Texas Showdown: Legal battle looming over Ten Commandments in schools
With a new state law set to kick in Monday requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public classroom in Texas, many school districts this week are scrambling to figure out what to do. Some are holding off following a federal judge’s recent ruling against the mandate. Others are racing to fundraise for donated posters of the commandments.
The law—and others like it in Louisiana and Arkansas—is part of a coordinated effort to get the issue to the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, who advocates hope will end, or significantly weaken, restrictions on prayer in public schools. Texas has been one of the flash points of this movement.
On Monday, Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a statement saying hundreds of school districts that were not involved in a recent lawsuit must display copies—if they received donated ones, or funded them themselves—of the King James Bible’s rendering of the Ten Commandments in every classroom by Sept. 1.
“The woke radicals seeking to erase our nation’s history will be defeated. I will not back down from defending the virtues and values that built this country,” Paxton said in his statement.
The Texas law doesn’t require districts to spend their own money on the posters of the King James Version of the Ten Commandments, but they must display donated posters. Dozens of national Christian conservative groups, including several focused on legal advocacy, are part of a coalition called Restore America’s Schools that has been fundraising for the posters.
On Tuesday, the group’s site said it had raised enough to serve an estimated 3 million students. Last week, KCEN-TV reported that a local couple donated 700 posters to Temple Independent School District, in east-central Texas, but the school district was holding off on displaying them because of legal concerns.
Bill Tarleton, executive director of the Texas Rural Education Association, said his sense is that the 400 districts he represents oppose state mandates like this and want local control of such decisions.
“It’s not that we’re against religion, it has to do with our belief that schools can handle things,” he said. He added that a lot of schools are in “a kind of limbo” trying to figure out legal issues and also waiting to see where donated posters will show up.
Conservative commentator Glenn Beck, whose nonprofits are partnering with the effort, said on his radio show last month that “the Ten Commandments are critical for a free society. … When we removed the Ten Commandments, we removed not just religion but the blueprint for all civilization. Without the Ten Commandments we cannot right the ship.” He urged listeners to adopt a school and donate posters.
Texas legislators earlier this year passed a law requiring every classroom to display the King James Version of the Ten Commandments. The King James Bible, which originated with the Church of England, is a Protestant version.
U.S. District Judge Fred Biery temporarily halted the law last week for the 11 districts that challenged it in court, including the state’s largest, Houston Independent. The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of 16 families that come from various faith traditions or who are nonreligious.
His action followed a similar new law in Louisiana being found unconstitutional in June and another federal judge partially blocking a similar measure this month in Arkansas.
Now school districts are getting different legal messages.
The ACLU and other major church-state separation groups, in a letter sent Aug. 21 to the more than 1,000 school districts in Texas, noted Biery’s ruling that the new law is “plainly unconstitutional.”
Even for districts that are not part of the case, the letter said, “all school districts have an independent obligation to respect students’ and families’ constitutional rights.” Saying public school families practice “a rich diversity” of religions and no religion, the letter said districts that post the commandments could be sued.
The Supreme Court in recent decades moved away from the church-state separation that existed in decades prior. It has instead emphasized the free exercise of religion rather than guarding against the establishment of religion. Both values are laid out in the First Amendment, but their meanings are hotly contested.
In 1980, the justices said a similar law in Kentucky was unconstitutional. In recent decades, however, the high court has chipped away at restrictions on religion in public places or using public funding. The general yardstick used for a half-century to determine if a law violated the Establishment Clause—called the Lemon Test—was tossed out by the court in 2022. Experts say the country is in an unclear period about what restrictions remain.
Douglas Laycock, a University of Virginia Law School professor and religious liberty expert, said that the court “for years said government can’t endorse religion, but they waffled on enforcing it. But the current court is just letting government do whatever it wants” in terms of mixing religion and the public square.
“Except for [limits on] prayer in schools, there really doesn’t seem to be anything left of the Establishment Clause,” he said.
Michael Helfand, a religion and law expert at Pepperdine University, said the court is still working out how to use a test the Supreme Court has recently emphasized, which says to look at the country’s “history and tradition” to figure out what the Constitution means. Critics say that metric cherry-picks certain people’s and groups’ traditions, and that law should be read in the context of modern realities.
Part of looking at the past, Helfand said, is looking at how courts have understood “coercion”—the idea that some government actions pressure or force people toward a certain type of religion. And some would say putting the commandments on a wall isn’t coercive, he said.
“Throwing up the Ten Commandments on a wall, who cares? Nobody’s forcing you to do anything. You want to stare at it, great. You don’t want to stare at it, fine.”
Bee Moorhead is executive director of Texas Impact, which does advocacy on behalf of more than 30 different faith groups on issues including voting rights and climate action. She said the new law is not “a one-off” or “just a small poster.”
The movement “in its heart has to do with religious hegemony. It has to do with one particular slice of the very diverse Texas population asserting that its particular flavor of Protestant Christianity is the one true faith and everyone else better toe the line,” she said. “Whether you’re Catholic, Jewish, Muslim—sooner or later you’re going to get targeted.”
See also:
Change in establishment clause test doesn’t save Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law, 5th Circuit says
Ten Commandments displays should not be required in public school classrooms, ABA House says
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