The Ten Commandments are in the news again, this time courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices will hear arguments this week about whether it is constitutional to display the Commandments on the grounds of the Texas Capitol and in two county courthouses in Kentucky.

Can government sponsor a huge monument – or even a small picture frame with a religious message – on public property? That’s the legal issue.

I have a different question:

If Texas and Kentucky and a nationwide coalition of religious groups, and the folks who sell Ten Commandments T-shirts and yard signs, and the Bush administration, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief – if all these good people get their way and those famous words are widely displayed, what should happen? What should happen if this ancient biblical code gets all the publicity some think it deserves?

Surely, they believe America would be a better nation. But I have to ask: Would it still be America?

The opening commandments, citing the supremacy of God, pretty much speak for themselves. Same for honoring one’s parents. The four proscribing criminal acts – murder, theft, swearing falsely and adultery – are necessary for a stable and just society, though we can debate what might happen to New York, Hollywood and all places in between if adultery suddenly was considered a serious offense.

So far, pure Americana. But there are two commandments that I, for one, have long struggled to follow, and that are at odds with the consumerist, capitalist culture that is also a part of American civic religion. One involves that enigmatic word covet, as in the Tenth Commandment’s dictum: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor’s.”

So important is the prohibition of this behavior – this feeling, really – that in some Christian versions of the Decalogue the verse is split in two different commandments.

Commentators have argued for years whether the word means desire, or greed, or something even more misguided. But there’s no getting around the fact that American economic might was fueled by those who believed, as Gordon Gekko famously said in the film Wall Street: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”

Thankfully, few of us are that ruthless. Instead, we are lulled into a coveting that may seem less offensive but is just as insidious. As Walter Brueggemann, professor emeritus of the Columbia Theological Seminary, wrote, “the propensity to covet in our society is enacted through an unbridled consumerism that believes the main activity of human life is to accumulate, use, and enjoy more and more of the available resources of the earth.”

This “acquisitive individualism,” as Brueggemann calls it, is hard to shake, especially when we are bombarded with entreaties to buy the SUV no matter how much gasoline it guzzles, or the house built on what was once open space when older neighborhoods are available.

Even more of a challenge is the admonition to keep the Sabbath and refrain from work one day a week – and not just you, but your children and servants and cattle and the strangers in your midst. This is a profoundly radical and egalitarian concept, “an abolition of the distinction of master and slave, rich and poor, success and failure,” as the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel has written.

Is this society really willing to shut down the factory and the computer, turn off the cell phone and suspend commerce one entire day a week? To make time more important than place and things for 14 percent of our days? To recognize that the Sabbath is Sunday to some, and Saturday and Friday to others, and all must be respected?

I struggle with this weekly and can testify that it is hard to do. Not for nothing do some scholars link this commandment with the Tenth. They both require us to reject the addictiveness of work and the coveting of consumerism, to put down our Blackberries and our credit cards and focus on something else.

I trust that those who believe it is so important to inject this religious moral code on public land have read the fine print. It’s a tall order. I hope they, and the nation, are able to fill it.