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LOSING MOSES ON THE FREEWAY: LOSING MOSES ON THE FREEWAY: The Ten Commandments in America by Chris Hedges Free Press, 224 pp.; $24

At first glance, a book by Chris Hedges on "America's broken covenant with the Ten Commandments" seems radically misplaced. The complaint that U.S. society has failed to follow the Decalogue is usually heard from the Religious Right or the evangelical center.

So what is this left-leaning former war reporter for The New York Times doing with a thesis more suited to Alabama's former chief justice Roy Moore?

A Presbyterian pastor's son who trained for the ministry at Harvard Divinity School while pastoring in a Roxbury, Massachusetts, ghetto, Hedges was born to preach. In the opening chapter on the initial commandment prohibiting worship of foreign gods, he narrates the gulf between Harvard's liberal theology and the loveless, hopeless lives in his neighborhood.

Hoping to rescue two teenage heroin addicts from sin and oppression, he instead descended to their depth. By the end of his second year, they were trying to kill him, and he was using the police and the courts to try to destroy them. Hedges discovered the truth that "the darkness … in Roxbury was my darkness, our darkness." Chastened, he left the ministry and the church to become a war correspondent.

Hedges weaves this story with those of other souls struggling with the idols that separate them from God. Here and in the rest of the book, he's still preaching-crying out against idolatry, violence, and selfishness, and calling for repentance, community, and love.

When Hedges left Roxbury, he ritualized the moment by throwing an empty bottle against the front door of his church. Some readers might feel that Losing Moses on the Freeway is a similar act of vandalism against God's church. It isn't. True, swear words for Hedges include institutional religion, rules, television evangelists, and (sometimes) theology. True, he sometimes writes about Christianity (and Judaism and Islam) as if it inherently champions violence while opposing life and love. And the fact that he skewers liberal and conservative theology alike probably won't offer readers much comfort.

Yet in a book on the Decalogue, this discomfort isn't such a bad thing. Israel became so uncomfortable when God spoke the Ten Commandments that they begged Moses never to let God speak to them directly again (Ex. 20:19). Similarly, our first instinct may be to silence Hedges by closing his book, especially if we won't hear criticism of the Iraq invasion (there's a lot). But just as every commandment contains a hidden promise (according to Karl Barth), so Hedges's criticisms offer the promise of real community. His denunciations are meant to call us from idolatry to authenticity, from fear to trust, from selfishness to sacrificial love.

The book offers 10 chapters, each loosely focused on one commandment, framed by a prologue and an epilogue. Hedges does not convey much about what the commandments mean, nor how we might faithfully keep them. Instead, he tells stories. His approach is shaped by his inspiration for the project, the 10 films on the Decalogue by Krzysztof Kieslowski. In Hedges's description of the films, we find an apt account of what he is trying to do in Losing Moses on the Freeway.

First, he shows that the commandments are not "dusty relics of another age," but are relevant "to the human predicament." Second, his approach to each commandment is indirect, by way of stories that present "the lives of ordinary people." Finally, he seeks to free the commandments "from the clutter of piety."

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July 2005, Vol. 49, No. 7