Should the Ten Commandments hang beside every chalkboard? Should public schools set aside time each day for students to recite the Lord’s Prayer?
In Texas these are no longer hypothetical questions. In June, in the wake of Supreme Court rulings seen as hospitable to public displays of faith, the governor of Texas signed a law requiring public classrooms to display the Ten Commandments. Another law signed that month invites school boards to adopt a policy setting aside time for voluntary daily prayer and readings of the Bible or other religious texts. The state attorney general, Ken Paxton, has recommended that students wondering how to use that time start with “the Lord’s Prayer, as taught by Jesus Christ.”
It’s all part of a battle over how to draw the border between church and state. After a federal judge blocked the Ten Commandments mandate in August in the 11 Texas districts where it was challenged, ruling that it most likely violated the First Amendment, Mr. Paxton appealed. “In Texas classrooms,” he said in a statement, “we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed and prayers lifted up.”
Beneath the surface of this quarrel, though, lies a deeper, murkier problem: Nobody — not legislators, not judges, not scholars — can quite agree on what religion is. How can you address church-and-state controversies if you’re not sure what the “church” part refers to?
In modern times, the Supreme Court has lurched from one way of talking about religion to another. In United States v. Seeger (1965), the court extended a religious exemption even to agnostics, as long as their beliefs about ultimate values were “sincere and meaningful” in a religious-like way. In Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), the court assumed that religious purposes and effects could be carved apart from secular ones, with the religious realm to be kept from “excessive government entanglement.”
In Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), religion was seen as encompassing a way of life: the Amish way of farming, schooling, speech and dress. And in Kennedy v. Bremerton (2022) — ruling in favor of a public high school football coach who prayed on the 50-yard line — the court scrapped the nebulous old Lemon test in favor of one even more nebulous: It declared that establishment clause disputes should be resolved by looking to the nation’s “historical practices and understandings.”
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The post The Problem Lurking Beneath Our Church-and-State Debates appeared first on New York Times.
