Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry made headlines this past June by signing H.B. 71 into law, a bill mandating that the Ten Commandments be displayed in all public school classrooms across the state. This legislation is not the first of its kind—Kentucky enacted a similar law that was deemed unconstitutional in 1980 by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Stone v. Graham. The Court found that the statute violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which prohibits legislatures from enacting laws that establish any given religion. Upon enactment, H.B. 71 was met with a barrage of legal challenges, creating the potential for a new Supreme Court ruling. Given the conservative slant of the current Supreme Court, this bill could reverse the long-held legal precedent set in Stone v. Graham and entitle other states to follow in Louisiana’s footsteps. Based on statistics from the Supreme Court Review, the current court is the most pro-religion court in history, ruling in favor of religion in 86% of cases. This, coupled with their proven disregard for stare decisis, leaves the current bench poised to adjudicate in favor of H.B. 71. 

The overturning of Stone could catalyze the growing rift between Church and state. The use of taxpayer funds to actively proselytize in public schools is not only a profligate political stunt but also a flagrant violation of our Constitution. Perhaps the Louisiana state legislature would be wiser to hang the Bill of Rights in schools—it might help avert attempts by future U.S. politicians to involve religion in state affairs. While displaying religious texts in classrooms may appear a benign act to some, it tacitly promotes certain faiths over others and sends an ominous message to religious minorities and nonbelievers. 

The Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study found that 70.6 percent of the US identifies as Christian and 1.9 percent identify as Jewish. The vast majority of Americans practice religions that hold the Ten Commandments as sacred text. But what about the other 27.5 percent of our country? Do our elected officials view the holy texts of Islam or Hinduism as inferior? Are atheistic parents forbidden from wanting a secular education for their children?

Our Founding Fathers foresaw the danger of religious interference in government, but they were fortunately both perspicacious and acutely aware of European history, which was wrought with religious persecution. This included attempts to exterminate paganism, expel Jews and Muslims during the Spanish Inquisition, and massacre Jews blamed for the Bubonic Plague. Time and time again, heretics have suffered at the hands of theocratic despots. America was instead meant to be a haven from religious conformity—a society devoid of tyranny based on faith. The Republican adoption of policies to evangelize schools threatens the very sanctity of the institutions our Framers sought to protect. 

Even more outrageous is that the evangelization of Louisiana public schools coincides with the American Right’s so-called “parental rights” movement. Just this year, Louisiana’s state legislature overwhelmingly passed a bill prohibiting discussions of gender identity and sexuality in public schools. Affirmative voters claimed that discussion of such topics falls outside the schools’ purview and ought to be handled by parents. Louisiana has also banned books deemed ill-suited for children, disproportionately affecting books on Black and Indigenous history which often include gruesome but insightful historical details. Louisiana Republicans do the bidding of the religious right, employing the pretext of parental rights to veil their bigotry while foisting their religious beliefs onto schoolchildren regardless of parental approval.  

H.B. 71 is not a one-off political maneuver unlikely to influence national politics—Republicans have embraced this legislation on a national scale. When discussing Louisiana’s bill at a rally, Donald Trump remarked, “Has anyone read the ‘Thou shalt not steal?’ I mean, has anybody read this incredible stuff? It’s just incredible…They don’t want [the Ten Commandments] to go up. It’s a crazy world.” Perhaps after his scandalous year marked by a conviction on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records to cover up an extramarital affair with a pornstar, Trump may be leafing through Biblical texts in pursuit of divine forgiveness. In his statement, however, the ostensibly pious former president distorts the Ten Commandments as a text composed of cross-cultural truisms. He conveniently ignored the Commandments with explicitly Judeo-Christian interpretations, such as “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3) or “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” (Exodus 20:7). There are centuries worth of secular texts replete with moral insight; Louisiana’s bill was never about ethics. 

I write as a concerned American, not because I find the Ten Commandments to be meritless, but because I believe in the values that America was built on. We must remain a country where our citizens can freely practice religion while insulating our government-run institutions from proselytism. We are not, nor should we ever be, a nation governed by faith. The continued efforts of one of our leading political parties to change this are alarming, and we must resist them if we are to uphold the Constitutional liberties that define us.