The Ten Commandments Lawsuit at the Center of the Church-State Battle

H
ow many of you know that I’m suing the state of Louisiana?” teacher Chris Dier asks his AP U.S. history class. Twenty-two hands shoot up in the air — all but one student have heard the news about Dier’s lawsuit. Most had seen the Times-Picayune article two weeks earlier circulated on social media, with the headline “Louisiana’s 2020 Teacher of the Year Sues State to Stop Ten Commandments Law” above a photo of Dier and his thick clear glasses, tattoos peeking out of his navy polo shirt. A student asks Dier to explain the law.

“The law says that every teacher, all public-­school teachers, have to post the Ten Commandments in the front of their classroom, in a certain size font, and that they’re legally obligated to do this. I represent teachers to say ‘That is unconstitutional.’”

It’s two days after the presidential election, and we’re in a New Orleans classroom filled with high school juniors. Dier, 36, answers his students’ questions while standing in front of a large black-and-white photograph of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Selma march for voting rights on his classroom’s wall. Underneath it is a copy of the Federalist Papers, which his mentor, a priest, gave the teacher. Dier explains that the lawsuit was filed in federal court. “That is what makes it so big, because this could set a precedent for the entire country.”

A student named Nico shares that while he’s Catholic, he still thinks the law is unconstitutional — if they are making religious posters, shouldn’t all religions be represented?

Dier tells Nico he agrees and that one reason he’s suing is because he doesn’t want any of his students who have different beliefs or are atheist to feel inferior or like the state is imposing a religion. Dier reminds them of their Bill of Rights lesson from September and says he believes the Ten Commandments law he’s fighting violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which says the government shall make no law establishing religion. Dier also says that, from a historical perspective, he challenges the idea that religion was imbued in the foundation of America.

“The bill includes a quote from James Madison about how the Ten Commandments were used to inform the Constitution, but the quote is fabricated,” he says emphatically. “When I saw that, I was just like, ‘C’mon now.’”

Everyone starts talking at once. One teen says, “This is just another way the government has imposed control over young people.”

Before class, Mikayla, a senior at the school, tells me, “My friends were discussing it, and we’re like, ‘This just goes against everything you think this country stands for.’ You are supposed to go to school and learn, and you’re still growing. To have someone tell you you have to plaster a very specific religion in front of your face, it’s jarring.”

Cayla, a senior who took Dier’s AP history class last year, says, “There’s a bunch of Catholic schools around here, literally down the street. Y’all got the wrong people right now. If we wanted that, we would have gone there.”

Beginning of the Fight

Dier is one of 15 people suing the state over the law Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed last June, which mandates that the Ten Commandments be displayed in all classrooms, including K-12 public schools and any college or university that accepts state dollars. That means science classes, math classes — even gyms. 

It’s part of a larger shift to bring religion into public schools. The 2022 SCOTUS decision Kennedy v. Bremerton allowing a coach to pray after school football games stoked the flames of Christian nationalism, and far-right groups are encouraging legislators to keep the fire burning. “This decision does a disservice to schools and the young citizens they serve,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent. “In doing so, the court sets us further down a perilous path in forcing states to entangle themselves with religion, with all our rights hanging in the balance.”

Along with the Louisiana Ten Commandments law, and similar legislation Texas plans to file in 2025, there are laws like the one in Oklahoma, which was introduced last summer and mandates the Bible be taught in grades five through 12. The conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, which is the architect of Project 2025, has been advising superintendents in states like Louisiana and Oklahoma on how to implement their plans. 

Dier is the first educator to sue over the Louisiana law. His argument is that the state is requiring teachers to use classrooms as spaces of proselytization and coercion, pressuring him and his students to worship a state-sponsored religion. The ACLU along with nine families in Louisiana are also suing the government to stop it. They filed the first lawsuit immediately after the law was signed, arguing it will isolate students who don’t follow this specific Protestant version of the Ten Commandments. 

In November, U.S. District Judge John deGravelles in Baton Rouge called the law “overtly religious” and “unconstitutional on its face,” and granted the families’ request to temporarily pause the law from going into effect until he hears the full case. There are many ways this law can get to the Supreme Court, where right-wing justices hold a supermajority — what’s being argued right now is whether the posters can go up while we wait for the law itself to be debated. The state appealed deGravelles’ decision to the ultraconservative Fifth Circuit, which  temporarily upheld it, but will hear more arguments at the end of January.

This is just the beginning of this fight. In 2022, SCOTUS issued rulings in two cases that chipped away at the separation between church and state, allowing prayer at football games in a Washington state school and requiring Maine to fund religious education in rural areas without public education. The case has the potential to earn landmark status alongside the Scopes trial, otherwise known as the Monkey Trial. Dubbed the “trial of the century” in 1925, the hearing was essentially a fight on whether or not Darwinism and evolution could be taught in school. The Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that the law banning evolutionary teaching was constitutional, which spurred copycat laws in other Southern states — something opponents of the Louisiana law fear will happen today, a hundred years later. (Tennessee ended up repealing the law in 1967, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court eventually struck down a copycat Arkansas law.)

“What’s happening in Louisiana is potentially a model for the rest of the nation in terms of infusing conservative Christianity into public education,” says Rachel Laser, the president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, one of the law firms suing Louisiana. “It’s religious coercion for some of our most vulnerable citizens: children.” 

She points out that the Ten Commandments law is about more than just classrooms.

“This is a case about the schoolchildren and families of Louisiana having religious freedom, but it’s also much bigger, because it could lead to a sea change in public education, church-state separation, and American democracy,” Laser says. “Because America wouldn’t look like America — America wouldn’t be America without church-state separation.”

Backlash to the Law

The reaction to the law in national media last fall was swift and loud — talk shows like The View and The Daily Show criticized the law, and Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin called it “unconstitutional and blasphemous,” while Republicans celebrated its passage.

“THIS MAY BE, IN FACT, THE FIRST MAJOR STEP IN THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION, WHICH IS DESPERATELY NEEDED, IN OUR COUNTRY,” Trump posted on Truth Social.

In New Orleans, a blue city in a sea of red, the reaction was critical, but in rural areas of Louisiana, some people praised the law. While visiting Landry’s rural hometown of St. Martinville last summer, I sat and spoke with residents at a local coffee shop, the Studio. When one woman said she thought religion and public schools should stay separate because it was a slippery slope, the rest of the group tried to convince her that children these days need more moral and spiritual guidance than they are getting from their parents.

“There’s not a lot of teaching of values and morals from home anymore,” said one woman, a Catholic-school teacher. “So those core 10 values, it’s a start so kids [can know] ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ The kids are hungry for it, and they have to get it somewhere.”

“I’m seeing what you’re saying,” the woman who originally protested said. “So maybe we’ll step on a couple of people’s toes, but all of the religions share these basic principles.”

The law lays out specific language that must appear on each poster, which is the King James Bible version of the commandments, displayed no smaller than 11 by 14 inches:

I AM the LORD thy God. 

Thou shalt have no other gods before me. 

Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images. 

Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain. 

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 

Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. 

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not commit adultery. 

Thou shalt not steal. 

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his cattle, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.

There must also be a context statement, declaring the Ten Commandments a “prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries,” an assertion disputed by a historian in the ACLU lawsuit. 

As the national debate about Louisiana classrooms swirled this summer, I sat down with Landry at the Louisiana Capitol in Baton Rouge. He has been steadily pushing the state to the far right since taking office last year, and before that, in his eight years as attorney general. He’s allowed surgical castration as punishment for certain sex crimes against minors, and the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law is more extreme than Florida’s. No legislation has gotten more national attention than this Ten Commandments law. 

“The Ten Commandments are the fabric of civilization, and you’re telling me we can’t hang them in school?” he asked me. 

When I brought up people who don’t believe in God, Landry got impassioned. “They don’t have to look at the poster! They don’t believe in what? Do not kill?”

At the Republican National Convention this summer, Landry told a reporter that if the Ten Commandments had been displayed in Thomas Matthew Crooks’ classroom, he may not have attempted to assassinate former President Donald Trump in July. Landry has been praised for the Ten Commandments law by Christian nationalists, such as former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who said the governor did a “wonderful thing.” Moore made a name for himself nationally by putting a 5,280-pound granite Ten Commandments monument in the rotunda of Alabama’s state judicial building in 2001. (It was eventually ruled unconstitutional, and he was ordered to have it removed.) 

Landry’s efforts to push his state further right have made him a favorite of the Trump family. He’s close to Donald Trump Jr., who told me, “Jeff has great talent and is a courageous fighter for the America-first movement.” And Landry has said he was considered for but declined the role of attorney general in the next Trump administration. Though Trump has voiced support for the Ten Commandments law, Trump Jr. remained neutral when I asked him about his friend Landry’s controversial law this summer

“I’m not personally offended by the Ten Commandments hanging in school classrooms,” Trump Jr. says in an email. “But I’m not a constitutional lawyer, and I suspect it will get sorted out by the courts in the end.”

Taking It to Court

On Oct. 21 in Baton Rouge, the Ten Commandments law had its first hearing in federal court with Roake v. Brumley. DeGravelles, an Obama appointee, heard arguments from civil-­liberties groups defending the nine families suing the state, as well as lawyers from the Louisiana attorney general’s office. (Dier’s lawsuit has been assigned to a Trump appointee and will be heard at a later date.) The Monday-­morning trial was open to the public, and there were about 50 people in the gallery during the six-hour hearing. One man in a priest collar occasionally clasped his hands in prayer during the brief breaks. 

There were debates about whether the court would grant a preliminary injunction to stop schools from displaying the posters until a final decision was made on the law, whether a legal historian could testify as an expert witness, and whether the case was premature since the posters weren’t up in classrooms yet. Attorneys for the families argued that the state was “indoctrinating students” in a violation of the parents’ right to raise their children with the religious education they wanted.

“Gov. Landry has said that he wants students to live by the Ten Commandments, lawmakers have said they want students to see God’s laws up there on the wall, so we know that they designed it with that end in mind,” attorney Heather Weaver said in her rapid-fire speech. “They could present it in a world-religion class … but they haven’t done that. Instead, they’ve decided to hit students over the head with it every single day, so that when they go from classroom to classroom, the thing that’s going to be constant is that they’re going to see a Protestant version of the Ten Commandments.”

For years, the religious right has made the claim that Christianity and the founding of the United States are inextricably linked. Lawyers for the plaintiffs spent the first few hours of the hearing seeking to dismantle this argument with testimony from their witness, legal historian Steven K. Green, a First Amendment law and religious-studies professor at Willamette University in Oregon.

He explained that the Ten Commandments in the law seems to be the Protestant version, looking at both the words used and the number order of the commandments, which differ from the Catholic and Jewish versions. He added, “Most religions in the world would not revere or follow the Ten Commandments.”

Attorney Jonathan Youngwood asked Green, “Did you find any evidence that the Ten Commandments were permanently displayed in early American public schools?” Green answered, “I could not find any evidence of that.”

“There is next to no evidence that the founders considered the Ten Commandments at all when they were drafting the essential documents of the American government,” Green testified. It was a point he reiterated throughout the day, later saying, “We have a lot of founding myths, and this is one of them.”

In the law, a quote attributed to founding father James Madison says: “We have staked the whole future of our new nation upon … the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.”

Green pointed out in his testimony: “This has been floating around since the 1990s, but there’s no record of this at all.” The judge raised his eyebrows in surprise as Green told the courtroom the source of this quote is in fact a renowned Christian nationalist named David Barton, who claimed Madison said it but did not have adequate documentation to back this up.

Instead of bringing their own legal historian to counter Green’s claims, the state argued during the hearing that history was subjective, and therefore a historian was not necessary as an expert witness at all. This is similar to a tactic used in the Scopes trial in Tennessee a century ago by the populist Christian firebrand William Jennings Bryan, when the state insisted they didn’t need a scientist as an expert. “I’m simply trying to protect the word of God against the biggest atheist, or agnostic, in the world,” Bryan famously said when on the stand.

“I’m not saying history is irrelevant to the case,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told reporters after the court hearing. “I just don’t think we need a historian to be an expert witness in this case.”

Weeks later, DeGravelles ultimately allowed Green’s testimony.

Standing Up for Their Kids

Unitarian Universalist Church minister Darcy Roake was in the courtroom wearing her minister vestments that day, along with her husband, Adrian Van Young. Their four- and 10-year-old boys were in their respective New Orleans schools; their neighbors had offered to help with pickup and drop-off as their way of showing support for the lawsuit. 

“When we were at the hearing, I felt somewhat calm and purposeful and empowered,” Roake tells me a few weeks later. We’re talking at her kitchen table with her husband and two ACLU representatives. 

The couple tell me they’re leading the lawsuit because of how important it is to their family. Roake and Van Young make it a point to be intentional about their sons’ religious upbringing and interfaith values.

“I was raised Reform Jewish,” Van Young says. “It’s a tenant of that faith that you don’t evangelize your religion to others.”

Roake explains Unitarian Universalists value the “free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” “This idea that these commandments are on this wall is neither free nor responsible. They’re not responsible to the young people that are going to read them. And it’s not free in the sense of it’s a very specific version, and that’s what somebody sees every day.”

When the couple got married, they decided their future children would study both their parents’ religions and that they would expose them to other beliefs as well.

“In every decision that we’ve made around our children’s interfaith upbringing, it’s intentional and meaningful,” Roake says. “That’s one of the main issues, at least, that I have with this law — that it strips away your agency.”

Before deciding to sue the state, they spoke to their children about it while on vacation in Mississippi. They knew it was a big decision that would mean putting their names out publicly, and that their case might go all the way up to the Supreme Court.

“We asked their permission,” Roake says. “We very much take seriously our children’s perspectives, their privacy. They’re making their own decisions.”

The kids gave their OK, and as the case has progressed, they’ve continued to have conversations as a family. It’s their 10-year-old who can grasp the concepts better.

“He doesn’t like the idea of having something mandated to him, and especially something of a religious nature, because he has had the freedom for his entire life to choose his spiritual path,” Roake says. “We have a giant Hanukkah party every year. We celebrate Christmas. We have all these traditions that are comingling and integrated constantly.”

The week before I visited with the couple, three weeks after the hearing in Baton Rouge, the judge had issued his first ruling on the lawsuit, blocking the state from enforcing it in the school districts involved in the suit. The next step will be oral arguments about the temporary injunction in the conservative Fifth Circuit appellate court.

When their 10-year-old came home from school on Nov. 12, Roake and Van Young told him about their initial win. He said he couldn’t wait to tell his friends.

The next day over dinner, the fourth grader reported back — some of his friends were so happy they cried when he told them.

“It felt meaningful to see his parents doing it for him, but also for his friends,” Roake says. “He’s started to see that, as citizens, if you don’t agree with something, you can use your voice to try to push back against it.”

What Happens Next 

Dier’s students are six or seven years older than the elementary-school children who were happy to hear the Ten Commandments wouldn’t be posted in their school, but they are like-minded. One student brought Dier samosas after his lawsuit became public, another baked him a cake.

Back in his classroom, Dier’s students are talking about the national debate that has been sparked from this issue affecting their small classroom. 

Kirsten, 16, tells her classmates about getting into a debate in the comments of an Insta­gram post about the lawsuit. She was commenting back and forth with an older woman who’d likened the Ten Commandments to students doing yoga at school, and another poster who commented that children need spiritual guidance. “Why is the state choosing kids’ religion? Can’t they choose their own spiritual guidance?” Kirsten says.

As the classroom discussion winds down, a student asks Dier if he’s going to miss any class to go to court. He explains he doesn’t need to testify, but that if his case goes to the Supreme Court, he may find a substitute.

“We’ll come stand behind you and make menacing faces,” one girl says.

“Field trip!” shouts another.

“Oh, yeah? You all want to come? Well, we’ll see,” Dier says, laughing. Then, he straightens up and tells the students they’re welcome to come to him with any questions about the lawsuit in the future. But it’s time for them to get back to the day’s lesson. 

“I appreciate the conversation, and now we’re going to start on the Civil War.”