No Ten Commandments in School: A Closer Look at the Law

The latest ruling by the Fifth Circuit keeps a Texas law that requires Ten Commandments posters in public schools. The court says the displays are not a violation of the First Amendment because, according to them, the law would have existed in 1791 when the Constitution was written. The First Amendment’s establishment clause was meant to stop governments from forcing people into religious beliefs or paying for religion. By putting a religious text in every classroom, the law forces students to see a specific set of rules that are religious in nature. Even if it is cheap, the money comes from taxpayers’ dollars, which the clause also forbids. In 1980, the Supreme Court in Stone v. Graham ruled that putting Ten Commandments displays in schools broke the establishment clause because it had no secular purpose. That decision relied on a test that later courts called the “secular‑purpose” standard. The Texas law was passed in 2025 after a 2022 Supreme Court case, Kennedy v. Bremerton, that moved away from the secular‑purpose test toward a “historical practices” approach. The Fifth Circuit argued that because the older Stone case used the old test, it was now overruled.But the Supreme Court is the only body that can overturn its own precedent, and it has not yet struck down Stone. The Fifth Circuit’s logic is shaky because it ignored the clause’s real purpose: protecting people from religious coercion and from having to pay for religion. The court also missed that the law uses state money to buy posters, which is a direct violation of the “no money” part of the clause. The court tried to separate the Ten Commandments posters from mandatory prayer, but both put students in a situation where they must see religious content daily. The law also fails to consider that there is no historical tradition of mandatory religious displays in public schools, a tradition that protects America’s religious diversity. Allowing one set of religious text opens the door for others, leading to conflict and division. In short, the ruling overlooks key aspects of the establishment clause. It treats a religious display in schools as neutral when it is actually coercive, and it ignores the money that taxpayers must pay for it. The Supreme Court may need to step in to realign the law with its original intent, which is to keep government and religion separate.