Louisiana Leads the Way in Bringing Religion Back Into the Public Square

On May 28, the Louisiana Legislature passed a new law requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments in every classroom, becoming the first state to do so. Gov. Jeff Landry signed the legislation last Wednesday, saying, “[I]f you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.”

This marks a significant step in the Right’s push to bring religion back into the public square. It is a welcome departure from the neutral, defensive crouch of “religious liberty” that conservatives have favored for the past few decades. 

Some religious leaders and even some conservatives have been openly critical of the Louisiana law. Such critics often appeal to the idea of “separation of church and state” to condemn any public display of religious texts, symbols, and iconography.

For instance, the senior pastor at St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans, Marc Boswell, was one of 115 clergy and lay members from a variety of denominations who signed a petition asking Gov. Landry to veto the legislation. Explaining why he could not support the bill, Boswell said:

My congregation and I stand firmly in our Baptist heritage and believe in the separation of church and state, and this bill represents a clear, unconstitutional violation of the intention of our founding fathers to provide for this separation of interests. It is better for both the state and the church to keep religious establishment out of our public institutions.

As is to be expected, there has also been backlash from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which opposed the law on the grounds that it “will result in unconstitutional religious coercion of students, who are legally required to attend school and are thus a captive audience for school-sponsored messages.”

In a joint statement with the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana, Americans for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation, the ACLU declared:

We are preparing a lawsuit to challenge H.B. 71. The law violates the separation of church and state and is blatantly unconstitutional. The First Amendment promises that we all get to decide for ourselves what religious beliefs, if any, to hold and practice, without pressure from the government. Politicians have no business imposing their preferred religious doctrine on students and families in public schools.

The problem with these objections is threefold. First, they falsely assume that our laws and customs have been the product of “neutral” and ambiguous abstractions. Critics like Boswell ignore that our laws — and the entire moral fabric of our society, for that matter — are the product of a particular historical context, largely defined by the moral code enshrined by the Ten Commandments, and Christianity more broadly.

In the words of conservative political philosopher Russell Kirk, “[L]aws arise out of a social order,” comprising “certain institutions and customs, and certain ideas and beliefs, which continue to nurture order in the person and order in the republic, down to our time.”

Second, the idea of “separation of church and state” is itself a novelty based on 20th-century jurisprudence that does not reflect the true nature of the American Founding and the longstanding interpretive tradition surrounding the First Amendment. Although the phrase is typically attributed to Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, where he wrote of “building a wall of separation between Church & State,” Jefferson’s understanding was far from dominant, as proved by the widespread persistence of blasphemy laws from the time of the Founding to the mid-20th century. Moreover, many such laws were passed by several of the same state legislatures that had ratified the First Amendment, which means that they did not see them as being incongruous with the Constitution.

Third, “civil liberties” absolutists like the ACLU fail to acknowledge that the state is already promoting and endorsing a certain kind of “value” system. The following cartoon, which went viral on X over the weekend, perfectly encapsulates the kind of indoctrination that is actually practiced by most public schools throughout the country:

Since the Ten Commandments are in the news, I made a new comic. pic.twitter.com/UwMBezDrRN

— Narrow Road Comics (@Narrowroadcomic) June 22, 2024

Indeed, the ever-expanding list of progressive causes, from BLM to LGBT, has become the new publicly endorsed morality. Thus, activist signs have become the new commandment tablets.

Every society exalts certain virtues, or “values,” which are themselves expressed in monuments, holidays, and public education. Increasingly, however, the virtues and tenets that American society has inherited are being replaced by the alternative “values” of radical liberalism. While monuments to Christopher Columbus are being toppled, for instance, we are building statues of George Floyd. And, as The American Spectator’s Nate Hochman and S.A. McCarthy have observed, our holidays are likewise being replaced by liberalism’s new liturgical calendar.

The question is not one of whether there will be a state-sponsored morality, but of what it will be. Dr. Carol M. Swain, a retired professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, weighed in on the issue of Louisiana’s new law to make this very point. “It’s fine and dandy to hang a pride flag in a public school classroom,” she said, “but any competing messages are banned. We wouldn’t want to influence the children.”

The state of Louisiana is by no means the first to attempt to influence the moral formation of its students, but it is the first to do so in the right direction — reverting to the way public schools operated not so long ago, with explicit acknowledgements of the tenets that have shaped our country and, yes, the religion that animates our civilization.

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