Old Fights, New Fire in America’s Classrooms
Charles J. RussoLydia Artz November/December 2025How a Supreme Court shift has reignited battles over the Ten Commandments and prayer in public schools
Religion in America’s public schools has long been a flashpoint, rooted in competing interpretations of the First Amendment’s command that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Few issues have generated more enduring disputes than prayer and displays of the Ten Commandments in classrooms. Those battles have gained fresh momentum in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, a ruling that signaled a new era in the Court’s approach to the religion clauses. This article examines the legal developments fueling a wave of state initiatives to reintroduce religion into public education.
A Key Shift at the Court
In 1971 the Supreme Court heard Lemon v. Kurtzman and Earley v. DiCenso, companion cases from Pennsylvania and Rhode Island dealing with state financial aid to faith-based schools. In its opinion, the Court set out a tripartite test that, until recently, it applied in most disputes involving the First Amendment’s religion clauses. Under Lemon state action must “first have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; finally, the statute must not foster ‘an excessive government entanglement with religion.’ ”
The Lemon test led to confusion, though, because the justices failed to offer clear explanations of how Lemon should be applied. Lemon’s first two prongs originated in litigation on prayer and Bible reading, while the third emerged from a dispute over state tax exemptions for church property used in worship services. To add to the confusion, the Court sometimes applied the “endorsement test” from Justice O’Connor’s concurrence in Lynch v. Donnelly, a 1984 nonschool case about a Nativity scene in a Christmas display on public property. This test asked whether the purpose of a governmental action was to endorse or approve of a religion or religious activity.
The Supreme Court initiated a dramatic change in 2022, finally abandoning the Lemon test and adopting its new “historical practices and understandings” test on religion. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District the justices ruled in favor of a high school assistant football coach in Washington and his right to engage in silent prayer by kneeling on the field after games. The Court reasoned that “a proper understanding of the Amendment’s establishment clause [does not] require the government to single out private religious speech for special disfavor.” Acknowledging that it “long ago abandoned Lemon and its [Lynch] endorsement test offshoot,” the Court explained that “the establishment clause must be interpreted by ‘reference to historical practices and understandings.’ ” It is unclear how this standard will be applied in future disputes.
The Ten Commandments—A Debate Revived
Buoyed by Kennedy, supporters of state-mandated displays of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms are making the argument that these laws are constitutional under the Supreme Court’s new “historical practices and understandings” test. At least a dozen states have considered bills obligating officials to post the Ten Commandments in schools, and since 2024 these have been adopted by Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. The federal courts have at least partially blocked all three laws.
Litigation concerning the Ten Commandments is not new. More than a dozen early cases upheld laws and policies mandating their recitation in schools. These practices survived in the states up until the 1940s because the First Amendment, with its establishment clause restraints, initially controlled only the federal government. The Supreme Court extended application of the First Amendment to the states in Cantwell v. Connecticut. In this case it unanimously overturned the convictions of a Jehovah’s Witnesses father and his sons for violating a state statute against solicitating funds for religious, charitable, or philanthropic purposes without prior approval of public officials. The Court struck the law down because it granted public officials unfettered discretion to limit the plaintiffs’ peaceful expression of their religious beliefs.
The legality of posting the commandments in schools first reached the Supreme Court in 1980. In Stone v. Graham the justices invalidated a Kentucky statute requiring displays of the Ten Commandments in classrooms because it failed the Lemon test. The Court thought that the displays lacked secular educational purposes. It rejected the officials’ claim that a small notation on the posters, describing the Ten Commandments as the “fundamental legal code of Western civilization and the common law of the United States,” provided evidence of the necessary secular purpose.
Twenty-five years later, in 2005, disputes over the Ten Commandments, albeit not in schools, again reached the Supreme Court. In McCreary County, Kentucky v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky officials erected a display at a courthouse, including the Ten Commandments, Magna Carta, and the Declaration of Independence. The justices invalidated the display for violating the establishment clause, largely because it lacked a secular purpose.
On the same day the Supreme Court reached the opposite result in Van Orden v. Perry, allowing a display including the Ten Commandments to remain on the grounds of the Texas capitol as one of 17 monuments and 21 historical markers. Unlike the relatively new display in Kentucky, the long-standing one in Texas, where the first monument was erected in 1891, was built using private funds. The Court left the Ten Commandments monument in place because it was a more passive display spread over 22 acres—a very different scenario than posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms for children to see daily.
Ten Commandment Laws Today
Louisiana
In 2024 Louisiana adopted a law compelling officials in public K-12 schools, colleges, and universities to post a version of the Ten Commandments in all classrooms. The posters must be 11 inches by 14 inches, in large, easily readable font similar to the one in the King James Version of the Bible, and include a context statement highlighting the role of the Ten Commandments in the history of the United States
The bill’s author, Rep. Dodie Horton, said the legislation honors the country’s religious origins: “The Ten Commandments are the basis of all laws in Louisiana, and given all the junk our children are exposed to in classrooms today, it’s imperative that we put the Ten Commandments back in a prominent position.” She added, “I’m not concerned with an atheist. I’m not concerned with a Muslim.” “I’m concerned with our children looking and seeing what God’s law is.” She also pointed to Kennedy v. Bremerton as a justification for the law.
Once challenged, a federal trial court refused to apply Kennedy, noting that “there is no long-standing tradition of permanently displaying the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms in Louisiana or the United States more generally. Indeed, for nearly half a century it has been well settled that the First Amendment forbids public schools from posting the Ten Commandments in this manner.”
Arkansas
Undeterred, Arkansas in 2025 passed similar legislation ordering officials to display a “durable poster or framed copy” of the Ten Commandments, at least 16 by 20 inches, in all state and local government buildings, including public school and college classrooms. Rep. Alyssa Brown, one of the bill’s sponsors, described it as an effort to educate students on how the United States was founded and how the Founders framed the Constitution. “We’re not telling every student they have to believe in this God,” she told a legislative committee, “but we are upholding what those historical documents mean and that historical national motto.”
Families from different religious traditions filed suit, arguing that the law violated the First Amendment’s establishment and free exercise clauses. In August 2025 a federal trial court enjoined the law because the display would have “forced [students] to engage with” the Ten Commandments, and “perhaps to venerate and obey” them. Reviewing Kennedy’s “historical practices and understandings” test, the court found there was no evidence of a tradition allowing displays of the Ten Commandments permanently in public schools.
Texas
Texas adopted a similar law in June 2025 directing officials to display posters sized at least 16 by 20 inches in all classrooms. Posters cannot include text other than the version of the Ten Commandments described in the bill. During debate in the Texas House, the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Candy Noble, said, “It is incumbent on all of us to follow God’s law, and I think we would all be better off if we did.” Two weeks later, recognizing that similar disputes occurred in Louisiana and Arkansas, a federal trial court in Texas, in an order limited to 11 districts, temporarily enjoined the law.
The judge observed that “the displays will pressure students, including the minor-child plaintiffs, into religious observance, veneration, and adoption of the state’s favored religious scripture and that they will also send the harmful and religiously divisive message that students who do not subscribe to the Ten Commandments—or, more precisely, to the specific version of the Ten Commandments that S.B. 10 requires—do not belong in their own school community, pressuring them to refrain from expressing any faith.”
An Emerging Storm Around School Prayer
On the heels of these Ten Commandment laws has come renewed focus on the issue of state-sponsored prayer in public schools. In September 2025, after Texas adopted a statute allowing students time to pray and read religious texts in public schools, state attorney general Ken Paxton issued a press release, encouraging children to practice the “Lord’s Prayer” as found in the King James Version of the Bible. His statement ignored Catholics, who refer to this prayer as the “Our Father.” Paxton’s comments were followed a few days later by similar remarks from President Donald Trump, who announced that the U.S. Department of Education will soon publish a guidance around “protecting the right to prayer” in schools. The signs are that this is an emerging area of constitutional controversy, despite clear Supreme Court precedent banning school-sponsored prayer.
No State Endorsement
The Supreme Court first examined school prayer in 1962’s Engel v. Vitale, striking down prayer suggested by the New York State Board of Regents for use in public schools to promote moral and spiritual values in students. Reviewing the history of state-sponsored prayer from sixteenth-century England through to colonial America, the justices wrote, “There can be no doubt that New York State’s prayer program officially establishes the religious beliefs embodied in the Regents’ prayer.” The Court feared that even absent overt pressure, placing the power, privilege, and support of the government behind a particular religious belief risked asserting indirect coercion on others, especially minorities, to conform to the officially approved religion. The justices thought that because religion is “too personal, too sacred, too holy, to permit its ‘unhallowed perversion’ by a civil magistrate,” state-sponsored prayer was contrary to the Founders’ original intent in the First Amendment.
A year later, in the companion cases of School District of Abington Township v. Schempp and Murray v. Curlett, from Pennsylvania and Maryland, the Supreme Court declared that prayer and Bible reading as part of the opening of school days violated the establishment clause. The Court invalidated the laws, and in the process created the first two parts of the Lemon test: that governmental action must have “a secular legislative purpose and a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion.”
The Supreme Court did not address school prayer again until 1990’s Lee v. Weisman, a dispute from Rhode Island. Avoiding Lemon, the justices rejected prayer as unacceptable because the state, through school principals, selected who would pray, controlling its content. Additionally, the justices worried that such activity could cause psychological coercion of students as a captive audience who may have been forced, against their wishes, to participate in ceremonies.
In Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe the Supreme Court determined that student-led prayers prior to high school football games in Texas violated the establishment clause. Relying primarily on the endorsement test, the justices rebuffed the board’s three main arguments. The Court rejected the board’s defenses that the policy enhanced students’ free speech rights, that it was facially neutral, and that the litigation was premature because prayer had yet to be offered at a game.
Reflections
These continuing controversies concerning both the Ten Commandments and prayer highlight significant questions over the place, if any, of religion in public education. As important as these spiritual markers are to people of faith, supporters of state-mandated Ten Commandment displays and state-sponsored prayer seemingly fail to realize that they cannot impose their religious values on others. Opponents of such laws, including Jewish, Christian, Unitarian Universalist, and Hindu Americans, along with a growing number of those with no religious affiliation, do not necessarily wish to remove religion entirely from schools. Rather, these critics want to preserve the Supreme Court’s historic perspective that the government must demonstrate “neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.”
Today’s challenge is to find the balance in public life. It is paramount to keep the right to exercise religious freedom untarnished, while also ensuring that public schools foster environments in which diverse beliefs can coexist peacefully. We believe the courts and legislatures must avoid sending the message that religion has no place in a free and open society, just as they must not permit one set of values to dominate. Keeping in mind that the Ten Commandments and prayer are designed to bring people together rather than cause division, the way in which the courts and legislatures balance the rights of the majority and minorities will go a long way toward shaping the future of religious freedom in American public education and life.
Article Author: Charles J. Russo
Charles J. Russo, M.Div., J.D., Ed.D., is the Joseph Panzer chair in education in the School of Education and Health Sciences, director of its Ph.D. program in educational leadership, and research professor of law in the School of Law at the University of Dayton. He can be reached at crusso1@udayton.edu.
Article Author: Lydia Artz
Lydia Artz, a second-year student at the University of Dayton School of Law, has a B.A. in International Studies with a concentration in Global Peace and Security and is a staff writer for University of Dayton Law Review. She can be reached at artzl1@udayton.edu.