President Donald Trump speaks at the religious liberty commission at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, on Sept. 8. Trump spoke about religion in schools, limiting transgender surgeries, and his administration’s attempt to what he termed “the woke agenda.” Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo/UPI | License Photo
President Donald Trump announced his intention to bring prayer into public schools, furthering a conservative push to mandate religious symbols and practices in public schools.
The president’s announcement that he will direct the Department of Education to issue new guidance around prayer in schools follows state-level measures related to religion in school.
The U.S. Supreme Court prohibited school-sponsored prayer in precedent-setting decisions in the early 1960s. In its decisions in 1962’s Engel vs. Vitale and 1963’s Abington District vs. Schempp, the high court cited the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
The Establishment Clause prohibits the government from establishing a national religion.
The movement to bring religion into public schools is not new but it sets up a debate over the Establishment Clause.
“The [Supreme] Court’s position for the last 60 years has been especially in public schools ‘We can’t allow establishments of religion.’ That children are young and impressionable and the teacher is an authority figure,” Douglas Laycock, professor of Constitutional law at the University of Texas at Austin, told UPI. “So public school students are especially vulnerable to the government trying to push one religion instead of another. We’ll see if there’s still five votes for that.”
The Ten Commandments
Three states have passed laws requiring schools to display a poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments in classrooms: Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas. The laws describe the requirements for a display, including its minimum size and its content.
District courts have blocked these measures, however Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton directed school districts not directly named in the case against the state to move forward with displaying the Ten Commandments.
Paxton argues that the Ten Commandments are intertwined with the foundations of American law and its “moral and historical heritage.”
The legislation in Texas was signed into law in June. A U.S. District Court Judge for the Western District of Texas, Judge Fred Biery, issued a preliminary injunction blocking 11 school districts from moving forward with Ten Commandments displays quickly after the law was signed. Biery said in his ruling that the bill “crosses the line from exposure to coercion.”
First Liberty Institute filed briefs in support of Ten Commandments displays in schools. Jeremy Dys, special counsel with First Liberty Institute, told UPI that, because the Ten Commandments would be a passive display, it would not represent the school or the government coercing or endorsing a religion.
“It is very clear that our history as a country has welcomed the Ten Commandments going back to the McGuffey Readers, where that was actually students reading the Ten Commandments as part of a more catechetical way,” Dys said.
McGuffey Readers were a series of books used in elementary classrooms as textbooks in the 19th century. They were authored by William Holmes McGuffey and included poems and stories to teach reading, spelling and Christian values.
Supreme Court peels back Lemon test
Since 1971, the Supreme Court has used the “Lemon test” to determine if a law or government practice violates the Establishment Clause. The Lemon test, derived from the case Lemon vs. Kurtzman, posits that for a law or practice to remain in effect it must meet three criteria.
First, it must have a secular purpose.
Second, it cannot advance or inhibit religion.
Third, it “must not foster” excessive government entanglement with religion.
In 2022, the Supreme Court’s decision in the case Kennedy vs. Bremerton School District, peeled back the emphasis on the Lemon test.
Joseph Kennedy was an assistant football coach for a high school football team in Bremerton, Wash. The school district fired him after he garnered attention for praying on the football field after games, often doing so surrounded by players.
The school district argued that when it became aware Kennedy was holding prayer on the field, it sought to accommodate by having him do it in other locations, such as the press box at games or other locations he may suggest. When Kennedy refused, insisting on continuing to pray publicly, the public attention had created what the district described as an unsafe environment with threats being made to district officials.
Ultimately the district said “any reasonable observer” could view Kennedy’s practice of praying on the field as being endorsed by the school. It added that some players felt compelled to join the prayers, fearing that foregoing praying may cost them playing time or alienate them.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines that Kennedy’s actions were protected under the Free Speech and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment.
The court’s majority opinion, written by Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, was that instead of the Lemon test, the court must interpret the Establishment Clause with references to historical practices and understandings that “faithfully reflect the understanding of the Founding Fathers.”
“Respect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse Republic,” Gorsuch wrote. “Whether those expressions take place in a sanctuary or on a field and whether they manifest through spoken word or bowed head.”
With this ruling, Dys said the court is calling for religion to be accepted in public spaces, including schools, without pomp.
“What the court is trying to tell us as a country is that we should be sort of non-plussed when religion shows up,” he said. “It’s just a part of who we are as a society. And in fact, public education is preparing us as future citizens. Our children as future citizens, perhaps they should be a part of learning what religion is and what it looks like and not be afraid of it.”
The arguments
Prior to the Supreme Court’s watershed decisions in the 1960s, religion had a broader influence in public schools. Protestantism was especially prevalent in education through the mid-19th century.
Proponents for displaying the Ten Commandments in public schools look to this history and the existence of religious texts and symbols in courthouses and government buildings across the country as an indication that these are a part of U.S. history, heritage and tradition.
Mark David Hall, professor of government at Regent University in Virginia, told UPI that the Supreme Court’s shift toward emphasizing history and tradition suggests Ten Commandments displays and other religious symbols have a place in the classroom, or at least should not be explicitly prohibited.
Hall was an expert witness for the state of Arkansas in a case involving a Ten Commandments monument being placed on statehouse grounds and in the Texas Ten Commandments case. His testimony in those cases focused on demonstrating a history and tradition of displaying the Ten Commandments in public spaces.
While he could not find documentation that 19th century schoolhouses had a history of displaying the Ten Commandments on their walls specifically, the courts insisted that direct parallels were not necessary to demonstrate that tradition. Analogous texts and symbols could also provide evidence of religion’s place in these spaces throughout history.
“Let me make a distinction that is often overlooked here and that is a difference between being exposed to something that you have objections to and being forced to participate in it,” Hall said. “So I think that coercion versus exposure is a key distinction. If any school district was trying to force school children to affirm the Ten Commandments, I would be right at the front of the line in opposing that. But that is not what the school districts are doing.”
Steven Green, Willamette University professor of law, history and religious studies, told UPI that the argument that the Ten Commandments are the basis of the American legal system is a common one. Green was an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas Ten Commandments lawsuits.
“In my significant research I have not found that the Ten Commandments had any basis in American law,” Green said. “But even if you would accept that proposition, the problem is, why single out the Ten Commandments? Why not emphasize other types of legal background to the American legal tradition? It’s always the Ten Commandments, so there’s a high degree of hypocrisy going on with these arguments.”
Public education did not exist when the Constitution was drafted, creating another challenge to drawing a line between the intent of the Framers and the modern context of the religion in public school discussion.
“A second problem with the approach is once public education got underway in the mid-19th century, it wasn’t in many ways a very pretty model to copy,” Green said. “The vast majority of public schools had a strong evangelical Protestant thrust to them.”
“Over time those became less and less dominant and became more secularized but they tried to find what they called a non-sectarian approach to doing it but the problem was it still panned Protestantism and it did not necessarily appeal to Catholic children or Jewish children,” he continued. “So there was a lot of discrimination.”
About 29% of people in the United States identify as religiously unaffiliated, according to surveys by Pew Research.
The Ten Commandments are a tenet of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. There are some distinctions in how they are displayed between these religions. Notably the Ten Commandments are numbered differently in Judaism, Christianity and Protestantism.
Hall argues that the version of the Ten Commandments Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas mean to display in schools is a non-sectarian version that does not favor one religion’s depiction over another’s.
The Bible and curriculum in Oklahoma
Oklahoma education superintendent Ryan Walters is ordering schools to incorporate the Bible into curriculum and have copies in the classroom.
Walters’ memorandum, published in June 2024, ordered that all schools are required to “incorporate the Bible, which includes the Ten Commandments, as an instructional support into the curriculum,” for fifth- through 12th-grades.
“The Bible is one of the most historically significant books and a cornerstone of Western civilization,” Walters wrote.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court blocked the state’s department of education from purchasing Bibles and supplementary teaching materials in March. In Oct. 2024, the state sought to purchase versions of the Bible endorsed and sold by Trump.
Walter’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
In the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1963 decision on Abington District vs. Schempp, it ruled that mandatory Bible readings and religious instruction are illegal but schools can continue to teach students about the Bible and religion in general in an academic way.
“There are clearly constitutional ways to teach the Bible in public schools,” Laycock said. “You can teach it as a source of lots of stories and metaphors about culture that students have to know about but you can’t teach it as religious truth and we can’t really take a position on whether it’s true or not. Of course the people that want the Bible in the classroom don’t want that. They want it taught as true.”
