The Ten Commandments are headed toward another possible encounter with the Supreme Court, this time by way of Texas, two groups of public-school families, and a sharply divided federal appeals court.

On August 17, more than two dozen Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Baha’i, Unitarian Universalist, and nonreligious families asked the Supreme Court to review Texas Senate Bill 10. The law requires public schools to place a state-prescribed version of the Ten Commandments in a conspicuous location in every classroom when compliant copies are donated. The displays must be at least 16 by 20 inches and readable from anywhere in the room. Districts may also purchase them, although they’re not required to do so. Apparently, a single poster is now expected to carry the combined weight of constitutional law, religious liberty, moral education, and Texas politics. That’s a demanding assignment for a piece of framed cardstock.

Federal district courts initially blocked the law in the districts involved in two lawsuits, Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District and Cribbs Ringer v. Comal Independent School District. In April, however, the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld S.B. 10 by a 9–8 vote. The majority ruled that the law violates neither the Establishment Clause nor the Free Exercise Clause. The families are now asking the Supreme Court to settle whether Texas can mandate these displays and whether doing so interferes with parents’ authority over their children’s religious upbringing.

Before deciding who has the better argument, it’s important to distinguish two questions. The immediate question is whether the Supreme Court should hear the cases. The eventual question—if the justices accept them—is whether the Texas law is constitutional. Granting review wouldn’t mean the ACLU has won, and declining review wouldn’t necessarily mean the Court endorses every word of the Fifth Circuit’s reasoning.

Why the Justices Should Take a Closer Look

The Clash with Stone v. Graham

The strongest argument for hearing the case begins with Stone v. Graham. In 1980, the Supreme Court struck down a Kentucky law requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in public-school classrooms. The factual resemblance between that law and S.B. 10 is difficult to miss without closing one eye and squinting with the other.

The Fifth Circuit nevertheless concluded that Stone is no longer binding because it relied upon the three-part test established in Lemon v. Kurtzman. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Supreme Court announced that it had abandoned the Lemon test in favor of an approach grounded in historical practices and understandings. The Fifth Circuit therefore described Stone as an “empty vessel” after Lemon’s removal.

The families respond that lower courts aren’t allowed to declare a Supreme Court decision dead merely because later decisions may have weakened its reasoning. Under the principle of vertical stare decisis, a lower court must follow directly applicable Supreme Court precedent until the Supreme Court expressly overrules it. Kennedy didn’t mention Stone, much less explicitly overrule it.

That procedural issue alone presents a strong reason for review. Even if the justices ultimately decide that Stone should be modified or overturned, that decision belongs to them, not to an appeals court attempting to read the judicial tea leaves.

The Court Needs to Explain What Replaced the Lemon Test

The Supreme Court clearly abandoned Lemon, but the boundaries of its replacement remain unsettled. The Fifth Circuit interpreted Kennedy as asking whether the challenged law resembles a founding-era religious establishment. Such establishments commonly involved official churches, compulsory attendance, religious taxes, punishment of dissenters, government control of doctrine, or restrictions upon political participation.

Because S.B. 10 does none of those things, the majority concluded that it’s not an establishment of religion. But the dissenting judges argued that this framework was too narrow, especially in a public-school setting where children are required to attend and remain particularly susceptible to social and institutional pressure.

The Supreme Court has previously distinguished a Ten Commandments monument on the Texas Capitol grounds from a display inside a public-school classroom. In Van Orden v. Perry, the Court upheld the Capitol monument while emphasizing that public schools require special caution because students are young, impressionable, and repeatedly exposed to what the government places before them. The new Texas law puts the state-selected text not outside a government building that citizens may pass occasionally, but inside every classroom children occupy throughout their education.

A 9–8 appeals-court decision containing multiple concurrences and dissents is a reasonably good indication that the law hasn’t become a model of crystalline clarity. Supreme Court guidance would help lower courts understand whether Stone survives, how Kennedy applies to public schools, and how much constitutional significance should be assigned to the schoolroom setting.

The Case Involves Parental Rights as Well as Church-State Separation

The petitioners aren’t relying solely upon the Establishment Clause. They also argue that the displays violate the Free Exercise Clause by interfering with parents’ authority to direct their children’s religious education.

That claim draws heavily upon the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which recognized that public-school policies burden religious exercise when they substantially interfere with the religious development of children or threaten to undermine beliefs and practices their parents seek to instill.

The families argue that S.B. 10 creates an even more unavoidable situation. A parent can sometimes excuse a child from a particular lesson, activity, or assigned book. But a child can’t meaningfully opt out of a poster displayed in every classroom, during every subject, throughout the school day. The only complete opt-out would be leaving the public-school system, which isn’t much of an accommodation for families who pay taxes and are legally required to educate their children.

The petitioners also dispute the idea that the mandated wording represents everyone who accepts the Ten Commandments. They describe the text as derived from a Protestant use of the King James Bible and point to differences in wording, numbering, organization, and theological emphasis among Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions. The Fifth Circuit majority declined to resolve those disputes, reasoning that courts shouldn’t become arbiters of scriptural interpretation. That caution is understandable, but it also raises the underlying question: If judges shouldn’t select the proper version of a sacred text, why should state legislators?

The Question Is National and Recurring

According to the petition, lawmakers in approximately two dozen states have enacted or considered legislation concerning Ten Commandments displays in public schools during the past two years. Texas alone has more than 1,200 public-school districts serving roughly 5.5 million students. Similar controversies have already developed in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama.

Without a clear national rule, a display could be unconstitutional in one federal circuit, permissible in another, and stuck in litigation limbo somewhere else. School boards, teachers, parents, and state officials would be left guessing while attorneys continue exchanging very expensive opinions about inexpensive posters.

The two Texas cases also provide a relatively clean vehicle for review. The Fifth Circuit reached the constitutional merits, found the claims ripe, and produced extensive majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions. The lower courts developed a substantial evidentiary record, and both cases challenge the same statute under the same constitutional provisions.

Why the Nine Might Say, “Not This Time”

The Fifth Circuit May Have Applied the Right Test

Those opposing view argues that Stone can’t be separated from the Lemon test upon which it expressly relied. Stone invalidated Kentucky’s law because it lacked a secular legislative purpose, the first part of Lemon. Once the Supreme Court abandoned that test and its “offshoots,” continuing to apply Stone as though nothing had changed could preserve a result after its legal foundation had been removed.

From this perspective, the Fifth Circuit didn’t improperly overrule Stone. It followed the Supreme Court’s more recent instruction to evaluate Establishment Clause claims according to historical practices and understandings. Courts routinely must determine how newer Supreme Court decisions affect older ones, even when the Court doesn’t provide a convenient list of cases that have been displaced.

Supporters of the Fifth Circuit’s decision could therefore maintain that Supreme Court review is unnecessary because the appeals court performed the historical analysis Kennedy now requires.

A Silent Display Isn’t Compulsory Worship

The Fifth Circuit emphasized that S.B. 10 doesn’t require students to recite the Commandments, profess belief in them, pray, attend a religious service, or participate in any religious exercise. Students face no legal penalty for ignoring, rejecting, criticizing, or even ridiculing the poster.

The law also doesn’t direct teachers to preach from the displays, offer theological interpretations, correct students’ religious beliefs, or use the Commandments as part of the curriculum. In the majority’s view, “mere exposure” to religious language isn’t equivalent to indoctrination.

Under that reasoning, calling the displays coercive stretches the term too far. If seeing a religious statement in a public building constitutes unconstitutional coercion, then many longstanding government acknowledgments of religion—from legislative prayers to monuments, mottos, and historical artwork—could become constitutionally vulnerable.

The Law Doesn’t Resemble a Founding-Era Religious Establishment

The Fifth Circuit identified several typical characteristics of eighteenth-century religious establishments: government control of church doctrine and leadership, compelled church attendance, mandatory religious taxation, suppression of dissenting worship, use of churches to perform governmental functions, and religious tests for political participation.

S.B. 10 doesn’t create an official church, fund clergy, dictate anyone’s worship, punish religious dissent, or restrict anyone’s civil rights. It requires a poster. From a history-and-tradition perspective, defenders argue that the distance between S.B. 10 and an established church isn’t merely substantial; it’s roughly the distance between a classroom bulletin board and the Church of England.

Texas officials further contend that the Ten Commandments have profoundly influenced American moral and legal traditions and that acknowledging this heritage doesn’t establish a religion. Attorney General Ken Paxton has characterized the law as preserving foundational moral principles rather than imposing worship.

Courts Should Avoid Deciding Which Version Is Religiously Correct

The challengers’ denominational arguments may themselves create an entanglement problem. Determining whether the mandated text is Protestant, sufficiently Jewish, incompatible with Catholic treatment of images, or faithful to a particular translation would require courts to decide theological questions they generally avoid.

Defenders of the law argue that Jewish and Christian traditions broadly recognize the same underlying commandments despite differences in numbering, wording, and organization. They contend that courts shouldn’t invalidate the statute by choosing sides in disputes over which formulation is most authentic.

The Court Could Allow More Lower-Court Review

Although several states have adopted or considered similar laws, relatively few federal appellate courts have yet issued final post-Kennedy rulings on them. The Supreme Court often allows legal questions to develop in multiple circuits before intervening. Further decisions could produce clearer disagreements and give the justices more analysis from which to work.

The Court could also wait for disputes involving the law’s actual implementation. If teachers begin preaching from the posters, disciplining dissenting students, or using the displays to promote a particular denomination, families could bring narrower as-applied challenges based upon concrete conduct rather than possible future misuse.

Finally, the Supreme Court hears only a small portion of the petitions it receives. A denial would leave the Fifth Circuit’s ruling intact without transforming that ruling into nationwide precedent or formally endorsing its reasoning.

Let the Nine Weigh In

From my perspective, the Supreme Court should accept these cases.

That conclusion doesn’t arise from embarrassment over the Ten Commandments or sympathy for every argument the ACLU has advanced. The Ten Commandments are sacred Scripture. They express God’s moral authority, expose human sin, and have deeply influenced Western moral thought. Christians shouldn’t act as though “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not kill,” and “Thou shalt not bear false witness” suddenly became unfortunate historical accidents because the ACLU filed paperwork.

But respect for the Commandments doesn’t require approval of every political scheme involving them.

The Fifth Circuit declared a directly relevant Supreme Court decision effectively dead even though the Supreme Court has never expressly overruled it. Whether Stone survives Kennedy is precisely the kind of question the Supreme Court—not a lower court by a one-vote margin—should answer. With similar laws spreading across the country, postponing clarification would merely guarantee more contradictory rulings, more uncertainty for schools, and many more billable hours for constitutional lawyers.

On the underlying merits, I remain unconvinced that S.B. 10 is either constitutionally sound or particularly wise. As I argued when a federal judge blocked Louisiana’s similar law, there’s a meaningful difference between teaching students about the Ten Commandments and ordering every public-school classroom to display a government-selected version of them.

If Texas genuinely wants students to understand the historical influence of the Ten Commandments, schools can include them in an academically serious study of history, law, ethics, and comparative religion. They could be examined alongside the Code of Hammurabi and other important legal and moral traditions, with proper context and age-appropriate instruction. A poster hanging in algebra, chemistry, physical education, and yearbook class isn’t a history curriculum. It’s a religious text attached to a wall and expected to explain itself.

That creates another practical problem Christians shouldn’t ignore. Public-school teachers include believers, nonbelievers, and some who may be openly antagonistic toward biblical faith. When students ask questions about the display—and naturally they will—who will explain its meaning? Will the teacher present it faithfully, reduce it to generic niceness, dismiss it as an outdated religious artifact, or use the occasion to criticize Christianity? Passing a law that places Scripture in every classroom doesn’t guarantee that Scripture will be treated reverently or accurately. Caesar has never been a particularly reliable Sunday-school superintendent.

More importantly, freedom of conscience can’t mean protecting Christians only when the government opposes us and suspending the principle whenever government officials borrow our preferred language. If the state can select Christian scripture and place it before every child, the same power can eventually be used to mandate some other religious creed, ideological statement, or officially approved system of morality. Constitutional principles are most valuable when we apply them consistently, including when inconsistency would temporarily benefit our own side.

Parents and churches—not legislators—bear the primary responsibility for teaching children the Word of God. A state-mandated poster can’t produce faith, repentance, wisdom, or moral renewal. The law may put the Commandments on the wall, but it can’t write them upon the heart.

Texas should vigorously protect students’ right to bring Bibles to school, pray voluntarily, form Christian clubs, discuss their faith, and express biblical convictions on equal terms with everyone else. Schools should also be free to teach the Ten Commandments objectively in appropriate historical and cultural contexts. Those protections defend religious liberty without turning the government into a theological publisher.

The Supreme Court should therefore hear the cases, clarify the relationship among Stone, Kennedy, and Mahmoud, and reaffirm that lower courts can’t quietly retire Supreme Court precedents on their own authority. On the merits, it should hold that Texas crossed the constitutional line by requiring a state-selected religious text in every public-school classroom.

The Ten Commandments deserve better than being reduced to political wall décor, and religious liberty deserves better than being treated as a principle that matters only when our preferred side is losing.