In Joe Rogan interview, J.D. Vance played dumb about the Ten Commandments in Texas schools

The vice president mangled history and the Constitution so badly that Joe Rogan became the voice of reason

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In the middle of his three-hour interview with Joe Rogan yesterday, J.D. Vance played dumb about why Ten Commandments posters are being forced into Texas public school classrooms while pretending they were a necessary correction to liberal overreach.

They were talking about the new law to shove the Decalogue into schools, and how Senate candidate James Talarico, a seminarian and Christian himself, gained notoriety years ago for highlighting the hypocrisy of the people voting for the bill. (That law was struck down by a federal judge but more recently upheld by an ultra-conservative appellate court.)

Vance had the opportunity to just freely admit this was about bringing Christianity into schools. Instead, he lied and acted like that wasn’t the main goal. The two men spent ten minutes discussing the Ten Commandments, which is to say Vance had ten minutes to lie his ass off about the purpose of the law and the motivations of the Republicans behind it.

At 48:22, Vance argued, “I don’t think putting the Ten Commandments up in school is, like, forcing things on anybody.”

That’s exactly what this is about. Republicans have long pretended like the law is about honoring American history or our legal past, but when the bill was being debated, Texas Republicans defended it by saying things like “It is incumbent on all of us to follow God’s law” and “This is a Christ-centered legislative body.”

Furthermore, the Texas law requires the posters—with their specific King James Version of the Commandments—to go up in every classroom. Kids can’t avoid it even if they wanted to. That’s the problem.

Leave it to a member of the Trump administration to not understand why forcing things on children is a bad idea.

At 49:19, Vance said, “Our founders were people who were very much influenced—even if they weren’t Christians, a lot of them of course were—but were very influenced by Christian culture.”

This is wildly exaggerated. The Founders were influenced by a lot of people and ideas, including Enlightenment thinkers, English common law, and religious freedom. But there’s a reason Christianity and Jesus and the Bible don’t appear in the Constitution. They knew our country shouldn’t have a religious foundation, much less a specific religious one.

At 51:06, Vance insisted, “I think all of the Abrahamic faiths recognize the Ten Commandments as, like, a significant thing.”

No they don’t. Islam recognizes Moses as a prophet, but the Qur’an doesn’t include the KJV Ten Commandments, nor do Muslims consider the version up in Texas classrooms some kind of authoritative text.

At 51:28, Vance said, “This is, like, an important cultural element of the western civilization.”

No it’s not. The Commandments aren’t part of our culture, much less the culture of all of western civilization. Several of the Commandments are explicitly religious and therefore meaningless to tens of millions of Americans.

Without the Commandments, you would still have rules about honoring your parents and not committing crimes. With the Commandments, you get plenty of additional bullshit.

At 51:46, Vance smugly stated, “If you look at the Ten Commandments, probably eight of them are something that I would hope that everybody would agree with, even if they're that not themselves religious.”

He can’t even name them, can he?

There may be two Commandments that everyone can agree with—don’t kill, don’t steal—but the rest are irrelevant or debatable. At the very least, you won’t find solidarity on the Commandments involving not having other gods before you, not creating graven images, not taking the Lord’s name in vain, and keeping the Sabbath holy.

Too bad Rogan didn’t ask Vance to list off all the Commandments.

At 51:56, Vance stated, “I would not be offended if I sat in a classroom as a Christian, or if my kids sat in a classroom as a Christian, and saw, you know, a religious text that wasn’t Christian on the wall.”

It’s very easy to say this when you know damn well Muslims and Satanists and atheists aren’t pushing to have their own endorsed texts on classroom walls. But if another religion managed to do that, Vance’s conservative allies would flip the hell out. There’s no way they would just smile and say they’re glad their kids are exposed to the Seven Fundamental Tenets of The Satanic Temple.

At 53:12, Vance claimed, “Freedom of religion is itself not really a liberal concept. It was originally derived from… a Christian idea about free will and the dignity of the person.”

This is just plain fiction. The writings of John Locke and Enlightenment philosophy played significant roles in our concept of religious freedom. The Bible did not. And if you want a sense of what “Christian” nations look like in history, they’re ones where heresy is criminal and religious minorities are persecuted.

At 53:32, Vance asserted, “It’s not like they’re putting the Ten Commandments in front of these kids and saying, ‘You have to read this and, you know, write it 500 times a day.’”

That’s irrelevant. Even if students aren’t asked to read or recite the Commandments, it’s still considered coercive to promote Christianity in the classroom the way they’re doing in Texas.

Vance might realize this if he had the ability to put himself in anyone else’s shoes. But empathy isn’t one of his strong suits.

At 53:41, Vance declared, “They're exposing kids to something. And I'm comfortable with kids being exposed to a lot of different things”

No surprise that a member of the Trump administration loves it when kids are exposed to things...

Anyway, this just mischaracterizes the law because Texas isn’t exposing kids to other religious beliefs. They’re elevating one religion above all others. That’s the problem. If exposure were the intent, teachers could bring up the Ten Commandments in a comparative religions class or even as part of another lesson. Exposure doesn’t require shoving a Christian poster in kids’ faces every single day.

Plus, Republicans are the ones who flip out whenever there’s a rainbow symbol on a teacher’s wall. Exposure, for them, only ever goes in one direction.

At 54:32, Vance proclaimed, “For a long time in this country, there were actually Supreme Court rulings that said that you cannot pray in a school, even a student organization led by the students, or that you cannot put the Ten Commandments up, even a teacher who chose to do it in their own classroom.”

No one, including the Supreme Court, ever said prayer was banned in school. Mandatory, teacher-led Christian prayers are not okay. Prayers over the loudspeaker at school events are not okay. But individuals who want to pray on their own or with friends? Not a problem. As long as it’s not coercive or forced upon students, no one’s stopping teachers or student groups from praying as they see fit.

Also, there’s a reason teachers can’t put up Christian symbols or Bible verses in the classroom. The laws requiring government neutrality on religion are good ones!

At 55:50, Vance argued, “I just think the balance in our country the last 30-40 years has actually been much more in the other direction, which is that we try to completely remove religion from the public square.”

This has never happened except in the deranged fantasies of Christian Nationalists and God’s Not Dead screenwriters. Religion was never removed from the public square. People can talk about it all they want. They can even put up religious displays as long as other groups are given the same opportunities.

The difference between 40 years ago and now is that we’re much more likely to realize religion is not a virtue… and that’s in part because we’ve seen what powerful religious people like JD Vance do with their faith. Vance demands respect for his beliefs even though they don’t deserve it.

At 56:35, Vance contended, “The late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist sort of said this: that if your approach to religion in public life always and everywhere is to push it out of the public square, then you’re actually embracing a religion of your own in the public square, which is secularism. You’re just taking one religion and replacing it with secularism.”

No one’s pushing religion out of the public square, and secularism isn’t a religion. Vance is pretending that government neutrality on faith is some kind of atheistic position. If atheists were trying to get governments to say God doesn’t exist and trying to ban any mention of faith in public spaces, maybe he’d have a point, but those are things that have never happened anywhere ever.

Neutrality is not oppression.

At 57:00, Vance stressed, “If I’m in a 95% Christian community and my local city council wants to put up a Nativity display on, you know, Christmas Eve, I’m okay with that.”

Again, it’s easy for Vance to say he’d be comfortable when it’s his faith being promoted by the government. But the whole point of the Constitution is that a majority of people can’t override our rights. It wouldn’t matter if 99% of a city was Christian; they still can’t promote their religion on city property without giving the same opportunity to everyone else.

At 57:50, Vance claimed, “I also don’t think that the expectation should be that we tell religious people they’re not allowed to be religious in the public square.”

No one has ever said this to religious people. They can be religious. Even in public. What they can’t do is use their government positions to shove Jesus in kids’ faces, which is exactly what conservative Christians in Texas have been trying to do.

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Ultimately, Vance refused to admit the obvious: No one would be complaining about the Ten Commandments in school if they were part of an objective lesson in an appropriate class. But that’s not what’s happening here. Texas Republicans jammed a specific version of the Commandments into every classroom in the state, and the courts, as of now, are letting them do it.

Talarico—whose name Vance refused to say properly, which I would argue is a sign of disrespect—had it right when he called out the hypocrisy on this matter years ago.

The bottom line is that Texas conservatives have used the courts to tell kids which religion counts—and which ones don’t. By doing so, they’re sending a message that kids from non-Christian families (or the “wrong” kind of Christian ones) are second-class citizens.

Christians like Vance would be furious if schools put up non-Christian lists of moral values. But because it’s his religion in control, he doesn’t give a damn. Instead, he played dumb so well that Rogan came off as the voice of reason in their conversation.

Vance never offered a serious defense of the Texas law. Instead, he offered Rogan a series of lies and deliberate mischaracterizations meant to make Christian supremacy sound like harmless cultural appreciation. He couldn’t tell the difference between private religious expression and government-sponsored faith. He falsely claimed the alternative to forced Christianity was religious neutrality. Either the vice president genuinely doesn’t understand the most basic principles of religious freedom or he understands it perfectly well and knows that lying about it is politically useful.

If Vance truly cared about exposing kids to different beliefs, he would demand that schools treat those beliefs equally. He doesn’t. He only becomes passionate about “religious freedom” when it involves his own religion getting special privileges. Because Christian Nationalists like him don’t want a public square where every faith can flourish. They want one where only their faith is dominant—and critics are always accused of trying to erase their religion.

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