Louisiana enacted a new law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public school classroom. A federal lawsuit was filed alleging that Louisiana’s mandate is unconstitutional. Perhaps we should study what our Founding Fathers thought.
Religion, Christianity in particular, and morality were very important to our Founding Fathers, and they were part of the historical foundation of America’s legal system. Many religious groups feared that the Constitution as drafted offered insufficient guarantee of the civil and religious rights of citizens. To help win ratification in 1791, a Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments) was added to include religious liberty. The First Amendment stated, in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
In 1802, Thomas Jefferson declared that when the American people adopted the Establishment Clause, they built a "wall of separation between the church and state."
Religious liberty was therefore an important pillar of America’s founding and traditions, and for 170 years the Constitution was clear. However, in the 1960s and 70s secular laws were passed that kicked God and the Bible out of our public schools under an interpretation that the Establishment Clause required separation of church and state.
In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled in Kennedy v. Bremerton that the test of whether a law complies with the First Amendment is whether it’s consistent with the country’s "original meaning and history," and going forward the Court will be abandoning the 1971 Lemon Test, which required a primary secular purpose. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said that forbidding teachers from engaging in any religious speech is “suppressing religious liberty rather than protecting it.”
After 60-plus years of secularizing our schools, perhaps the Ten Commandments is a good place to start teaching morality again to the next generation.
STEVE GARDES
Lafayette