I have a word I would like to share with New York Times columnist Pamela Paul. The word is “monolatry.” It is not as well known as “monotheism” but it is crucially necessary in Old Testament studies.

Here is a quote from Pamela Paul’s column in this morning’s New York Times:

“And when the Ten Commandments say, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” the implication is that there is one true god.”

“No other gods?”

The idea of monotheism is that there is one god. One God? That is certainly what the apostle Paul had in mind when he assured the sophisticates in Corinth that there was actually only one God and the others were all fakes. It is not what Moses had in mind when he passed along the tablet that says, “no other gods.”

The Moses position is that there are lots of gods. Every nation has one focal deity and many have a whole choir of them. Perfectly fine. However we—the Israelites—are to worship our God.

You can say all the great things about this God that you want to say. God created the world; God is the source of all life and of all virtue. And then you place those claims by saying, “for us.” These claims are all part of our story of the world. We understand that they are not part of your story.

That is why the little-known word “monolatry” is so useful. WE worship this God. There is no other God for us. Worshipping any of the other gods—notice the reference to other gods in the commandment—is wrong for us.

Pamela Paul’s point is that the Christian Nationalists are appealing to “Judeo-Christian values” as the norm for the whole nation. The “we” in “we worship this God” is, in their view, all Americans. But if it relies on the Ten Commandments as the source of her notion of monotheism, it will crash of its own weight.

The word that will destroy it is “other.”

And happy independence day. The Declaration of Independence has been voted on and established for two whole days already. Let’s get that sucker signed today.