Through comments from several friends, I have received an insight into my personal reasons for reacting to the Alabama Ten Commandments controversy.

To recap, Roy Moore is Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Two years ago he commissioned a 5,280 pound granite monument to honor the moral foundations of law. He topped it with the Ten Commandments and ordered it placed in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building. Lawsuits followed, a Federal judge ordered the monument removed, Moore refused, the other Alabama Supreme Court justices overruled him and now it's gone. We haven't seen the last of it.

I now understand that some of my reaction to this issue stems from my personal background.

I consider myself an atheist but I was raised Roman Catholic and while I no longer practice that faith, it is very influential as my cultural tradition. There are differences between the Protestant and Catholic bibles that lead to differences in key texts such as the Ten Commandments. Roy Moore's monument uses the Protestant Ten Commandments. As a Catholic, I immediately feel excluded when someone presents the Protestant Ten Commandments as an example of our "common" religious heritage. I believe I am a fairly typical Catholic, at least of my generation, in feeling that the use of Protestant texts as if they are definitive or generic is deliberately and specifically anti-Catholic.

Here is how I got this way.

Although my father was baptized Roman Catholic, he was raised in a household that practiced a not-very-observant form of Protestant Christianity.

My mother, on the other hand, was baptized and raised Roman Catholic, by parents whose heritage was German Catholic. When my mother was 11 years old she moved with her family from Cleveland to Mansfield, into a parish that also had German Catholic roots. That is the same parish in which I was raised.

After my family, the church and its school were the most important institutions in my life. We attended mass every Sunday and often in-between. We confessed our sins. Our Boy Scout troop was sponsored by the parish. Our social lives revolved around school-sponsored sporting events, dances and other activities.

St. Peter's is the largest of two Catholic parishes in Mansfield, Ohio. When I was growing up, both had their own grade schools but only St. Peter's had a high school. We had a broad mix of ethnicities in both the parish and school, so as a group we weren't specifically German, Polish, Irish or Italian, as was the case in big cities. But we were always conscious of being Catholics in a Protestant sea. I never felt anti-Catholic prejudice was a serious problem in that place and time, but it did exist.

One subtle way it manifested itself was in religious observances that were supposed to represent "all faiths" but which always exhibited a clear Protestant Christian bias. We weren't so far removed from the experiences of our immigrant ancestors that we didn't know what that meant: "If you want to be part of this community, you'll learn how to recite Protestant prayers and sing Protestant hymns."

I was 9 years old during the 1960 presidential campaign. Part of my mother's youthful rebellion was to become a Republican, so we were a Nixon family in a Kennedy universe. Even though I didn't consider myself a Kennedy supporter, I was touched by the common accusation that a Catholic could not be president because his loyalty would be to Rome. The clear message was that the patriotism of all Catholics was suspect. This was just 40 years ago.

In retrospect, as a minority we probably were much more sensitive about the text differences than they were. The typical Protestant probably doesn't even know Catholics have a different Ten Commandments, a different "Lords Prayer" (we call it the "Our Father"), different names for some books of the Bible, and a couple of extra books. The differences aren't very important theologically but they can be important symbolically. Saying Protestant prayers at community events was a way of reminding everyone which group was in charge and, God willing, would remain in charge. At least that's how we interpreted it, and when we got control of something I'm sure we said our prayers at all the events.

The movie "Gangs of New York" reminded me how the discrimination against Catholics at the hands of Protestant "natives" always has had that "we're more American than you are" component. Each wave of immigrants from predominantly Catholic lands has experienced this, not just the Irish but also the Germans, Italians, Poles and, still today, Latin-Americans. Catholic immigrants didn't establish a counter school system because they didn't like the way geometry was being taught. They didn't do it because they thought the public schools were too secular, but because they were too Protestant.

Since today most efforts to insinuate religious beliefs into classrooms and courthouses come from Protestant Evangelicals, I always feel that tingle of the natives still trying to institutionalize their culture and exclude my kind from it. When people talk about putting God back into the schools, courts or legislatures, part of me remembers that it wasn't my God who was there before. That helps me appreciate how a Jew might experience it, or a Muslim, or a Hindu.

Sure, we're almost all Christians in the USA, but for the past 150 years we have been Sunni Christians and Shia Christians, and for most of that time the Sunni have run everything and actively kept the Shia down. Although the Shia have broken through most barriers and neither group seems dominant today, the Shia continue to fear resurgent Sunni hegemony and the Sunni continue to fear envelopment by Shia masses.

There is an irony to my personal heritage, on my father's side. Both my father and his father married Catholic women, but they were probably the first in their line to do so. My father was raised in the household of his paternal grandparents, who he describes as non-denominational Protestant Christians. As you go further back my Cowdery forbearers get more serious about their Protestantism, all the way back to William who came over in 1630 and was a deacon in his Puritan congregation.

Although I was much more imbued with the culture of my Catholic ancestors, my Protestant heritage is part of me too. Today I am a "religion-friendly" atheist. How American is that?

The United States seems always to be simultaneously coming together and flying apart. Political commentators talk about Red America (the Republican-dominated suburbs and rural areas) versus Blue America (the Democrat-dominated cities). They talk about Culture Wars and wedge issues. It's always more interesting, even if it's not necessarily more productive, to talk about what makes us different. Political polarization makes good television but is it good for society?

If our goal is to promote greater social harmony, we need to concentrate on what we all have in common. Maybe we can't please everybody, but we can do better than 60 percent. That's the percentage of Americans who are Protestant Christians and for whom Roy Moore's Ten Commandments are the Ten Commandments.

Although Christians are the overwhelming majority in the United States, about 85 percent of the population, more than 90 percent of Americans are believers of some kind, so "In God We Trust" excludes fewer than 10 percent of us. That Protestant Ten Commandments in the Alabama courthouse excludes about 40 percent of us. That's the difference.

© 2003, Charles Kendrick Cowdery, All Rights Reserved.

Read my other essays on this subject.

"Roy Moore Has a Point." (8/22/03)

"A Ten Commandments for Everyone." (6/9/03)