By John Sharp
The push for Ten Commandments displays in Alabama’s K-12 schools is heating up, with lawmakers advancing new legislation Wednesday that would require the sacred text to be posted in public school entrances, common areas, and history classrooms.
The bills, SB166 and HB178, moved forward in Senate and House committees, setting the stage for full-floor debates.
Alabama joins more than a dozen states where Republicans are advocating for similar requirements. However, legal and religious studies experts warn that mandating these displays could lead to costly court battles, especially after Louisiana became the first state to enact such a law only to see it challenged in federal court.
The Ten Commandments, as recorded in the Bible, are a set of moral, religious and ethical directives for people not to steal, not to commit murder or adultery, and to honor one’s mother and father, etc. In Christian and Jewish traditions, God gave the commandments to the Prophet Moses on Mount Sinai.
Alabama lawmakers have been debating what to include in the legislation this spring after Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey called on them to incorporate “key historical documents” and the Ten Commandments in classrooms during her State of the State address in February.
The governor’s office is gearing up for any potential legal debate. In an email to AL.com Wednesday, the office forwarded a statement from former Alabama State Supreme Court Justice Champ Lyons Jr., who said the latest version in the legislature is defensible in the courts because it’s about teaching history, not imposing religion.
“For two generations, our teachers have been subjected to a recently repudiated, excessively broad legal standard for determining the applicability of the Establishment Clause of our Constitution,” Lyons said. “It is time for Alabama to undo this damage to our students by assuring them a complete education.”
Ivey spokesperson Gina Maiola said the governor’s critics on the issue are working against the Ten Commandments. She said that Ivey is taking “decisive action to do this the right way and in a way that will stand, if tested.”
Some of the highlights of the recent changes include:
Tax money will not be used on the displays, but local school boards are “encouraged to use documents that are printed and made available” to them free of charge. A school board is also allowed to accept donated funds to pay for the displays.
The displays are required in K-12 institutions, and not colleges and universities. A previous version of the legislation also required the displays at higher education institutions in Alabama.
The Alabama state school superintendent is charged with approving the layout and design of the poster or framed document.
The Ten Commandments is intertwined with historical documents that also make direct and indirect references to God and religion. They include the Mayflower Compact (signed in 1620), which served as the first government document of the Plymouth Colony; the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which outlines the process for admitting new states to the Union; and the Declaration of Independence.
Historical significance
The legislation says the Ten Commandments have “historical significance as one of the foundations” of the U.S. legal system, and cites quotes from John Quincy Adams, the nation’s sixth president.
“The Alabama Constitution provides that ‘no religion shall be established by law,‘” the latest version of SB166 says. “The purpose of this poster, however, is simply to acknowledge the historical role of the Ten Commandments – and the broader Judeo-Christian tradition – in shaping American civil society.”
Some scholars say the historical connections of the documents to founding of the U.S. are flimsy. The Freedom from Religion Foundation has also raised concerns that efforts nationwide to connect the Ten Commandments to the nation’s founding are a falsehood aimed at promoting a particular brand of Christianity.
Michael Altman, professor of religious studies at the University of Alabama, said there is more to the story with some of the historical text quoted in the legislation.
“The Mayflower Compact opens with a pledge of loyalty to the king and clearly shows that the signers saw themselves as British and not ‘American’ in any real way,” said Altman. “The original text of the U.S. Constitution does not have any mention of God and only mentions religion in terms of prohibiting religious tests for office.”
However, Altman said that Supreme Court rulings around the Ten Commandment monuments gives supporters for their displays a pathway. The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority which has already ruled in favor of school prayer and, in 2022, overturned the longstanding Lemon test.
The Lemon test was a legal standard established in 1971 to determine whether a government’s action violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. The court’s 6-3 ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District replaced the Lemon test with an approach based on “historical practices and understandings,” which some conservatives have interpret as a green light for religious expression in public settings.
Conservative concerns
Still, a 1980 U.S. Supreme Court ruling potentially looms over the matter. The high court that year ruled a Kentucky law requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments on the wall of every school classroom violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment because the displays were overtly religious.
Dean Young, an Orange Beach businessman who led efforts in 2018 to get the Ten Commandment displays enshrined into the Alabama Constitution, said he is hopeful that President Donald Trump’s appointees on the Supreme Court will eventually overturn the 1980 ruling.
“Trump has been doing a good job of putting more conservatives on the bench,” Young said. “Trump wants to see this happen.”
Young has been critical of Ivey’s efforts to get the Ten Commandments displayed on public properties since the 2018 constitutional amendment vote was backed by 72% of voters that year.
He claims that Ivey should have been ahead of Louisiana and led the national effort to get the Ten Commandments displayed in public places.
He said the recent legislation is a “whittled down” version of what he envisioned with the constitutional amendment in 2018. He said the removal of colleges and universities represented another example of making the “Ten Commandments less and less prominent” within the state measure.
Young is also a former political ally of ex-Alabama State Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore who generated a national reputation for himself over refusing to remove a massive monument with the Ten Commandments on them from the Heflin-Torbert Judicial Building in downtown Montgomery.
An Ivey spokesperson told AL.com last week that the governor is a supporter of displaying the Ten Commandments in public places with other founding documents like the Declaration of Independence.
“I’m glad Alabama is doing something, but they are doing less and less since (2018),” Young said.
First Amendment concerns
Alabama’s handling of its legislation comes as other states are also forwarding Ten Commandment bills this spring. The Arkansas House passed its Ten Commandments display legislation on Monday, advancing it to Republican Gov. Sarah Sanders for her signature.
Texas, Missouri, and – more recently – Pennsylvania are considering bills requiring the Ten Commandments displayed in classrooms.
Not every effort has been successful. Lawmakers defeated similar proposals in the South Dakota House. In North Dakota, lawmakers also shot down a bill requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in school cafeterias and in state-funded colleges.
Jeremy Paul, dean of the Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, said he believes some of the efforts to get the Ten Commandments displayed come from the Supreme Court’s 7-2 decision in 2019, to allow a giant 32-foot cross to remain on public land in Maryland.
The court, in that ruling, determined the cross that was erected nearly a century ago was essentially historic, and not religious.
“One of the key points in that case is it had been there for a long time,” Paul said. “In this case, the Ten Commandments have not been posted in the schools so you don’t have that (historical) argument.”
Paul said while he loves the Ten Commandments, and is happy to embrace their directives, forcing their displays in public schools is “about as unconstitutional as you can get.”
“Just because the majority of people in the country and find that the Ten Commandments are consistent with their faith doesn’t mean everyone does,” Paul said. “The whole point of not establishing a religion into secular spaces like public schools is that you do not have religion imposed on you in this way.”
Lyons, the former Alabama Supreme Court justice who served on the court from 1998-2011, said he believes the Alabama version will withstand court challenges.
Paul said he can sympathize with concerns from Christians who feel sometimes their embrace of faith in a secular world can make them feel like they are a “persecuted minority.”
“People of faith should be respected and should not in any way suffer any legal consequences because they are religious,” Paul said. “If they have a particular practice they want to follow or observe the Sabbath or follow dietary restrictions or not work on certain holidays, the country should go out of its way to accommodate.”
“But that doesn’t mean we should jettison 250 years of long-standing principles that the job of the government is not to infringe on people’s free exercise of religion or establish one as superior to the other,” he said.