Thou Shalt Not Post the Ten Commandments in Classrooms

When you were in elementary school, did your mind occasionally rise above the smell of pencil shavings and the sound of squeaking desk chairs to contemplate whether you ought to commit murder? Did you ponder what it would mean to covet your neighbor’s wife? Ordinarily those aren’t questions addressed in grade-school classrooms, but according to legislators in Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas, they ought to be.

In those districts, state Republicans are rallying behind laws that would mandate posting the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms and common areas, such as cafeterias and libraries. This fad began in 2024, when Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed such a bill, reviving a debate long silenced by the Supreme Court’s 1980 decision in Stone v. Graham to strike down a similar Kentucky law. Other states followed suit: Arkansas and Texas last year, and Alabama just this month. Although these laws pose a threat to the First Amendment rights of students and teachers, the trend is spreading, so far unchecked by courts. Opponents of Texas’s law suffered a defeat last week when an appellate court decided in the state’s favor. The ACLU and other organizations representing the plaintiffs—a multifaith group of Texas families—are expected to appeal this decision to the Supreme Court.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: The evidence that God exists]

As is often the case when religion is deployed politically, these efforts seem less about earnest moral education and more about using state power to enforce a certain brand of political piety. The Republican supporters of these laws may believe that they are delivering a coup for their base of conservative Christians, but they are undermining the sacredness of the Ten Commandments by reducing these foundational biblical laws to yet more classroom wall text, alongside class schedules, corny motivational posters, and homework reminders.

Past Republican efforts to make space for Christianity in public schools have centered on school prayer. The Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1962 case Engel v. Vitale established a compromise: Schools can allow time for prayers, but school officials cannot lead them. By requiring schools to endorse biblical laws, this latest round of Ten Commandments statutes directly challenges the reasoning behind that compromise, as do other measures floated of late to allow public schools to employ religious chaplains instead of guidance counselors or to use the Bible as a core textbook. Conservative legislatures seem buoyed by the prospect of defending these measures before a friendly Supreme Court.

These legislative efforts should be seen in light of Republican complaints that public schools have been hijacked by the “woke” left. Conservatives lament that grade-school libraries offer books about LGBTQ characters and that teachers deliver lessons about America’s history of race-based oppression. Republicans often characterize this perceived left-wing incursion into public schools as a violation of parental rights, given that children may respond by developing views that depart from those held by their families. Beneath these concerns lurks a deeper anxiety: that whatever political faction controls public schools will be able to control the next generation of voters.

Maybe they are right to worry. But if Republicans hope that displaying the Ten Commandments will instill Christian values in impressionable youth, or that subjecting students to scriptural dictates will affect a passive Christian evangelization, they are bound to be disappointed. Children with questions about right and wrong rarely turn to state-mandated declarations presented without comment. Answers and ideals about how to live meaningfully and ethically are handed down through relationships, conversations, and by example, not through posters about what one shalt and shalt not do.

[Peter Wehner: The evangelicals who see Trump’s viciousness as a virtue]

The Ten Commandments are also arguably not the most significant laws in the Christian tradition, nor the best positioned to elicit distinctly Christian behavior. According to scripture, when Jesus’s disciples asked him what the greatest commandment of all was, he replied that every other commandment hangs on two dictates: to love God and to love one’s neighbor. For a glimpse into Jesus’s heart and priorities, he offered the Beatitudes, a series of blessings for the poor, the weak, the oppressed, and the persecuted, among others.

Saint Augustine warned of the libido dominandi, or the dark will to power nestled deep in the human heart. The manipulation of Christian language and symbols by potentially cynical politicians to mask those desires borders on sacrilege. Some advocates for these laws surely believe in the transformative power of the Ten Commandments, in classrooms and elsewhere. But for anyone hoping to understand what it means to be good in an often harsh world, there is no substitute for love.