Thou shalt teach religion in schools? Activists, parents and pastors object

A Louisiana law requires students as young as kindergarteners to confront a document that discusses sex, lies and murder: the Ten Commandments.

On Monday, a coalition of advocacy groups, clergy members and concerned families from diverse religious backgrounds sought a preliminary injunction to stop the Judeo-Christian decree from appearing in all public school classrooms by January 1, as mandated by House Bill 71 , signed into law last month by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry.

“This law violates the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty, specifically the separation of church and state,” said Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief. “Louisiana is imposing an official religious orthodoxy on every public school student in the state. School officials can’t force religious scripture on students as a condition of getting a public education.”

Together with the ACLU of Louisiana, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Freedom from Religion Foundation and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, the national ACLU is representing nine Louisiana families who have children in public schools and are Jewish, Christian, Unitarian Universalist and nonreligious.

Imposing religion on students in public schools is not only unconstitutional, say critics of recent efforts to merge church and state, but it also runs the risk of introducing students to controversial ideas about gender, race and sexuality. Scripture, they say, can be interpreted in wildly different ways, raising concerns about how school personnel would apply it in class and the possibility that students from some faiths could be ostracized or bullied.

“These displays distort the Jewish significance of the Ten Commandments and send the troubling message to students that one set of religious laws is favored over all others,” Joshua Herlands, one of the Louisiana plaintiffs, said in a statement. “Tolerance is at the heart of our family’s practice of Judaism, and this effort to evangelize students, including my children, is antithetical to our core religious beliefs and our values as Americans.”

The motion for a preliminary injunction in Louisiana’s Ten Commandments case — Roake v. Brumley — comes just weeks after Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public instruction, Ryan Walters, directed public schools to teach the Bible. His move followed the state’s failed attempt to launch what would have been the nation’s first religious public charter school, which the Oklahoma Supreme Court in June blocked from going forward. Officials for that school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, have vowed to continue their fight to open the institution, calling the ruling a “a setback for Oklahoma K-12 students and to the ideal of free choice and open opportunity in education.”

Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, applauded the court’s decision. Her organization is involved in a separate lawsuit against the opening of the charter school . “It was a relief to see a judge not try to torture the law to yield a result that advances a Christian nation over an American one,” she said. “And it was a strong and resolute endorsement of church-state separation from the highest court in a very red state, as it should be, because church-state separation should transcend partisan politics. It’s a foundation of American democracy.”

In Louisiana, the ACLU has filed a motion to expedite the hearing related to its preliminary injunction request, hoping for a resolution before students begin school next month, Mach said. Meanwhile, states that also aspire to push religion in schools have their eyes on the Pelican State. If Louisiana can order public schools to display the Ten Commandments in all public classrooms, they will follow suit, he said, stressing that the policy undermines core American principles.

The push for religion in schools goes beyond Oklahoma and Louisiana. In 2023, a Texas bill attempted to get the Ten Commandments posted in public schools, but did not garner enough support to advance. This year, at least 14 states, including Indiana, Alabama, Iowa, Maryland, Nebraska and Florida, have introduced bills to bring chaplains to public schools to counsel students. On July 1, Florida’s school chaplain law took effect, and in protest, the Satanic Temple said this week that its members are prepared to volunteer as chaplains . The legislation does not specify that chaplains be Christian, though the bill’s detractors say that Gov. Ron DeSantis has indicated as much.

Efforts to impose a narrow set of religious beliefs on others should engender a backlash, Laser said, adding that religious extremists feel emboldened to ignore church-state separation largely because they hope the Supreme Court, which has a conservative supermajority, will reverse long-standing precedent. In 2022, the court ruled 6-3 in favor of Joseph Kennedy, a football coach who was fired by Bremerton School District in Washington for praying midfield after games. It argued that the First Amendment gave Kennedy the right to pray in such a manner and that his behavior did not violate the Establishment Clause, which bars the government from “establishing” a religion. That year, the court also revoked a Maine law barring students from using taxpayer funds to subsidize the costs to attend religious private schools.

Ahead of its convention next week, the Republican National Committee passed a draft party platform echoing the language used in Kennedy v. Bremerton. “Republicans will champion the First Amendment right to pray and read the Bible in school,” the plan states.

“What we’re witnessing is a backlash, or some would call it a Whitelash, to progress,” Laser said. “What I’m talking about is the first Black president, the first Black and female vice president, the advent of marriage equality, the #MeToo movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, an unprecedented number of women elected to Congress, the changing demographics around religion in this country and the religious pluralism that is growing instead of shrinking.”

Since 2007, the Pew Research Center has reported decreases in the percentage of self-identified Christians in the United States. In December 2021, these Christians made up 63 percent of the nation’s population , a drop from 75 percent a decade earlier, Pew reported.

Attempts by Louisiana and Oklahoma officials to impose religion on public school students could leave youth who aren’t cisgender, heterosexual, White and Christian vulnerable to discrimination, critics of the states’ policies say. Oklahoma’s effort to fund St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School prompted legal challenges because the institution made it clear that it would not contradict the Catholic Church’s teachings “on modesty, sanctity of life, sanctity of marriage, the theology of the body, sexual orientation and gender identity,” the Americans United lawsuit contends.

On June 27, Americans United entered into an agreement with the defendants. St. Isidore officials won’t accept public funding for the charter school or open in that capacity during the 2024-25 school year, and court proceedings will be paused until at least February 1, 2025, according to Americans United.

The Rev. Lori Walke, senior minister of the Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ in Oklahoma City, is one of the plaintiffs in the case against establishing St. Isidore. She’s concerned that educators in public schools could pick and choose scripture to support a worldview that marginalizes certain students, especially girls.

“The Bible is a patriarchal book, and if you do not read it with historical context, then you can do wild things with it,” she said. “You can interpret it in any way, and it has been, of course, interpreted to endorse discrimination against women. So it’s very concerning. It can be used as a way to discourage girls’ imaginations, their sense of their place and role in the world. It can be used to limit their options for what they get to choose to do with their lives and that’s obviously of high concern to me.”

Many denominations still do not ordain women pastors, with scripture used historically and today to justify their exclusion . The Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, president and CEO of the Interfaith Alliance, a national organization formed to counteract the religious right, pointed out that a number of Biblical passages celebrate women. He questions, however, whether educators will focus on them.

“You could teach all the passages where Jesus is lifting up women and including women,” he said. “Women are the last with him at the crucifixion and the first to see his resurrection. Women are central to the story of Christianity. There’s also in the Bible: ‘ Wives, obey your husbands .’ Put yourself in a public school where your teacher is like, ‘OK, well, we’re going to teach about the Bible because that’s mandated, and here’s a passage about how women should obey their husbands and the roles of women and the roles of men.’”

Dangerous dogma could make its way into schools and emotionally harm students, Raushenbush said, adding that scripture could also be used to malign LGBTQ+ students. In Oklahoma, many residents are still grieving the February 8 death of 16-year-old nonbinary student Nex Benedict after their involvement in a fight at Owasso High School. Officials said that Benedict’s death resulted from suicide and not head trauma from the altercation, but the teenager had mentioned being bullied because of their gender identity for more than a year before they died.

“Nex’s death was very much related to the rhetoric and attitude of our elected officials, which are homophobic and transphobic and queerphobic,” Walke said. “It puts our kids at risk. So if people are going to be empowered to teach that in our schools, which is, by the way, the opposite of how many Christians interpret the Bible — many Christians do not think that the Bible condemns homosexuality and that God has made queer folk fearfully and wonderfully in God’s image — then, that’s a real concern.”

Benedict’s mother is enrolled in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. In a state with one of the nation’s largest Native American populations , teaching the Bible also has racial implications. Christianity was used to justify the colonization of the Americas and to subjugate Indigenous peoples. One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit over St. Isidore is Native American.

“We had pastors from different backgrounds, including one from the Muscogee tribe, who remembers when Oklahoma was imposing Christianity on Native American children and robbing them of their religious and cultural identity,” Laser said.

This week, Walters announced that he has tapped a coauthor of Project 2025 , the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the next Republican president, to write the state’s social studies curriculum. The updated standards will include the Bible as instructional material and “eliminate DEI,” Walters said in a statement.

Given that Oklahoma passed a bill three years ago restricting the teaching of race in schools, Walke wonders whether educators will discuss the role of scripture in the nation’s racial history. The Bible, she said, has been used to endorse slavery .

“So are we going to teach that?” she asked. “Or are we going to teach the Biblical themes of liberation and justice and the fact that Bibles were kept from enslaved Black people in this country because there was such concern that they would read stories of the Exodus and apply it to their own lives and insist on freedom? Will that be considered too woke to teach?”