Efforts to push Christianity into public schools are hitting a wall of hostility in conservative states, including lawsuits, protests and resistance from local officials. The movement for religious instruction in public schools is overwhelmingly driven by conservative Republicans. They argue kids can’t understand Western civilization without learning about Christianity. It’s sparking a legal fight over the separation of church and state. “I wish it was that easy that we could read some Bible verses and kids would behave themselves. But society has changed a lot in the last hundred years since that was the norm. There’s enough court precedent and historical evidence to show that separation of church and state has worked well for quite a long time.”
Florida now allows chaplains in public schools. Oklahoma and Texas are looking to infuse Bible lessons into curricula. And Louisiana wants to set up Ten Commandments displays in classrooms.
But these efforts to push Christianity into public schools are hitting a wall of hostility in conservative-led states, including lawsuits, protests and resistance from local officials.
The clash of religion, politics and local control represents an unusual challenge for a spreading education policy model led by influential conservative leaders. And it’s sparking a legal fight over the separation of church and state that could end up before the conservative-controlled Supreme Court. Republican officials including Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Oklahoma state school Superintendent Ryan Walters are welcoming legal challenges, defending their policies and demanding local schools fall in line. Even former President Donald Trump has offered support for posting the Ten Commandments in public schools.
“What we’re trying to do, honestly, is protect the religious freedoms of all of our students … from being improperly indoctrinated by teachers or by schools,” said Rob Miller, superintendent of the Bixby Public Schools district near Tulsa, Oklahoma, who is defying orders from Walters to incorporate the Bible and Ten Commandments into school curriculum. “There’s enough court precedent and historical evidence to show that the separation of church and state has worked well for quite a long time.”State lawmakers from both major parties introduced more than 650 bills tied to religion in education this year, according to a report by Quorum, a software company that tracks legislation. But the movement for religious instruction in public schools is overwhelmingly driven by conservative Republicans. They argue kids can’t understand Western civilization without learning about Christianity and benefit from the lessons of biblical teachings.“If we start from a moral perspective, then maybe we’d have a little bit more peace in our society and in this country,” Landry told reporters in August while defending his state’s embattled Ten Commandments law. “Many religions share and recognize the Ten Commandments as a whole. So, really and truly, I don’t see what the whole big fuss is about.” DeSantis has championed a new Florida law that allows religious chaplains in schools, saying that a bit of “soulcraft” could “make all the difference in the world” to some students.
But, so far, school boards are not creating chaplain programs, citing fears of possible religious freedom lawsuits if they restrict access to organizations like the Satanic Temple. Recognized by the IRS as a religious group, the Satanic Temple has been loudly declaring its intent to flood Florida with chaplains against the wishes of DeSantis, who has vowed to keep them out.Osceola County, a left-leaning enclave in central Florida, has been on the cusp of becoming the state’s first school district to allow chaplains. But two attempts to get a program off the ground have been narrowly defeated by local school board members.
Last week, a proposal to launch a chaplain program fell by a 3-2 vote at a meeting where some supportive clergy faced off against Satanists and a civil rights group opposed to the plan.
Board members raised concerns about possible First Amendment violations and lawsuits the district could face in deciding to push pause.
“I need more time to make a decision,” board Chair Heather Kahoun said when the chaplain program was first considered in August. “I haven’t had an opportunity to think about these things, to think about the implications regarding the First Amendment, regarding federal litigation that we could receive if we were to approve this as it is today.”
Supporters of the chaplain program, led by Osceola board member Jon Arguello, bashed its rejection as politically motivated, noting that the law was signed by DeSantis at a local high school.
“If there was a student who came up here asking for ‘Hey, I want to be chemically castrated’ because I’m a transgender ideologist, the school board members on this dais would pay for the Uber to send that student to go to the clinic,” Arguello said during the Aug. 27 meeting. “But here, in this situation, a student comes, and they ask for spiritual guidance because they need something that is different than what we’re offering, and they want to cut it down.”
Florida education officials introduced a proposal last month to prevent organizations like the Satanic Temple from volunteering through a policy aimed at ensuring only “credible” chaplains are permitted on campuses. It suggests requiring participants to belong to a religious organization that meets in-person at least monthly within the boundary of the school district. It also calls on principals to beef up the qualifications for chaplains by requiring previous experience and a degree in counseling or theology.
“Florida welcomes legitimate and officially authorized chaplains to become volunteers at their local schools and to provide students with morally sound guidance,” Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. said in a statement announcing the model policy.Still, the Satanic Temple — which didn’t respond to a request for comment from POLITICO — is showing no signs of backing down and has started selling merchandise heralding how “Florida welcomes” its chaplains in schools.
“The reality is you’ll have to accommodate religious identities you may not agree with,” Satanic Temple founder Lucien Greaves told Osceola’s school board on Aug. 27. “You will end up with Satanist chaplains.”
Legal fight in Louisiana
A few states over, Louisiana’s new law requiring public schools to post a version of the Ten Commandments is facing a significant legal test this month.
The ACLU and other religious freedom groups sued to have Louisiana’s law, which passed with some bipartisan support, overturned on First Amendment grounds. Representing a group of religious and non-religious plaintiffs, the civil rights organization contends that displaying a “specific” version of the Ten Commandments “runs afoul of the First Amendment’s prohibition against the government taking sides on questions of theological debate.”
Top state officials like Landry and Attorney General Liz Murrill expect schools to prepare to follow the policy despite the pending federal lawsuit.The state has already produced several examples of posters schools could use to comply with the law, featuring Charlton Heston as Moses and Lin-Manuel Miranda from Hamilton to help signal the historical and cultural significance of the Ten Commandments to students.
The biblical signage, according to Louisiana Republicans like Landry and Murrill, is meant to help curb a “lack of discipline” in local schools and the “inability of the whole system to impose some rules of order.” “If those posters are in the school, and they find them so vulgar, tell the child not to look at it,” Landry told reporters in August when asked about parents who object to the law. A court hearing at the end of the month may determine whether the law will be allowed to take effect in January.
In a similar fight, a proposed new K-5 reading and language arts curriculum next door in Texas is facing criticism — and possibly a future lawsuit — over its “heavy coverage of religion” and prominent focus on the Bible. State officials, though, are standing by the proposed curriculum, claiming that the lessons draw from a “wide range” of faiths and are not meant to “proselytize or present one religion as superior to another.” In Oklahoma, Walters, the state superintendent, declared in June that the Bible was a required “instructional support” for student curriculum in fifth through 12th grades. “Immediate and strict compliance is expected,” Walters said in a memo to superintendents and lawmakers.
Yet critics immediately dismissed the order as a paper tiger, saying Walters lacked legal authority to unilaterally require curriculum standards without approval from state policymakers. Oklahoma law also grants local school districts significant discretion to determine the instruction materials they use to meet state-approved academic standards.
“Superintendent Walters has no authority whatsoever to dictate curriculum to school districts and individual teachers under state law,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, a co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a nonprofit that is pushing to obtain records about the Bible mandate with a group of other organizations. “His memo is reckless grandstanding that school boards should ignore.”
The state superintendent dug in. Walters’ office issued a more detailed July memorandum that extolled the Bible’s influence on Western art and culture and said physical copies of the holy book and Ten Commandments must be provided in classrooms — but also noted the Bible was “not to be used for religious purposes such as preaching, proselytizing or indoctrination.” Several major Oklahoma school districts have said they will not alter their curriculum, prompting a defiant response from Walters.“Some Oklahoma educators have indicated they won’t follow the law and Oklahoma standards, so let me be clear: they will comply, and I will use every means to make sure of it,” Walters said in a July 24 statement.
The superintendent’s office did not respond to questions regarding how many districts are following or refusing the biblical instruction demands, or what the state will do to enforce compliance.
“Biblical instruction in its historical and literary context was the norm in American classrooms prior to the 1960s, and its removal foreshadowed a decades-long decline in American education,” Walters said in a statement to POLITICO.
Miller, who is suing Walters for defamation as part of a separate and ongoing dispute over school funding that has entangled the state superintendent, suspects Walters could attack the state accreditation of school districts that refuse to comply, a move that would likely spark lawsuits.
“This is a state where religion is a very important part of most families’ lives. So this idea that schools are the ones trying to keep God out, or keep the Bible out — it’s a red herring, it’s not true, and it’s designed to inflame people,” Miller said.
“I wish it was that easy that we could read some Bible verses and kids would behave themselves. But society has changed an awful lot in the last hundred years since that was the norm.”
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