Appellate Court Okays Ten Commandments Display in Public School Classrooms

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The U.S. Court of Appeals ​for the Fifth Circuit upheld Texas’s law (S.B.10) requiring the display of the Ten Commandments conspicuously in the state’s public elementary and secondary school classrooms. This majority decision in Rabbi Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District represents an important victory for allowing students to see the religious, historical foundation of America’s legal system. The appellate court ruled that the Texas law does not violate either the establishment of religion clause in the Constitution or infringe upon the Constitution’s protection of the free exercise of religion.

The majority opinion noted that the Texas law “does not tell churches or synagogues or mosques what to believe or how to worship or whom to employ as priests, rabbis, or imams. It punishes no one who rejects the Ten Commandments, no matter the reason.”

Simply requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments on classroom walls does not coerce “students in the way that founding-era establishments coerced dissenters,” the majority opinion stated. “The two are worlds apart.”

In short, displaying the Ten Commandments on classroom walls does not equate to religious indoctrination of students in the public schools. Neither does it create an intimidating atmosphere which pressures students to accept religious tenets that may conflict with their own beliefs or interfere with parental rights. The Texas law “does not compel any student to engage in formal religious exercise,” much less to recite or affirm the contents of the Ten Commandments. “The mere fact that the displays use religious language does not convert them into a call to prayer.”

Moreover, the Court concluded that the display does not create any “substantial burden on religious belief or practice” that would constitute “the core of a free-exercise violation.”

“The Texas law creates no religious curriculum designed to shape children’s beliefs or subvert their parents’ teaching,” the majority opinion observed.

It is true that the Ten Commandments begin with reciting the fundamental monotheistic belief that there is only one God of the universe. But displaying the Ten Commandments in the classroom does not interfere with the beliefs of atheists, polytheists, agnostics, or even worshipers of the devil. They are free to disagree with this religious monotheistic belief and practice their own beliefs freely instead.

It is also true that the Ten Commandments are central to the Jewish and Christian faiths’ expression of monotheism, in particular. But displaying only the Ten Commandments, while declining to exhibit any passage from the holy books of other monotheistic religions such as Islam, does not discriminate against those religions when viewed through the lens of American history. Displaying the Ten Commandments in the classroom is an affirmation of the Ten Commandments’ unique influence on the foundational law of the United States of America.

The Founding Fathers were generally pious men, who believed in one God ruling “the destinies of the universe,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote. Benjamin Franklin said at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, “the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men.”

The Declaration of Independence refers to the “Creator,” who has endowed human beings with “certain unalienable Rights,” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The words “Nature’s God” appear in the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. The phrases “Supreme Judge of the world” and “Divine Providence” also appear in the Declaration.

The Founding Fathers believed that with such God-given inalienable rights come God-given responsibilities. President George Washington described these in his First Inaugural Address in 1789 as “the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained…”

The Ten Commandments provided the Founding Fathers with the divine bedrock upon which to build a nation governed by “rules of order and right.” The first four of the Ten Commandments set forth rules for how human beings should respect and behave towards their Creator. These commandments laid the foundation for the commandments to follow – a God-given moral code prescribing how human beings should behave towards each other.

In 1809, John Adams, one of the most important of the Founding Fathers and the second president of the United States, praised what he referred to as “the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty Sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.”

The belief in the Ten Commandments as the moral bedrock of American law did not die with the Founding Fathers. They have remained an inspiration to government leaders throughout U.S. history.

“The fundamental basis of this nation’s laws was given to Moses on the Mount,” President Harry Truman said in 1950, for example.

And more than two centuries after the Declaration of Independence was written, President Ronald Reagan said, “Standing up for America also means standing up for the God who has blessed this land. If we could just keep remembering that Moses brought down from the mountain the Ten Commandments, not ten suggestions – and if those of us who live for the Lord could remember that He wants us to love our Lord and our neighbor, then there’s no limit to the problems we could solve or the mountains we could together as a mighty force for good.”

Dissenters to the appellate court opinion upholding Texas’s law (S.B.10) requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed prominently in the state’s public-school classrooms argued that it contradicts a decades-old Supreme Court case invalidating a similar Kentucky law. This Supreme Court decision held that the Kentucky statute violated the Constitution’s Establishment Clause. But the Supreme Court in that case had applied a three-part analytical test, including whether the law has a “secular purpose,” in determining whether there is an establishment of religion problem, which the Supreme Court has since abandoned.

The test now, the majority Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion explained, is whether the law in question “resemble[s] a founding-era religious establishment.,” such as the Church of England. The Court concluded that “S.B. 10 looks nothing like a historical religious establishment.”

Erecting a wall of separation between church and state does not mean that documents of foundational historical importance in American law should be rendered invisible in public school classrooms because they contain religious content. Erasing the Ten Commandments from the public schools is not only an anti-religious act. It is anti-historical. Indeed, it is anti-American.