Background and Context
By 2010 the argument about religion had been running loudly for most of a decade, conducted largely through bestsellers — Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens himself, the four the press had taken to bundling together. Their common charge was that religion is false and does harm. The common reply was that unbelief helps itself to a moral vocabulary it did not earn and could not have generated. What almost nobody on either side had done was open the founding text and go through it in order, keeping score. Hitchens does exactly that here, and his premise is that the text invites the treatment: the law was delivered more than once, in versions that differ materially, and the first set was destroyed by the man carrying it. Something handed down that many times is a draft, and the useful question to ask of a draft is what a revision would keep.
Interpretation
Set the two lists beside each other and count what each one is actually about.
The Decalogue's prohibitions run to the contents of a household. Your father and mother. Your neighbour's house, his wife, his manservant, his maidservant, his ox, his ass. Theft and perjury are transactions between two identifiable parties, and even the Sabbath commandment, which looks like the most abstract of the ten, turns out to be addressed to a man with a particular son, daughter, servant, and animal to give the day off to. The moral unit throughout is the neighbour — not humanity, not a people considered in the abstract, but the man whose field adjoins yours, whose ox you know by sight, who might well be standing in the room when the rule is read aloud.
Hitchens saw this, and it produced his most substantial objection. His complaint about coveting is partly the familiar thought-crime one, but the objection he actually develops is about reach. He records the scholarly argument that "neighbour" here means the literal man next door, and the further reading that through much of the Bible it means only a fellow Jew, and then remarks that it seems rather a waste of a commandment to confine it to either the Joneses or the Semites. That is not a complaint about what the rule forbids. It is a complaint that the rule is too small.
So count the objects of what he writes in its place. An ethnicity. Homosexuals, and pointedly so many of them. Those who use violence in sexual relations, taken as a standing class. People robbed by false prospectus — the plural earning its place, since a prospectus is the instrument by which one defrauds a great many strangers at once rather than one man with a knife. All jihadists and crusaders, the all stated outright. The web of nature entire. Any god and any religion whatsoever. Seven of ten take a class as their object where the original took a person — and two of those seven are not even populations but categories of thing, the natural world entire and any religion whatsoever, which is the widening carried about as far as it will go.
That is not a corrected version of the old code. It is a different moral grammar, and it is the grammar of roughly the last two centuries — the one that made it possible to hold a settled position on slavery as an institution rather than on a particular slaveholder, on a category of person rather than on the household next door. Hitchens's additions strike a modern reader as self-evident because every modern reader has been thinking in this grammar since childhood. They were not available at Sinai, and the reason has little to do with the ancients being crueller. A code addressed to the man whose field adjoins yours has no way to reach a category, because a category is not standing in front of anybody, and none of the instruments that let a person form a moral opinion about people he will never meet — the census, the survey, the newspaper, the campaign, the statistic — had yet been built.
Two of the ten refuse the widening, and they are the revealing ones. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child: a child, singular, and what is asked for is a posture of the body, which is about as particular as a rule can get. And the phone — you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us. That us is the only first-person plural in eleven sentences, and it attaches to the smallest injury on the list. Both exceptions are the two items where the injured party is physically present. Where somebody is in the room, the sentence goes particular without being asked to; the widening is what language does when nobody is.
Which leaves the price. A code written in the wide grammar is superb at telling you what to think about slavery, an epidemic, or an emissions path, and has almost nothing to say about the person in front of you — which was the older list's entire job. Nothing in Hitchens's ten would help anyone behave decently toward one specific person over thirty years, and nothing in the original would have helped anyone form a view about an institution. He has bought reach with resolution. It looks like a fair trade right up until the day the other thing is what is wanted.
Current Relevance
Almost all public moral argument now runs in the wide register. We reason about protected categories, affected communities, statistical lives, disparate impact, ecosystems, cohorts, and populations, and we are right to: nobody can think usefully about a health system, a sentencing disparity, or a warming atmosphere in the grammar of the neighbour. The instruments Hitchens's list presupposes have only grown more powerful since, and the moral reach they buy is real.
The characteristic modern failure follows from the same fact and has no good name. A person can hold impeccable and even costly positions about a class while treating an individual member of it badly, and nothing in the wide vocabulary registers the contradiction, because the two claims are made in different grammars and never meet on the same page. Institutions reproduce the gap at scale, and the mechanism is mundane rather than sinister. A policy written for a category is drafted, reviewed, and defended by people who will only ever encounter it as a document; the person it injures encounters it once, in a room, as a decision about them. Nobody in the drafting chain is assigned the second view, because there is no artefact for it — no standing register of particular cases, no seat at the review for whoever handled the last one that went badly. So an organization can hold a position it is genuinely proud of and be unable to say what it owed to the single person the position ran over. The second thing is what gets remembered.
The quarrel Hitchens was writing into, meanwhile, has moved from courthouse lawns into classrooms. In 2005 the Supreme Court decided two Ten Commandments display cases on the same June day and split them, upholding a monument on the Texas Capitol grounds and striking down courthouse displays in two Kentucky counties. In 2022 it discarded the test that had governed those cases in favour of a standard keyed to history and tradition, and legislatures moved: Louisiana required the Ten Commandments in every public classroom in 2024, Texas and Arkansas followed in 2025, and by the spring of 2026 the Fifth Circuit had answered twice and differently — vacating the Louisiana injunction on ripeness grounds without reaching the merits, then upholding the Texas statute on the merits. Both statutes are now the subject of certiorari petitions pending at the Supreme Court, neither yet acted on.
What is being installed in those classrooms is a document in the older grammar, a text that names an ox, while the moral disputes those same classrooms actually have are almost entirely about categories of student. And Hitchens's throwaway advice names the question the litigation now turns on: ask which set. Both statutes prescribe the same unnumbered wording carried by the twentieth-century monument campaign, a version adopted precisely to sidestep the numbering dispute between Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish traditions — and critics can still show that the phrasing tracks a Reformed Protestant rendering.
Impact and Legacy
The piece belongs to a small and revealing lineage. Bertrand Russell had published his own secular decalogue in 1951, "A Liberal Decalogue," and setting the two lists side by side is the most useful thing anyone can do with either. Russell was explicit that his ten were meant to supplement the original rather than replace it, which is itself the first difference worth noticing, since Hitchens is unambiguously writing a replacement. The second is the subject matter. Russell's ten are almost entirely about intellectual conduct: do not feel absolutely certain of anything; do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, since every opinion now accepted was once eccentric; never try to discourage thinking, because you are sure to succeed. Hitchens's ten are about whom you may harm.
Two atheists of comparable temperament, asked a version of the same question fifty-eight years apart, produced lists with essentially no overlap. That is the finding. A secular decalogue turns out to be a portrait of what its author's moment was frightened of rather than a derivation from anything — dogmatism and conformity for a man who had watched two European catastrophes assembled out of certainty; ethnic hatred, sexual violence, child abuse, financial fraud, and holy war for a man who had spent his career reporting them. Neither list is wrong. Neither is derivable from the other, and neither author offers an argument for his selection. That is what the comparison exposes, and no amount of arguing about whether atheists can be moral would ever have exposed it.
Contrasting Views or Controversies
Choosing the neighbour as the Decalogue's moral unit is a selection, and other selections are defensible. The opening commandments address a nation in covenant; the Sabbath governs an entire household including servants and livestock; the law as a whole is given to a people rather than to a man, and the promises attached to it are collective. The neighbour is one register within the document and not obviously the governing one, so the contrast drawn above depends on which lines get quoted.
The same problem runs the other way. Hitchens's list is not uniformly wide either: the child clause is singular, the phone clause names the people at one table, and do not ever use people as private property reads at least as much like a prohibition on a transaction as a verdict on an institution. Seven of ten is a tendency. A tendency is not a grammar, and building an argument on a count invites the obvious question of what the other three are doing there.
Then there is the historical claim, which does not survive contact with the tradition it contrasts itself against. Class-scoped moral reasoning is not a modern acquisition at all. The prophets denounce the treatment of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger — three categories, named as categories, indicted structurally rather than case by case. Leviticus extends the command to love your neighbour explicitly to the resident alien, which is a deliberate widening of exactly the kind described above, performed inside the tradition and several thousand years early. The widening may therefore be a change of emphasis rather than of kind, and much of the argument above would not survive that.
One more objection, and this one is to Hitchens. The wide grammar does not only license moral positions about slavery; it licenses moral positions about people. Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions is a verdict issued about a class, in advance of any particular case, on the strength of category membership — the precise operation the list's own first item forbids. The two sentences sit eight apart, on the same list, in the same breath. Whatever else the widening buys, it costs the ability to notice that they contradict each other, and the essay does not notice.
Practical Application
- For a citizen arguing about public moral instruction: Ask what moral unit the proposed text uses, before arguing about whether it belongs on a wall. A document that names an ox is telling you something about the kind of guidance it can give, and a school's real moral difficulties are unlikely to be of that shape. This reframes the whole dispute: instead of arguing about whether a text is religious, which is unresolvable and has been litigated for seventy years, you are asking what the text can actually do for a fourteen-year-old, which is answerable by reading it.
- For an institution that writes rules about categories of person: Build the missing artefact. The gap described above persists because there is no standing record of particular cases and nobody at the review table who handled the last one that went wrong — so create both, and give whoever holds them the authority to say this one is different before the injured party has to go outside the building to be heard. The cost is one seat and one document. The alternative is discovering the particular case from a journalist.
- For anyone who has been handed a code — scripture, a professional oath, a founding charter: Read the variants. Almost every such document exists in more than one version, the differences are usually where the interesting history is, and the single most useful thing a teacher can do is put two of them side by side without comment. Someone who has watched a canonical text disagree with itself has learned something durable about authority that no amount of instruction about authority will supply.
- For a person writing rules for themselves: Notice which scale each one is pitched at, and keep at least a few at the smaller one. Resolutions about categories — being fairer, being less judgmental about a kind of person — are unfalsifiable on any given day and can be held for years without contact with evidence. A rule about one named person can be kept or broken by Thursday. Both are worth having; only the second will ever tell you anything you did not already believe.
Background on the Author
Hitchens's beat was the category. He wrote about the Kurds rather than a Kurd, about the Bosnian Muslims, about what orders signed in Washington did to villages in Indochina; his two most sustained books are prosecutions, one of Henry Kissinger and one of Mother Teresa, and both work by accumulating particular cases until they stop reading as anecdotes and resolve into a pattern with a name and a defendant. That operation is precisely what the wide grammar exists to perform, and he had spent a working life getting good at it. Born in Portsmouth in 1949, he came to the question from journalism rather than philosophy and never had a system, which bears directly on the list's most criticized feature — that it offers no argument for its selections. Reporters do not derive their subjects. They go where the harm is and file.
The exception in his career is the one that shows what the default cost him. In 2008 he had himself waterboarded and wrote it up, on the principle that a man arguing publicly about whether a thing constitutes torture ought to find out; the piece is memorable exactly because the category collapses in it to a single body on a board, and the body is his. He could do the particular when the particular was himself. Very little of that register survives into the ten he wrote afterward.