BJC urges federal appeals court to reject Louisiana law requiring public school classrooms to post the Ten Commandments

One of the first significant church-state tests of the new year surrounds a troubling new Louisiana law (H.B. 71) that requires the Ten Commandments to be posted in every public school classroom. On January 23, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in Roake v. Brumley, a challenge to the law. BJC (Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty) filed a brief with the circuit court, making the case that the law violates the religious freedom provisions of the First Amendment.

Joining BJC on the brief are The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; the General Synod of the United Church of Christ; the Rev. Jihyun Oh as Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.); and The Most Rev. Sean W. Rowe, Presiding Bishop and Primate of The Episcopal Church.

As the brief explains, for BJC and the other Christian organizations and individuals joining in, their opposition to H.B. 71 emerges from their faith:

The Ten Commandments are particularly significant Bible verses because they list a set of rules to be followed in order to live a holy life in the eyes of God. … For Amici and other Christians, the Bible is holy and authoritative. References to its teachings provide direction for believers in daily life. Religious communities meet regularly to interpret and understand those religious teachings. It is not the province of the state to supplant that education.

The brief emphasizes that there are many versions of the Ten Commandments. H.B. 71 chooses a particular version, picking sides and improperly expressing a preference in long-standing religious debates among and between religious denominations.

BJC General Counsel Holly Hollman underscored the need for the government not to usurp the role of religious authorities in our lives. “When the government mandates the posting of a preferred version of a religious text to hang on each classroom wall, it is acting beyond its authority,” she said.

Plus, the brief makes it clear that protecting against government establishments of religion protects faith from the coercive nature of the government:

The Establishment Clause exists not only to protect nonbelievers and believers in minority faiths from proselytization by the state, but also to protect religion from being undermined by state action. … Government sponsorship of religion can undermine true faith in many ways. It can bend religion to its own political or other purposes. Further, efforts to deny that the government is doing anything that might offend or exclude adherents of other faiths can cause it to secularize religious observance or misstate religious teachings because the government does not understand them or take them seriously.

Defenders of H.B. 71, the brief points out, ignore principles that are fundamental to Supreme Court precedent protecting against religious indoctrination in public schools. Most striking is the discussion of the state’s wrong-headed argument that students can simply “ignore” the Ten Commandment posters to avoid improper religious indoctrination:

[T]he suggestion that no student will feel compelled to follow instructions posted on the walls of every classroom ignores reality.
…
Students will be confronted with the State’s religious instruction every minute of every day and cannot “opt out” from this pervasive messaging. They cannot avoid routinely seeing the Commandments, and they cannot realistically avoid routinely reading parts of the Commandments, even if they do not read all the way through. If anything, the fact that the Ten Commandment’s religious instruction remains in full view at all hours of the school day makes it more pervasive than the limited amounts of prayer found unconstitutional in Engel, Schempp, Lee, and Santa Fe, each of which was over in a few minutes or less.

The brief also notes that young children are particularly susceptible to the coercive effects of public school postings, especially when they include no context and no safeguards against indoctrination:

When religious instruction is posted in every classroom—where students go to receive educational instruction—it is not credible to suggest that [children as young as five years old] will be able to distinguish instruction from non-instruction, and obvious religious meaning from alleged but invisible secular meaning, when no effort is made to explain any of this to them.

H.B. 71 represents a dangerous step toward the entangling of our civic and religious institutions. As I posted in November, public schools have become a critical target of those in state legislatures who would promote the ideology of Christian nationalism. BJC’s brief explains well to the court the threat to religious liberty this law poses.

Here’s hoping the court takes this historic concern to heart and does the same thing the lower court did: reject H.B. 71 as unconstitutional.