(ANALYSIS) A Louisiana bill signed into law on June 19 requires displays of the Bible’s revered Ten Commandments in all public classrooms, even at the university level. Religious and nonreligious citizens immediately joined national lobbies in a federal court complaint that the law must be overturned for violating the U.S. Constitution’s ban on “establishment of religion” by the government. 

Similar display bills have been proposed in Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma and West Virginia, and are expected elsewhere. Last week, Oklahoma’s education chief directed all public schools to teach about the Bible, specifically including the Ten Commandments. Liberals warn that this latest culture war flareup shows the threat from sinister “Christian nationalism.” 

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Here are some of the complexities as this drama plays out, likely for years to come.  

You might think abolishing Louisiana’s law would be automatic, since the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed schoolroom displays in the 1980 Stone v. Graham case from Kentucky. However, that court was more liberal than the current one, and voted by a narrow 5-4. Moreover, Stone was an unusual unsigned order without the oral arguments and legal briefs that are customary in deliberations on  church-and-state substance.

Also, Stone relied upon the court’s Lemon decision nine years earlier concerning the different matter of public funding for religious schools and students. Lemon said government actions must pass all three of these tests: have a “secular purpose” — neither advance nor inhibit religion — and avoid “excessive’ entanglement with religion. In the decades since, the Supreme Court has often ignored Lemon.

A 21st century upsurge of Ten Commandments conflicts started with a hot Alabama feud. In 2001, new Chief Justice Roy Moore installed a 5,280-pound granite carving of the Ten Commandments in the state Supreme Court rotunda — all without consulting fellow justices. A federal appeals court decided the monument violated the “establishment” clause, and in 2003 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review this. Moore refused a federal court order to remove his display, and a special judicial tribunal expelled him from office. 

Meanwhile, federal courts dealt with two displays of the commandments alongside secondary texts. Critics of Louisiana’s law note that the U.S. Supreme Court rejected courtroom displays in the 2005 McCreary County decision. Some media ignored that the same day the court's Van Orden decision allowed a Ten Commandments display on the grounds of the Texas Capitol. This six-foot monument, donated to Texas in 1961 by the secular Fraternal Order of Eagles, stands among 28 items about the “people, ideals and events that compose Texas identity.”

Showing high political stakes, pro-display briefs were filed in either or both 2005 cases by attorneys general representing 24 states (yes, Alabama, Kentucky and Louisiana, but also Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming).

Both rulings were by only a 5-4 margin, with a morass of multiple opinions. Justice Stephen Breyer was pivotal, voting against the courtroom displays but yes on the Texas monument, demonstrating how fine and confusing constitutional line-drawing can be.

Why his split decision? Breyer’s guiding principle was this: “The Establishment Clause does not compel the government to purge from the public sphere all that in any way partakes of the religious. Such absolutism is not only inconsistent with our national traditions but would also tend to promote the kind of social conflict the Establishment Clause seeks to avoid.” He thought the Texas location “suggests little or nothing of the sacred” and does not lend itself to religious activity on site, and noted the monument existed for decades without protest.  

Both the Texas and courtroom displays were passive, requiring no one to heed or read them or do anything else. But Breyer objected that Kentucky’s legislative history showed an intent to promote religion, as opposed to the Texas “effort primarily to reflect, historically, the secular impact of a religiously inspired document” and thus serve “a mixed but primarily nonreligious purpose” reflecting “a cultural heritage.” 

In the plurality decision, Chief Justice William Rehnquist (a Lutheran) observed that the Supreme Court’s own building has two Ten Commandment displays, as does the U.S. House, Library of Congress, National Archives, Department of Justice headquarters and the city’s federal courts building. 

Since the Ten Commandments are in Jewish (and Christian) Scripture, and Breyer himself is Jewish, it’s notable that the Texas monument was opposed by the American Jewish Congress and Anti-Defamation League, alongside the customary Freedom from Religion Foundation and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.  

A coalition representing Orthodox Judaism, rather like Breyer, felt the Kentucky courtroom displays “might” convey improper government “endorsement” of religion, but favored the Texas monument. Spokesman Nathan Diament said the Orthodox appreciate the Ten Commandments’ role “in the development of a just and moral society” and the Texas decision showed “government neutrality — not discrimination — toward religion.”

A strict “establishment” view came in a Texas brief by leading scholar Douglas Laycock for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and Interfaith Alliance. He said that “when government displays a sacred text, it must be presumed to endorse that text” unless equal evidence on-site negates  apparent endorsement. He said with displays, the government “desacralizes sacred texts, distorting and undermining the text’s religious meaning in its effort to demonstrate secular meanings.”

In the new Louisiana lawsuit, nine families are backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United and Freedom From Religion. The plaintiffs include Presbyterian and Unitarian Universalist clergy, Reform Jews and people with nonreligious, agnostic and atheistic views. Some object that the Ten Commandments are “discriminatory,” even “denigrate” women or offer a “heterosexual male perspective.”

The plaintiffs raise practical problems. As in Louisiana, displays often use a Protestant text or numbering system rather than Catholic or Jewish versions. Jews find offense because Louisiana’s summary wording omits the introductory language about God’s liberation from “bondage” in Egypt. Of course, the Ten Commandments pertain only to Judaism and Christianity, excluding adherents of other world religions and the nonreligious. 

Finally, there’s the major objection toward supposedly secular displays. The Ten Commandments do cover honor for parents, homicide, adultery, theft, lying and envy toward a neighbor’s wife or wealth. But the opening words are explicitly religious, commanding proper worship of the one true God and observance of the Sabbath rest. 

Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.