In East Texas, a band instructor quit rather than display the Ten Commandments in his classroom. In the suburbs of Fort Worth, two teachers posted them — along with displays of many other faiths. In Galveston, the commandments are nowhere to be seen, even though the Texas attorney general has sued to force their display.
It has been half a year since Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed legislation mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in his state’s public school classrooms. Since then, successive courts have blocked the law on grounds that it violated the U.S. Constitution.
The ensuing confusion could soon be cleared up. On Tuesday, the 17 active judges on the generally conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans will hear arguments over the Texas law and a similar Louisiana measure signed in 2024.
The Fifth Circuit is generally considered the most conservative appellate court in the nation, but a three-judge panel from the court has already called Louisiana’s law “plainly unconstitutional” and blocked it statewide.
Supporters are confident that the law will be upheld, pointing to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling that a high school football coach in Bremerton, Wash., could legally pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games.
“It‘s perfectly fine to have posters of the Ten Commandments as part of the educational process,” said Kelly Shackelford, the chief executive of the Christian legal organization First Liberty Institute.
Even in legal limbo, the Ten Commandments mandate in Texas has had an impact. In Carthage, a rural town near the Louisiana border, Johnnie Cotton, the band director, abruptly resigned in October over the measure after 40 years in education. A Ten Commandments poster had appeared on his desk one Friday that month with the directive to hang it up.
“That was a line I was unwilling to cross,” Mr. Cotton said in an interview.
In the suburbs of Fort Worth, some teachers have been enacting what one instructor, Lena Lee, called “malicious compliance,” collecting spiritually themed posters from faiths as far afield as the Satanic Temple to join the commandments on display.
And in Galveston, State Senator Mayes Middleton, a Republican, bequeathed the schools 450 posters of the commandments, only to have the school board vote to block their display. Texas’ hard-right attorney general, Ken Paxton, promptly sued, saying, “America is a Christian nation.” The posters still sit in the district warehouse.
The confusion in Texas is understandable. In separate rulings, two federal judges in the state said the commandments law likely violated the First Amendment, and they blocked its enforcement across 24 districts, including Houston, Fort Worth, and Conroe, an outer Houston suburb.
But Mr. Paxton has promised to sue other districts that don’t put up the posters, presenting many school administrators with a difficult decision: Do they follow the court rulings or Mr. Paxton’s mandate?
“The state has put us between a rock and a hard place,” a Galveston school board member, Elizabeth Beeton, said at a recent board meeting.
Critics of the law say that posting the commandments where students have no choice but to see them amounts to state endorsement of religion and excludes students of faiths not connected to the commandments. Some critics also say the text of the commandments is inappropriate for young children.
“It talks about adultery, it talks about coveting your neighbor’s manservant,” said Damon McMurdo, 55, a fifth-grade math teacher in Keller, Texas, who has his own young children. “I don’t want them to have to figure out what those things mean.”
Mr. McMurdo said he has not received one of the posters stockpiled by Christian organizations, conservative activist groups and even some Republican state lawmakers. If he does, he will not put it up, he said, regardless of the appeals court decision.
Proponents of the law argue the Ten Commandments is a historical document, not purely a religious one, that informed law and society in the United States. Mr. Shackelford pointed to Shakespeare. Without knowledge of the Bible, he argued, the Bard’s works are far more difficult to understand.
“No student really receives a quality education by banning the religious aspects of our nation’s history and heritage,” Mr. Shackelford said.
At the same time, he called it “disturbing” that some teachers had put up other religions’ posters alongside the Ten Commandments.
An infrastructure has already been built to make sure Texas’ law is carried out. Church groups and conservatives in Texas have created a coalition, Restore American Schools, to track which classrooms have received donated posters, said Jonathan Covey, a policy director for Texas Values, one of the roughly two dozen organizations involved.
The posters have already reached about 4,300 Texas schools, just under half the total, according to Restore American Schools’ website.
In Montgomery County, north of Houston, Rebecca Smith-Nash raised money for about 5,100 Ten Commandments posters that she and a team of volunteers delivered to six school districts in August. Ms. Smith-Nash, a licensed counselor who runs a Christian organization for foster children in Conroe, said she was moved to help fund the displays because faith had positively impacted the people served through her organization, Love Heals Youth.
Lorne Liechty, a lawyer and a commissioner in Rockwall County, outside of Dallas, raised money to donate 1,350 Ten Commandments posters. The posters are down now, but Mr. Liechty said he was hopeful the courts will come around.
Mr. Cotton, the band director, said other teachers have told him they agreed with his position, but they said following his lead would be “career suicide.”
“My religion is extremely personal,” he said. “It would really bother me to know I was sending my kids to a school where there was one particular religion that was pushed on my students.”
During an in-class writing assignment last semester, Ms. Lee, the English teacher in Keller, asked students to write about what they thought of her plethora of posters. She also invited students to write about how they felt about the Ten Commandments.
Some students said they could go to church to learn them. Others wondered what the consequences would be if someone defiled the posters. Many appreciated that Ms. Lee had posted other faiths’ tenets, she said. The white board at the back of her classroom features posters describing the ethical guidelines of Hinduism, the mystical landscape of the human body central to Taoism, the teachings of Confucius and even the seven tenets of the Satanic Temple.
Another display demonstrates how versions of the Golden Rule appear in many faiths, including Islam, Judaism and Sikhism.
The Ten Commandments hang in another corner of the classroom, next to a bookshelf and below other artwork.
Rick Rojas contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Pooja Salhotra covers breaking news across the United States.
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