history, which would have been morally unacceptable only a decade earlier. Morality and religion are not necessarily mutually bound, but the weakening of the force of the commandments has made them less viable and has also strengthened religious fundamentalism and the inevitable hypocrisy and absolutism it breeds.
The first four commandments are tied to God, the last four to property. Theft and adultery — both essentially crimes against property, since marriage was viewed as a form of ownership — were prohibited for the same reasons as bearing false witness and coveting what belonged, or was seen as belonging, to another. All four are clearly about possession and ownership, and the prohibition against adultery is also about keeping vows and ensuring that men do not abandon their wives and offspring. Though the stricture against bearing false witness has often been seen in a broader context as a prohibition against lying or mendacity, the commandment historically has been tied to notions of property and ownership. And how absolute can one expect to be on the subject of lying, even on lying while under an oath to God? My mother, who believed God marked down every single lie in a big book, still liked to emphasize that there were differences between big and small lies, even so-called white lies calculated to keep someone’s feelings from being hurt. Not coveting what another possesses might be the most vexing commandment of the final four, since coveting seems almost an intrinsic part of human nature.
I had a religious-minded Catholic crony in high school named Wayne, who was aching with lust for his neighbor Jerry’s blonde, big-busted wife. Wayne confessed to me one day that he regularly masturbated, sometimes two or three times a day, while thinking about her. He also revealed that he simply couldn’t get over the fact that Jerry was a jerk to his wife, mean and bossy, unable to appreciate her sirenlike appeal the way covetous Wayne did. Wayne was fearful God would punish him for coveting his neighbor’s wife. He told me he confessed to his priest and actually asked the priest if this meant a place in hell would be reserved for him, and whether jerking off so much to her image could make him lose his sperm supply. He had heard somewhere that the Bible warned that a man only had what he described to me as “a thousand loads.”
Murder remains for many the central commandment despite its position at number 6, and despite all the murders that God, if he is truly omnipotent or involved in human affairs, is complicit in or simply uninvolved. The greatest moral seriousness is still attached to murder, especially premeditated murder, which is one reason why it is so often popularly dramatized. The sixth commandment has the greatest currency even though the world is awash in murder. Most who believe in God accept prima facie that God, regardless of how we reckon with his inscrutable nature, does not countenance murder, even though God himself has been given a James Bond–style license to kill by his true believers, who frequently also give themselves license to kill in his name.
If higher intelligence manifests directly in our lives, one has to reckon with the kill toll, and especially with the number who die horribly and for no reason, or by the hands of others in God’s name. But behind the sixth commandment, and anchored to its ongoing power over us, is the value attached to the preciousness of human life. Why human life should be more important than other animal life is a question I leave to philosophers like Peter Singer and others who argue that perhaps it shouldn’t. But spiritual seekers, and hordes of the secular minded, and those of little or no faith all still confirm the sacredness of human life and the tradition that has come down to us from the sixth commandment. Even atheists speak of the sanctity of human life.
Yet if one assumes that God directs or intervenes — the God most people believe in and worship, the God who supposedly commands us not to kill — he can perhaps be seen as the greatest and most random of killers, one for whom murder is an ongoing specialty. He is the one in whose name fervent believers have for centuries killed. This same God, the faithful would quickly argue, grants us life and all the wonders and joys of the planet — even though the planet may be, without any guarantee of divine intervention, perilously close to nuclear annihilation or ecologic catastrophe or asteroids or staggering losses of precious human life from a yet-to-be anticipated pandemic. That same God instills in us, according to believers, all that is holy, good, and true and grants us life everlasting, while nonbelievers cede none of this and do not attribute our virtues or strengths or good health or good fortune to God.
The great twentieth-century novel and short story writer Flannery O’Connor, as devout a Catholic in her daily life as most pontiffs or priests, created one of literature’s first mass killers, the Misfit, in her most famous and widely taught story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The Misfit kills people randomly, an entire family in fact, but he broods over theological questions such as whether Jesus actually raised the dead. His words to the grandmother, a foolish old lady he is about to shoot to death, hearken back to those of Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, who says that anything is permissible in a world without God. Had he been there to see Jesus raise the dead, the Misfit says to the grandmother, he would have known. Since he was not there he cannot know, and so he might as well kill people.
Was the main problem of the past century, as W. E. B. DuBois, the author of The Souls of Black Folk, famously proclaimed, “the problem of the color line”? Or was it what Flannery O’Connor recognized as finding God and knowing what God was capable of performing or allowing, and knowing whether he was in his heaven or in our lives? I’m left, like the Misfit, with the inability to know, but I lack the desire to succumb to what I see as the evil in a code like his — one in which there is no stricture against killing or doing mean things. Speaking of Jesus as the only one who raised the dead, the Misfit tells the grandmother: “If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him.”
I can offer no good reason why killing (or any other form of meanness) is not permissible, other than the importance of adhering to human-made laws or to one’s own code. The Misfit wished he could have been there to see Jesus raise the dead, and I wish I could know whether God really handed commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai. The real challenge of hewing to the particulars of one’s own code is to stand behind it in times that require courage and in moments that put life and death on the line.
In Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s character Raskolnikov makes philosophic attempts to be a Nietzschean superman and kill, without conscience, his old landlady. from this, we have come, in the United States, to an age of the Misfit and an age in which the moral weight of murder has diminished. Mass murder and serial killing especially have become a significant part of American life and popular culture, and subjects of philosophical meditations on evil and a world without the moral force of God. In the past few decades, so many infamous figures have been identified with serial killing that someone produced a collection of serial-killer playing cards — featuring the likes of John Wayne Gacy, David Berkowitz, Richard Ramirez, Ted Bundy, members of the Manson family, and other representatives of mayhem — apparently worth collecting like the traditional bubblegum cards of my youth.
I knew we had crossed a Rubicon in America in 1991 when Silence of the Lambs, a Jonathan Demme film about not one but two serial killers, won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor, given to Anthony Hopkins for his chilling performance as Hannibal Lecter. In 2007 Javier Bardem won an Oscar for his equally frightening portrayal of a serial killer in the Coen brothers’ film version of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men. The idea of an entire family senselessly murdered was still horrific new fictional territory when Flannery O’Connor’s famous story was published in 1955. And that shock factor was still powerful a decade later when Truman Capote published In Cold Blood about the real-life murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas.
We in the West are not yet desensitized to murder in any way remotely comparable to that in parts of Africa and in the Middle East, where ongoing carnage suggests that life is intolerably cheap. But we have become, thanks to a glut of media murder portrayals, increasingly inured to the kind of killings that once precipitated great shock throughout the land — Charles Whitman in his University of Texas tower shooting innocents like ducks in an amusement park, or Charles Starkweather and his childhood companion, Caril Ann Fugate, murdering indiscriminately throughout the Midwest