In quest to infuse more religion into Texas schools, advocates say courts are now on their side

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Emboldened by recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings and President Donald Trump’s second term, conservative Christians are rallying behind a series of Texas bills that would further infuse religion into public education and potentially spark legal fights that could upend church-state separations.

Last week, the Texas Senate advanced a bill that would allow public taxpayer money to flow to private, religious schools via vouchers. And on Monday, Sens. Mayes Middleton of Galveston and Phil King of Weatherford filed bills, respectively, that would allow time for prayer in public schools and require classrooms to display the Ten Commandments — both of them priorities for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and co-sponsored by all 20 Republican senators.

The impact could extend beyond Texas. In the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, those on the religious right see an ally in their decades-long fight to crater the church-state wall and allow more Christianity in classrooms across the country.

“Our schools are not God-free zones,” Middleton said in a statement announcing Senate Bill 11, the school prayer legislation. “We are a state and nation built on ‘In God We Trust.’ … There is no such thing as ‘separation of church and state’ in our Constitution, and recent Supreme Court decisions by President Trump’s appointees reaffirmed this.”

Legal experts and religion scholars say those arguments misrepresent history or potentially overestimate the effects of recent high court rulings.

“The Christian Right feels very empowered by this particular moment,” said Mark Chancey, a religion professor at Southern Methodist University who focuses on movements to put Christianity in schools. “They see the present configuration of the U.S. Supreme Court as sympathetic to their efforts.”

The religious right entered this legislative session amid a string of legal and political victories. In just the last few years, state Republicans have required classrooms to hang donated signs that say “In God We Trust”; allowed unlicensed religious chaplains to supplant mental health counselors in public schools; and approved new curriculum materials that teach the Bible and other religious texts alongside grade-school lessons.

Those moves have corresponded with a broader normalization in the GOP of claims that church-state separation is a myth, or that the nation’s founding was ordained by God and its laws and institutions should therefore reflect fundamentalist Christianity. Some lawmakers began the 2025 session with calls for “spiritual warfare” with demonic spirits that they believe seek control of the Capitol.

A new legal landscape

In his statement introducing Senate Bill 10 on the Ten Commandments, King said the legal landscape favored more opportunities for religion in school following the 2022 Supreme Court case Kennedy v. Bremerton School District decision.

In that landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled along ideological lines that a Washington state school district could not prevent a high school football coach from engaging in prayer with students on the 50-yard line after school games. Justices said the school district’s efforts to discipline the coach and prevent his praying violated his free speech rights and right to freely exercise his religion.

In issuing that opinion, the court outlined that it was moving away from the long relied upon legal test— called the “Lemon test” — to determine if the government is unconstitutionally allowing the infusion of religion in public spaces.

The more than 50-year-old test has been used by courts to make sure that laws involving religion have primarily non-religious purposes. For example, in the 1980 case Stone v. Graham, the Supreme Court relied on the Lemon test — named for a 1971 case — when it struck down a Kentucky law requiring the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

In the Kennedy decision, justices suggested they were replacing the Lemon test with a consideration of “historical practices and understandings” that is based on an analysis of “original meaning and history.” Legal experts describe the new test as vague and unclear.

Christian conservatives see hope in their path to put religion back in public schools, with the court’s move to sideline the Lemon test. They view the new history-based test as a pathway to reverse long-standing precedents that prohibit school-sponsored prayer or putting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

Rep. Mike Olcott, R-Aledo, who has proposed his own Ten Commandments bill, said in an email that “after the Kennedy decision, there is no merit in prohibiting expressions of faith or our collective history.”

Under a new history-based test, Matt Krause, a former Texas House member and attorney for the First Liberty Institute, a conservative legal organization, said he thinks a law putting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms would survive given their “very conspicuous history” in the U.S. and purported influence on the nation’s laws and government. Among other high-profile cases, First Liberty Institute represented the football coach in the Kennedy case, and Krause has previously testified in favor of putting the Ten Commandments in classrooms in part to prompt a “restoration of faith in America.”

Rep. David Spiller, R-Jacksboro, holds a similar view to Krause. This session, he’s introduced separate bills that would put the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms and allow prayer during the school day. Because of the Kennedy ruling, Spiller said he believes both bills are constitutional — though he wasn’t confident they would have survived prior. A new history-based test would bode well for his Ten Commandments bill, he added, since “most of our laws are based on principles that are contained” within them.

But Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Freedom, which advocates for a strong wall between church and state, said the Constitution and American law are not rooted in Biblical texts.

“There is this zombie myth that all of American law is based on the Ten Commandments,” Tyler said. “But when you look at the U.S. Constitution, there is no mention of God. There is no mention of Christianity. The only mention of religion is to prohibit religious tests for public office.”

Moreover, she takes issue with those arguments, which she said reframe a sacred text as a secular document in order to justify its inclusion in public schools.

“There are so many different translations, and there's just such a rich and diverse depth of the Holy Scripture, she said. “And when the government gets its hands on the Holy Scripture, it standardizes it in ways that really cheapen the mystery and the beauty.”

Religious and legal experts say it isn’t immediately clear exactly how the Supreme Court will apply the history-based test in future cases. There are lingering questions about the specific type of history that would be considered as part of the test.

Chancey, the SMU religion professor, expects those laws, if passed, will prompt lawsuits that could end up in front of the Supreme Court. But he isn’t confident the Ten Commandments bill could survive a test on historical merits.

“There was no time in American history when the Ten Commandments were routinely placed in American public school classrooms,” Chancey said.

School prayer, however, presents a slightly different history. Chancey said while school-endorsed prayer was common in early American history, it was not universal and sometimes divisive.

Steven Collis, director of the First Amendment Center and the Law and Religion Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin, said he’s also not convinced that the Lemon test has been completely thrown out. It’s possible that some parts of the test could still apply, he added.

The school prayer bill, he said, may address the legal question of whether a school cannot endorse prayer or simply cannot coerce prayer, by directly or indirectly forcing students to partake. The current court appears to be leaning toward the latter, he said, which could mean they’d allow a bill similar to the one proposed to go unchallenged. Prior to Kennedy v. Bremerton and under the old test, however, a similar law likely would have been struck down by lower courts, he said.

In the 1962 case, Engel v. Vitale, the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot hold prayers in public schools even if the prayer is not tied to a specific religion and participation is optional. The ruling has since been consistently upheld by subsequent decisions, but conservative groups have pushed for it to be overturned.

Regardless, Collis said parties on both sides of the school prayer and Ten Commandments bills would likely try to get the Supreme Court to “bite off on it.”

Efforts to challenge related bills are already underway. Last November, a federal judge said it was “unconstitutional on its face” for Louisiana to require the Ten Commandments be posted in public school classrooms. In January, a federal circuit court heard an appeal on the case. A decision is pending.

Freedom from religion

The religious right’s legal and legislative pushes have come as America continues to diversify and secularize. At roughly two-thirds of the population, Christians still are by far a majority.

Even so, some Christians have been alarmed by the steady decrease in their share of the population — and the simultaneous rise of religiously unaffiliated Americans. So-called “nones” — short for believing “nothing in particular” — now make up 28% of the U.S. adult population — a 12% jump since 2007 that makes them a larger group than Catholics or Protestants, according to Pew Research.

Religion experts say that trend has been accelerated by broader discontent with organized religion, namely Christianity. Interfaith groups have said as much for years, warning that the push to redefine America as a Christian nation is actually driving people away from religion altogether.

“They are interfering with the right of every American in Texas to practice religion freely, which includes practicing no religion, if that’s what you choose,” said Bee Moorhead, executive director of the interfaith group Texas Impact.

Benjamin Clodfelter counts himself among the 4% of U.S. adults who are atheist — though he has not always been up front about his views. During his 7-year stint in the Army, Clodfelter was a closeted atheist, fearing his disbelief in God would draw unwanted attention and cut off career opportunities.

The U.S. Military is supposed to be secular. But Clodfelter said those rules were openly flouted by his unit leader, who required those in his command to attend prayer breakfasts and, at the same time that he had broad authority over their promotions, told soldiers that “you have to have faith to be a good leader in the Army.”

Ten years after leaving the military, those remarks still stick with him. Clodfelter has since dedicated his life to maintaining a strong church-state wall, serving as a board member for the Atheist Community of Austin and, on Monday, joining about 25 other Texans as they lobbied state lawmakers to preserve those separations.

It’s at times felt like an uphill battle, with increasing hostility crowding out nuanced conversations about religion and government.

“It used to be more of a conversation,” he said. “It was an actual dialogue. And I noticed that there was more thought terminating cliches, where they are just denying the existence of our side. It is both perplexing and really frustrating.”