A federal judge on Monday called out Republican-led states for attempting to inject Christianity into public schools, claiming they had a “coordinated strategy” to push through “unconstitutional” laws.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) in April signed legislation that would require the state’s public schools to display the Ten Commandments from the Christian Bible in every single classroom. A group of parents promptly sued their school districts, saying the law was a clear violation of the Constitution, which prohibits the government from establishing a religion.
On Monday, Judge Timothy Brooks issued a preliminary injunction blocking the implementation of the law in several districts in Arkansas.
“Why would Arkansas pass an obviously unconstitutional law? Most likely because the State is part of a coordinated strategy among several states to inject Christian religious doctrine into public-school classrooms,” Brooks said in the ruling.
GOP-led states, encouraged by a conservative-leaning Supreme Court, are passing laws that would force religion into the classroom. Legal experts suspect their goal is to get one of the cases in front of the high court in order to undo decades of precedent that bars religion in public schools.
“These states view the past decade of rulings by the Supreme Court on religious displays in public spaces as a signal that the Court would be open to revisiting its precedent on religious displays in the public-school context,” Brooks said in the ruling.
Many similar laws are working their way through courts right now. Louisiana’s was struck down last year and again in June by an appeals court. A group of parents in Texas are suing their state over a Ten Commandments requirement, and nearly identical measures have been proposed in Missouri, Oklahoma and Alabama.
“Just ten days after the Arkansas Plaintiffs filed suit, Texas enacted its own public-school Ten Commandments law,” Brooks said in the ruling. “Similar laws appear to be in the works in other states, which will lead to more lawsuits — until, it seems, the Supreme Court puts its foot down.”
The rush to push religion into the classroom is part of a broader attempt to dismantle the public education system. In the aftermath of the racial justice protests that swept the nation in 2020 and the coronavirus-related school closures, the Republican Party has doubled down on its efforts to insert conservative ideology into schools across the country. Conservative leaders took over school boards and passed laws aiming to remove books with racial justice or LGBTQ+ themes from schools.
Their efforts were given a boost when Donald Trump returned to power in January. He promised to abolish the Department of Education and vowed to eradicate diversity programs and services for LGBTQ+ and immigrant children. He’s made good on those promises by threatening school funding for diversity programs and firing nearly half the staff at the Department of Education.
In the last few years, the Supreme Court has signaled that it’s increasingly open to ruling in favor of conservative Christians.
In 2023, the justices sided with Lorie Smith, a Colorado web designer, who sued her state over its law requiring her to serve everyone equally. Smith claimed that requiring her to make wedding websites for same-sex couples was a violation of her religious freedom. That same year, the court ruled in favor of Joe Kennedy, the high school football coach who sued his school district after he was fired for praying on the field. He was rehired and then quit after one game.
In May, the court narrowly blocked a religious charter school in Oklahoma from receiving taxpayer funds, but only because Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the case. The tie vote only meant that the case would go back to the lower courts, and other states could bring similar cases.
And that same month, the court ruled 6-3 in favor of a group of Maryland parents who sued their school district over books with LGBTQ+ themes. The parents claimed their religious rights were violated when Montgomery County Public Schools stopped allowing them to pull their children from school on days when the books in question were used in lessons.