christian name while arguing that the public acknowledgment of God's own law is somehow anti-Christian is to employ religious form as a weapon against religious substance.

The legislator's argument draws its rhetorical power from a claimed Christian identity — 'I am a Christian, and this is un-Christian' — while actively opposing the plain content of the faith it invokes. This is the form of godliness deployed to deny its power.

Paul's instruction to 'avoid such people' is a pastoral warning: the danger is not merely error, but the confusion sown when opposition to Scripture is dressed in scriptural language.

Jeremiah confronted religious leaders and educated classes in Judah who claimed authoritative knowledge of God's law while simultaneously distorting it to serve institutional and political interests. The scribes did not deny that the law existed — they claimed it as their credential while falsifying its meaning.

The structural parallel is genuine: actors who invoke religious standing ('we understand Christian teaching') while reinterpreting the law of God in ways that serve a secular political agenda, not its plain meaning.

The Texas legislator does not deny Christianity — the argument is framed as an interpretation of it: 'true Christianity opposes the Ten Commandments in classrooms.' This is precisely Jeremiah's target: those who say 'the law of the LORD is with us' while their handling of it makes it into a lie.

The parallel is not about ancient Israel's national covenant specifically, but about the recurring pattern of those who wield religious authority to neutralize the very law they claim to honor.

The psalmist declares the intrinsic character of God's law: it is perfect, it is life-giving, and it is the source of wisdom for the simple — that is, the ordinary person who encounters it with an open heart. The law is not socially dangerous or spiritually harmful; it is restorative by nature.

This verse does not adjudicate every church-state legal question, but it does flatly contradict the claim that exposure to God's law in any public setting could be spiritually harmful or anti-Christian.

The legislative argument depends on the premise that posting the Ten Commandments causes harm — to children, to pluralism, to authentic Christianity. The Psalter answers that premise directly: the law of the LORD revives, it does not damage.

For the believer, the inversion under discussion is not merely a legal or political error — it contradicts the plain doxological testimony of Scripture about the character of God's own moral instruction.