An appeals court in New Orleans is weighing whether Louisiana and Texas can require public schools to display the Ten Commandments following a hearing this week.
No action was taken on Tuesday, leaving decisions from lower courts that have effectively blocked the Louisiana and Texas laws — as well as a similar one in Arkansas — intact for now.
Louisiana’s law, passed in 2024, orders public schools, including colleges and universities, to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Supporters say the law has a secular purpose: to expose students to an important historical document.
But plaintiffs — nine families, some religious, some not, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups — argue the state is endorsing religion and coercing children to follow it, violating the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom and the separation of church and state.
Supporters of the laws see an opportunity now, after a 2022 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a high school football coach who prayed on the 50-yard line, sometimes with players.
In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the court abandoned the Lemon Test, the legal standard it had used for more than 50 years to determine whether a law violated the separation of church and state.
Outside the court after Tuesday’s hearing, Louisiana’s Republican attorney general, Liz Murrill, summarized the state’s argument.
“The point that we are trying to make,” she said, is that the Ten Commandments are a foundational document for our legal and our historical traditions in creating our government structures, creating our country.”
Applying a new standard
Much of Tuesday’s hearing before the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals focused on how to apply the new standard, whether a law is consistent with the country’s “history and traditions,” and if cases decided using the old rules are still good precedent.
“Where on the spectrum do we begin to say no?” asked Judge Stephen Higginson, an Obama appointee.
“I think a football coach after a game is a lot different than every hour of every day all year, that document facing students,” Higginson said, referring to the Ten Commandments.
In 1980, the Supreme Court struck down a Kentucky law requiring public schools to hang the Ten Commandments in every classroom. The court ruled in Stone v. Graham that the posters were “plainly religious in nature,” and therefore unconstitutional under the old Lemon Test.
The Supreme Court has not overturned Stone, but on Tuesday, several judges questioned its future. Seventeen judges and one chief judge participated in the full bench hearing, though only some spoke.
“If you take away Lemon, there is nothing left in Stone,” said Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee.
Central to the plaintiff’s arguments against the Louisiana and Texas laws is that Stone still stands.
Judge Edith Jones, a Reagan appointee, questioned plaintiffs' attorney Jonathan Youngwood about what makes something too religious to be displayed in a public school.
“How about Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from the Birmingham Jail?’ He refers to Saint Paul. He refers to Thomas Aquinas. He refers to the Old Testament, the New Testament,” Jones said. “It’s about as religious as you can get.”
“The sources he’s referring to are religious,” Youngwood replied. “The nature of his writing goes beyond religion.”
“‘Thou shalt not steal’ goes beyond religion,” Jones countered, referring to one of the Ten Commandments.
Youngwood responded by pointing to other commandments, such as ‘I am the Lord thy God,’ which he says amounts to coercion by commanding students to believe.
“ If the government is going to put up a central tenet of a religion as a state-selected scripture, I think that is turning school in part into a church,” Youngwood said.
Parents push back
In 2024, a district court judge ruled that Louisiana’s law violated the First Amendment because it forced students “to participate in a religious exercise; reading and considering a specific version of the Ten Commandments.”
State officials appealed to the Fifth Circuit, and a three-judge panel upheld the lower court’s decision last year. The state then appealed to the full bench, and Texas joined the appeal, which the court took up, vacating its earlier ruling.
Attorneys general in 18 states filed a Kentucky-led brief supporting Louisiana’s case. Those states are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.
Louisiana’s Republican governor, who is Catholic, has been a vocal supporter of the law.
When asked after Tuesday’s hearing about families who don’t want their children exposed to the religious doctrine at school, Gov. Jeff Landry told reporters, “ I would advise parents like that that they find some moral code.”
“You either read the Ten Commandments or your child is gonna learn the criminal code,” Landry said.
At a press conference last year, he gave a similar answer, saying, unhappy parents should tell their children “not to look at them.”
Joshua Herlands, one of the parents suing the state, is Jewish and believes in the Ten Commandments — though not in the specific wording of the version the law requires.
(Catholics, Protestants, and Jews all recognize the commandments, but order them differently, and the wording can vary depending on which part of Scripture they’re from or the Bible translation used. Louisiana’s law requires schools to use a specific version listed in the order commonly used by Protestants.)
“It’s precisely because I have religious beliefs,” Herlands said, explaining his decision to sign onto the case. “I have had people ask, ‘Hey, are you not in favor of the Ten Commandments?’ And nothing could be further from the truth.”
The difference, he said, is that it’s his job to expose his kids to them, not their public school.
Herlands said it was easy to explain the legal reasoning to his kids.
“The beauty, I think, of the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment is it's pretty self-explanatory — do not mix church and state,” he said.
Dozens of religious groups have filed briefs in support of the plaintiffs, and some of the parents challenging the law are religious leaders.
Rev. Jeff Sims, a Presbyterian minister in Covington, said the law “tramples religious freedom.”
“The authority to educate our children lies with us, and our communities of faith,” Sims said.
Just over half of U.S. adults said they support allowing public school teachers to lead students in prayers that refer to Jesus, according to a recent Pew Research Center report.
The rate is much higher in the Gulf South, 81% in Mississippi, 75% in Alabama and 74% in Louisiana.
In Texas, 46% of respondents in a University of Texas survey conducted last April said they strongly or somewhat support the state’s law requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom.
Similar polling data does not appear to exist in Louisiana.
What happens next?
Most public schools have already received donated posters designed by the Louisiana attorney general’s office and printed by the Louisiana Family Forum, a conservative Christian group that helped write the law, according to LFF President Gene Mills.
Mills said they’ve sent posters to every school district, except for those named in the lawsuit: East Baton Rouge, Livingston, Orleans, St. Tammany and Vernon.
Schools can display any poster as long as it meets the law’s minimum requirements, including that the exact version of the Ten Commandments is the “central focus” of the display presented in large, easily readable font.
The posters must also include a context statement that says, in part, that the Ten Commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries,” though some historians argue that isn't true.
Mills said he hopes the posters show students the Ten Commandments' role in “Western civilization and authentic history.”
“Whether that’s from a religious devotion or a secular, historical context, we believe it’s too important for it to be omitted in the public square,” he said.
Herlands, the parent plaintiff, strongly disagreed with advocates' efforts to distance the law from a religious agenda.
“Let’s look at what’s really going on here,” he said. “This is a Christian nationalist agenda being pushed by our state legislature.”
Once the Fifth Circuit issues its decision — no timeline has been set — both the plaintiffs and state officials have said they will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.
Legal experts expect the court to hear the case and, with a conservative supermajority, could rule in Louisiana’s favor.
