The plot to end church-state separation one school district at a time

In late June, the Louisiana state legislature passed a law requiring all classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. Not to be outdone, Oklahoma’s elected state superintendent of public schools, Republican Ryan Walters, issued a directive requiring that states “incorporate the Bible, including the Ten Commandments, as an instructional support into the curriculum” across grades 5 through 12.

Christian conservatives such as Walters argue that the Bible was foundational to America’s origin story and directly shaped the design of the American government. In defending his proposal, Walters told CNN, " We're not going to allow the radical left to continue to push a false history on our kids that said that faith played no role.”

It is not surprising that efforts to promote religious content in America’s public schools have been spearheaded in these two states. My organization has found that whereas nationally three in 10 Americans can be categorized as Christian nationalist adherents or sympathizers, the percentage of Christian nationalists is significantly higher in Louisiana (45 percent) and Oklahoma (41 percent).

Attempts to dictate more overt religious content in public classrooms by conservative Christian activists in red states, which our data show are home to a greater share of Christian nationalists than the national average, are likely to accelerate. This represents a more aggressive approach to tearing down the wall between church and state in public schools than in years past, where culture wars have long been a central feature of education politics. 

In the 1990s, the Christian Coalition’s Ralph Reed led efforts to recruit conservative Christians to run for school board, declaring that he would “rather have a thousand school board members than one president.”

His advice to candidates to downplay their theological beliefs while on the campaign trail drew national scrutiny after some Christian right-wing candidates succeeded in making controversial decisions once elected to school board majorities. It also led to the widespread perception that the Christian right was systematically taking over school boards across the country.

My research found, however, that efforts by the Christian right to dominate local school schools proved isolated, at best. At the national level, Christian right-wing candidates were no more likely to win school board elections than other candidates in the 1990s. 

Moreover, when Christian right-wing candidates did manage to secure board majorities, efforts to enact conservative religious or ideological changes to school policies often provoked community backlash, prompting extreme members to lose their seats in subsequent elections.  

Just as importantly, the Supreme Court’s Engle and Schempp rulings banned state-sponsored school prayer and Bible reading in the 1960s because they violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Afterward, efforts to promote religious instruction or organize prayer in public schools were largely viewed as futile, as few believed that the legal precedent established in those landmark rulings was in jeopardy. 

Indeed, while some red states have passed legislation in recent years allowing for the instruction of the Bible in public schools, under the auspices of promoting religious literacy, those courses were designed as electives. Notably, such courses have often struggled in terms of student enrollment.

However, the move by these Southern states to require such instruction of the Bible and to hang the Ten Commandments in classrooms is of a whole different magnitude, signifying two new political and legal realities. 

First, it demonstrates that the MAGA movement is now firmly ensconced as the powerbrokers of the GOP. Christian nationalists are now emboldened to enact policies that force their own religious views on public school students, most of whom hail from varied religious backgrounds, or increasingly, from no religious background at all. 

Indeed, America’s growing secularization and religious diversity in all corners of our public lives is precisely why Christian nationalists feel compelled to mandate their misguided belief that America’s greatness is solely linked to its founding as a Christian nation in American classrooms.

Second, the legal landscape has become far more hospitable to these arguments with the appointment of Trump’s justices. The past two years show that the Roberts Court is eager to overturn longstanding precedents to advance a political agenda.

The justices have also shown a willingness to defer a larger role for religion in public schools in recent years, allowing for more direct public funding to be spent at religious schools and ruling that a school policy forbidding a football coach from praying with his players violated the coach’s right to freely exercise his religion.  

Activists seeking to stop overt religious instruction in their local schools may take some heart in revisiting those school board election battles from the 1990s. 

After the COVID pandemic lockdowns, right-wing organizations such as Moms for Liberty found success in local school board races championing parental rights, overturning mask mandates, and seeking to remove objectionable books from school libraries that discussed sexuality and racial equality themes. But they also provoked a backlash from parents alarmed at conservative overreach in their school district who have, in turn, successfully nominated their own candidates.

However, while many curricular decisions happen in individual school districts, it may prove harder to fight such decisions made by statewide elected officials. 

Those concerned about the growing encroachment of religion in public schools would be wise to learn more about what statewide elected officials, who often have tremendous power in shaping what our children are taught in America’s classrooms, think about the separation of church and state.

Melissa Deckman, Ph.D. is CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to conducting independent research at the intersection of religion, culture and public policy.