The Ten Commandments do not belong in public school classrooms | Opinion

The Ten Commandments do not belong on the walls of public school classrooms. This was the conclusion of the Supreme Court in 1980, and that ruling is binding on every court in the country. But in a stunning decision on April 21, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, by a 9-8 vote, upheld a Texas law requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in every public school classroom.

For many reasons, this decision is wrong.

In June 2025, the Texas legislature enacted Senate Bill 10, which requires public elementary and secondary schools to display in each classroom a “durable poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments.” The poster or copy must measure “at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall,” use an easily readable typeface and be displayed “in a conspicuous place.”

The law also prescribes the content of each poster, mandating that it include the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments (there are important differences — with religious significance — between this version and the Catholic and Jewish versions of the Decalogue).

The court of appeals was bound by the Supreme Court’s decision in 1980 in Stone v. Graham, which declared unconstitutional a similar Kentucky law.

“The pre-eminent purpose for posting the Ten Commandments on schoolhouse walls is plainly religious in nature,” the court declared in its ruling. It explained that the Ten Commandments are undeniably a sacred text of Jewish and Christian faiths and include religious commands.

The court explained that posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms served no educational purpose: “(If) the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in Stone v. Graham followed decades of its holding that the government cannot bring religion into the classroom. In a series of decisions beginning in the early 1960s, the court held that prayer — even voluntary prayer — in public schools violates the provision of the First Amendment that forbids the government from making any law respecting the establishment of religion.

The conservative majority on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals said that the Supreme Court’s decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton Schools, in 2022, served as the basis for its belief that the law had changed. The 2022 case involved a high school football coach who went onto the field after games to kneel and pray. The court stressed that it was the coach doing this on his own time after the game on a football field — not in a classroom.

Nothing in the Kennedy v. Bremerton Schools decision — or any Supreme Court ruling — has questioned the fundamental principle that classrooms must be secular.

In fact, a Supreme Court decision from last June provides another reason why the Texas law is unconstitutional. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Supreme Court found that free exercise of religion was violated when parents did not have the right to opt their children out of education about sexuality which was inconsistent with their religious beliefs. The court held that mere exposure to material about sexual orientation and gender identity that the parents objected to on religious grounds was a sufficient to infringe free exercise of religion.

The parents challenging the Texas law make exactly the same claim: that the Ten Commandments are inconsistent with their religious beliefs and that forcing their children to see them in every classroom violates their free exercise of religion. Their claim is even stronger than in Mahmoud v. Taylor because of the religious content of the Ten Commandments.

State laws, like the Texas statute, requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms use the government to further Christianity. Some state legislatures are pushing to have the Bible taught in public schools, and they appear to have several allies in the federal government: Secretary of War Pete Hegseth holds Christian prayer sessions in his office and repeatedly invokes his Christian faith to defend the war in Iran. And President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling on the Justice Department to investigate a “systematic pattern of discrimination against Christians,” and to protect churches and pro-life organizations.

In 1948, all nine justices on the Supreme Court said the purpose of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment was to create a wall that separates church and state. Nowhere is that more important than in public schools.

The Fifth Circuit’s decision upholding the Texas law requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments flouts that, and the Supreme Court must reverse its ruling and reaffirm that classrooms in this country must be secular.

Erwin Chemerinsky is dean and professor of law at the UC Berkeley School of Law.

This story was originally published April 28, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline "The Ten Commandments do not belong in public school classrooms | Opinion."