Louisiana law now requires the prominent display of the Ten Commandments in all public-school classrooms within the state. Whether or not the law is constitutional, it poses a potentially grave danger to religion. Its implementation, if allowed by the courts, must be done with the utmost caution lest damage be done to Christianity and other religious faiths.
A strict and impenetrable “wall of separation” between church and state is impossible. People can and do make decisions on whether to support or oppose public policy options, or vote for or against candidates for office, on the basis of religion. Not only is it impossible to prevent such decision making, but making such decisions are well within the constitutional rights of those who make them. Supreme Court decisions on church-state relations mandate government neutrality on religion—not opposition.
But what of posting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms as mandated by Louisiana state law—a law which may soon be copied and adopted by other states, including Texas? Such a law might seem to be a violation of the principle of government neutrality and could therefore be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court—although one can never completely know how a case will be decided until the decision is announced, and recent history shows how the Supreme Court can reverse itself on a wide variety of public policy cases: Once, it said racial segregation was constitutional but now it says it isn’t; once it said there was no constitutional right to same-sex marriage but now it says there is; once it said abortion was a constitutionally protected right, but now, of course, that’s no longer true. So one should not automatically assume the Louisiana law will be declared to be an unconstitutional violation of the neutrality principle.
So as long as the law is in effect, what are its dangers? One is tempted to say that posting that law will “cram religion down the students’ throats,” but there may be a greater danger—not to religious liberty, but to the strength of religious acceptance and belief.
It may be the case that if a particular religious faith becomes the official religion within a given political system, or at least becomes identified with the government, people may become at least more apathetic and possibly even more hostile to the faith if they dislike the policies of the government with which it is associated. It’s noteworthy that the public in western European nations which have, or have until recently had, official state churches—the Anglican church in England, the Lutheran church in the Scandinavian nations—have become more secular. True religious belief exists only among small minorities. In predominantly Catholic Latin America, the fastest growing faiths are those of the Mormons and Baptists—two sects in no way identified with governments or their policies. There is some evidence that Islam is becoming weaker among younger Iranians who feel oppressed by their theocratic political system.
In Louisiana, as in every other state, the public schools are agencies of state and local governments, and therefore the mandatory display of the Ten Commandments in the government-run schools will be a governmental policy. Perhaps, at least from the perspective of the indifferent and apathetic, the Ten Commandments will become one more feature of public-school life to be ignored. Or, given that the public schools have become Ground Zero for our interminable culture wars, they will become one more issue, along with what textbooks should say, what libraries should collect, or whether rainbow flags should be flown, thereby engendering more bitterness and hostility—possibly to religion itself.
Assuming the Louisiana law and its probable clones remain on the books and implemented in the classroom, one should hope that in addition to the Ten Commandments, other material from other faiths—Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, whatever—will be displayed as well. An especially good addition would be the Golden Rule, associated with Jesus yet apparently a principle to be found in virtually all known religions of the world. Equal access of students to all major religions may meet religious neutrality requirements.
And should the Louisiana law be struck down by the courts, those who want their children to be more exposed to the Ten Commandments should not despair. Parents, churches, and Sunday schools are well within their rights to offer instruction in the Ten Commandments themselves, and of course adherents to other faiths, or to no faith at all, retain the right to offer instruction on their tenets as well. No government needed here.
Malcolm L. Cross has lived in Stephenville since 1987 and taught politics and government at Tarleton for 36 years, retiring in 2023. His political and civic activities include service on the Stephenville City Council (2000-2014) and on the Erath County Republican Executive Committee (1990-2024). He was Mayor pro-tem of Stephenville from 2008 to 2014. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Stephenville
Economic Development Authority since 2018 and as chair of the Erath County Appraisal District’s Appraisal Review Board since 2015. He is also a member of the Stephenville Rotary Club, the Board of Vestry of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, and the Executive Committee of the Boy Scouts’ Pecan Valley District. Views expressed in this column are his and do not reflect those of The Flash as a whole.
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