The same battle is playing out in classrooms nationwide: an effort to blur the line between church and state. Especially in the South, from Texas to Tennessee, lawmakers are attempting to impose religion on public schools. They’re pushing the Ten Commandments, organized prayer sessions and the use of taxpayer dollars to fund faith-based charter schools.
The erosion of church-state boundaries in public education is worrisome enough on its own, critics of the trend contend — more so because states aren’t merely promoting benign Judeo-Christian values. Instead, critics say, these efforts reflect a White Christian nationalist agenda intended to marginalize students and families based on gender, sexuality, race and religion. Moreover, legislative efforts to mandate religious displays or prayer often coincide with curriculum restrictions.
“Look no further than the religious extremists that were restricting the curriculum in Florida,” said Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “‘Don’t say gay.’ No DEI. ‘Don’t teach about menstruation.’ Girls are implicated, right?”
Florida has not passed laws requiring the Ten Commandments in classrooms, but it has taken other steps, such as allowing chaplains to counsel students in public schools. The state is currently considering a constitutional amendment on religious expression that could weaken the church-state boundary in public education there.
Religious freedom advocates say their concern isn’t just the presence of religious texts in classrooms, but how school personnel may explain them to students. The Ten Commandments, for example, contains language that frames women in relation to men. Take the commandment against coveting, they say, which discusses a neighbor’s wife in the same context as property — a reflection of the patriarchal perspective of biblical times but one that can shape how children today understand gender roles.
Laser said that when a narrow version of Christianity is injected into public schools, it is often used to single out students who are already vulnerable.
“There is a very active crusade to ruin the line between church and state,” she said. “It’s unconstitutional, un-American, against the will of the people, and ultimately, will also be very dangerous for religion itself.”
Over the past year, the mix of legal victories and new strategies employed by conservative lawmakers nationally has alarmed religious freedom advocates. They celebrated in 2024 when a federal judge blocked Louisiana’s Ten Commandments mandate for all public schools to display the scripture in classrooms. That same year, Louisiana passed a law requiring public school personnel to only use the names and pronouns on students’ birth certificates, unless they had parental permission to do otherwise. This February, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision to block the state’s Ten Commandments law. To date this year, over a dozen states have introduced legislation to post the religious text in classrooms.
Imposing religion on schools — according to John C. Williams, legal director of the ACLU of Arkansas — tests the limits of the First Amendment during a time when the Supreme Court has taken an ultraconservative turn.
“The First Amendment is often thought of as a speech amendment, but religious liberty is much part of that right,” Williams said. The amendment’s Establishment and the Free Exercise clauses prohibit the government from instituting an official religion or infringing on individual religious practice.
The Bible Belt is only part of the picture, experts and advocates say. Last year, about 20 states introduced Ten Commandments bills. They include Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas, Minnesota and Ohio, but the legislation did not pass in most states where it was introduced.
No matter their location, states attempting to copy Louisiana’s playbook — the Pelican State was the first to pass Ten Commandments legislation since Kentucky did in 1978 — are encountering resistance from the courts and the public.
In March, a federal court permanently blocked Act 573, an Arkansas law that would have mandated every public school classroom and library post a King James version of the Ten Commandments selected by the state government. Just a few years earlier, the state passed the LEARNS Act and Act 542, which restricted discussions of LGBTQ+ topics in public schools. The laws also prohibited public school employees from using students’ preferred pronouns without parental consent if they clash with those assigned at birth. In his ruling about Act 573, U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks wrote that “the only reason to display a sacred, religious text in every classroom is to proselytize to children.”
The ACLU of Arkansas represented families in the case. “I think the federal court recognized what was pretty clear from precedent already, which is that hanging the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom is unconstitutional,” Williams said.
For the religious and nonreligious families who brought the suit, the issue was also deeply personal, since they felt that the requirement violated their right to direct their children’s religious upbringing, Williams said.
But the win doesn’t mean Arkansas and other states will abandon efforts to smudge the lines between church and state in schools. The wave of Ten Commandments bills is part of a larger legal game plan, Laser contends. The aim is to prompt a “circuit split,” she said, which occurs when federal appeals courts rule differently on similar laws, forcing the Supreme Court to intervene and potentially reverse decades of precedent.
That strategy recently saw some success. Although a federal court initially blocked Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law, the full 5th Circuit permitted its enforcement as the case goes forward — a procedural move that has concerned opponents. Meanwhile, a Texas Ten Commandments law remains in litigation.
“They’re using every possible opening to get this case back before the Supreme Court,” Laser said.
The Ten Commandments law isn’t the only policy sparking debates over religion in Texas. Last year, the state legislature passed Senate Bill 11, which requires every public school district to hold a vote on whether to adopt a “period of prayer and religious study” during the school day. The deadline for the votes was March 1.
The outcome marked a win for religious freedom advocates thanks to grassroots organizing in the state’s 1,200 school districts.
“An incredible number of school districts all across the state… voted to reject SB 11,” Caro Achar, engagement coordinator for free speech and pluralism at the ACLU of Texas, told The 19th. “That’s because inviting state-organized prayer into public schools would cause division and pressure students to conform.”
Achar also questioned the need for the law, pointing out that Texas students — like their peers across the country — already have the right to practice their faith.
“Texas students already have robust rights to voluntarily pray, to read religious literature, including the Bible, to engage in other religious activities during their free time,” she said. SB 11 instead serves to “hand over that practice of prayer to educators who neither wanted nor were qualified to guide that practice.” Last year, Texas also passed SB 12, which prohibits conversations about race, gender identity and sexual orientation in K-12 schools.
A 2025 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 61 percent of Texans support school-led Christian prayers, while 38 percent oppose them.
Supporters of church-state separation warn that when schools take on a more active role in students’ religious lives, the consequences can extend beyond questions of constitutionality. It “can certainly open the door to mistreatment or exclusion or bullying, not just by educators but by other members of the school community,” Achar said.
A diverse coalition — including the ACLU, the Texas Freedom Network, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty and the National Council of Jewish Women — swayed school districts to reject the measure. This indicates, Laser said, that support for church-state separation crosses partisan and religious lines.
“Christians and non-theists and religious minorities are rising up across this entire country,” she said.
Some conservative states have pushed the boundaries of church-state separation well beyond the Ten Commandments and school prayer. They’re attempting to make taxpayer funds available to launch religious charter schools. In 2024, Oklahoma officials attempted to open the nation’s first religious charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, but the Oklahoma Supreme Court blocked that effort, a decision the Supreme Court let stand last year. But religious education proponents in Oklahoma remain undeterred.
In February, the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board rejected the application of yet another religious public charter school, Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School. On March 25, the founding group of the school filed suit against the state’s attorney general and the charter school board in federal court on religious discrimination grounds. On Wednesday, a group of predominantly Jewish Oklahoma parents filed a motion to join the lawsuit out of concern that Ben Gamla plans to select students and staff based on religious affiliation.
The strategy behind the repeated attempts to establish religious charter schools is clear, Laser said, pointing out how Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the St. Isidore case due to her ties to the legal team representing the school.
“The strategy is, use every possible opening to get this case back before the Supreme Court where Amy Coney Barrett doesn’t have to recuse herself again,” she said, “and then let’s try to allow religious public schools in America.”
In Tennessee, a similar battle is underway over Wilberforce Academy, a proposed religious charter school in Knox County. The founders of that school sued the Knox County Board of Education on religious discrimination grounds in November when the agency prevented it from opening the institution. But a federal judge earlier this year allowed a team of parents and taxpayers to join the lawsuit. The group says they’re concerned about public funds being used to support Wilberforce should it open in an unprecedented move nationally.
As legal battles continue to unfold, the outcome may ultimately hinge not just on the courts but on how much the public is willing to accept religion’s role in public education. Increasingly, advocates say, the answer is becoming clear.
“Americans are awakening to what it looks like to live in a country without church-state separation, and they don’t like it,” Laser said.