In approving a law requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, Louisiana has rekindled a culture war over the role of religion in public schools that should have been settled long ago. Supporters of the law, and potential copycat proposals in other states, might hope that a U.S. Supreme Court that recently blurred the separation of church and state would ratify this statute and repudiate its own precedents. The court must disabuse them of this fantasy.
Any culturally literate American should have heard of the Ten Commandments. That includes children in middle school, though first-graders might wonder what the injunction against adultery is all about.
But featuring the Ten Commandments, and other influential religious texts, in age-appropriate lesson plans is far different from enshrining them in the classroom as Louisiana’s law does. Ignore protestations that lawmakers just wanted to inform students of the historical role of the Ten Commandments; this law is a deliberately provocative act by the Legislature that passed it and the governor who signed it.
The battle over religion in the public schools isn’t new. Some segments of American society never accepted Supreme Court decisions in the 1960s striking down officially prescribed prayers and Bible readings in public schools.
But the new Louisiana law must also be viewed as part of a contemporary effort to infuse a specific brand of Christianity into American public institutions. That campaign is especially worrisome at a time when America and its classrooms are so religiously diverse.
This religious campaign aligns alarmingly with right-wing politics. Former, and would-be future, President Trump praised the Louisiana law and posted “I love the Ten Commandments.” Much of Trump’s appeal is to white, Christian Americans who long for a real or imagined America that was monolithic in its beliefs.
The courts have been a bulwark against efforts to “Christianize” public education and other institutions supported by taxes paid by Americans of all religious faiths, or of none. In 1980, the court struck down a Kentucky Ten Commandments law similar to Louisiana’s as a violation of the 1st Amendment’s prohibition of an “establishment of religion.” In 2005 the justices also ruled that posting the Ten Commandments in Kentucky courthouses violated the 1st Amendment.
But recently the court’s conservative majority has poked holes in what Thomas Jefferson called the “wall of separation” between church and state. For example, in 2022, the justices ruled in favor of a high school football coach in the state of Washington who knelt and prayed on the field after games. In his majority opinion, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said that the court had abandoned a legal test it long had used to decide whether a government activity violated the ban on an “establishment of religion.”
The court’s recent religion cases may lead the supporters of Louisiana’s law to think that they can engineer a reversal in the court’s long-standing refusal to allow public schools to inculcate religious beliefs. The legislation’s language suggests that the state is on firm constitutional ground, citing a 2005 ruling in which the court upheld a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the state Capitol in Texas.
But as then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist noted in the leading opinion in the case, the placement of the Ten Commandments monument was “a far more passive use of those texts” than their display in public schools “where the text confronted elementary school students every day.”
It’s unclear that even this conservative Supreme Court would uproot a series of rulings against the propagation of religious teachings in public schools. But it’s understandable that advocates of church-state separation would be concerned. After all, the court felt free to discard an equally important line of precedents in its 2022 Dobbs abortion decision overturning Roe vs. Wade.
If the Louisiana law comes before it, the court should strike it down. There are plenty of pulpits in which religious messages can be preached.
