PUBLIC EDUCATION AND THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

 Louisiana is the most recent state to pass a law requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in public school classrooms. Now, Texas has decided to follow suit. This is part of a trend among Republican-led state governments, using narrowly construed Christian moral and religious ideas as a basis for imposing restrictions on public life, including in public education and health care.

Religiously inspired laws are both unconstitutional and against the will of the people. We must vigorously resist legislators’ attempts to impose them, at all levels.

A well-organized, well-funded campaign to insert conservative religion into government, using public education as the wedge, has been operating in the U.S. for many decades (see Katherine Stewart’s The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, 2019, and her forthcoming Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, 2025).

The Supreme Court has considered Ten Commandments laws before. Using the principles enshrined in the Constitution that deny governments the authority to promote one religion over others or legislate religious beliefs, these laws have always been struck down. For example, in Stone v. Graham (1980), the Supreme Court ruled a Kentucky law requiring schools display the Ten Commandments “had no secular legislative purpose” and was “plainly religious in nature,” in violation of the First Amendment.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick is an outspoken advocate of Christian Nationalist principles in government, despite the fact that using religion as a basis for law is a violation of the First Amendment. People in this camp, like Rep. Lauren Boebert, have become fond of saying that the separation of church and state is not in the Constitution. But that is a distortion at best: That string of words is not in the text, but the clear sense of the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause is that the government shall not use its power to impose religious doctrines.

These state governments are hoping that when cases challenging their religious laws go before the Supreme Court, this time the judgement will be different. Since Pres. Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court has become markedly more permissive of Christian Nationalism.

In various cases, including overturning Roe v. Wade, this Court has chipped away at previous precedents and principles long used to defend freedom of religion and church/state separation. Gorsuch’s opinion in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), for example, undermined the rule used to decide Stone v. Graham, replacing it with a historical context test that is subject to bias and corrupted understandings of U.S. history. (See Andrew Seidel, The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American, 2019, and American Crusade: How the US Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom, 2022.)

The infamous Project 2025 document, which is likely to guide the second Trump administration in many respects, is deeply infused with Chrisian Nationalism, the idea that the United States should be a Christian nation in which (a right-wing, extremist interpretation of) Christian doctrine is used to set law and policy.

However, Christian Nationalism is fully embraced by only about ten percent of Americans, with another 19% somewhat sympathetic to it (PRRI/Brookings survey, 2023). Christians are more likely to support Christian Nationalism than non-Christians; among Christian denominations, conservative evangelicals are most supportive of it.

61% of Americans not affiliated with any religion are strongly against Christian Nationalism; another 31% are skeptical of it. This demographic group, who pollsters call “the nones,” has steadily grown. Nones were 15% of the U.S. population in 2007, and almost 20% in 2012. By 2022, the proportion had shot up to 28% (Pew Research, “Has the rise of the religious ‘nones’ come to an end in the US?”).

Notably, the percentage of Americans who tell pollsters they are Christians declined from 85% in 1990 to 65% in 2020 (Pew Research, “Measuring Religion in Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel”).

The 29% support for Christian Nationalism among the 65% of the population who are Christian means that only about 19% of Americans, in total, support Christian Nationalism. That’s a smaller group, even, than the almost 26% of the population made up by nones who oppose it.

The fact that the Christian Nationalism movement is so dominant in American life and politics in this era is therefore doubly bad: Not only is it against the Constitution, it is also against the will of the People.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in the Louisiana appeal in late January 2025 and will rule soon.