Lawmakers Can't Turn Classrooms Into Sunday Schools

If state lawmakers have their way, this fall public-school students in Arkansas and Texas will be forcibly subjected to unavoidable displays of a state-approved Protestant version of the Ten Commandments. Inspired by a similar Louisiana statute enacted last year, both states passed laws earlier this year requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments in a “conspicuous place” in every single classroom. But the ACLU is fighting back against these laws and other efforts to turn our public schools into Sunday schools.

When schools impose religious doctrine, beliefs, or practices on students, it marginalizes students who don’t share those beliefs and treats them as unwelcome. Students who do not feel safe and welcome in their school cannot focus on learning.

We’ve already won judicial victories against Louisiana’s, Arkansas’s, and Texas’s Ten Commandments laws. In Oklahoma, where the state’s top education official, Ryan Walters, issued a mandate that teachers incorporate the Bible into their lesson plans for grades five through 12, we won a temporary order from the state supreme court that blocked Walters from spending millions in taxpayer dollars to purchase Bibles for every school district. We also sued in Oklahoma to prevent the state from approving a religious public charter school. In a parallel case brought by Oklahoma’s attorney general, both the Oklahoma Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled against the proposed school. And working with our allies in a number of states, the ACLU has helped fend off legislation and other attempts to impose government-sponsored prayer, school chaplains, and religious instruction on students.

While the separation of church and state is important in any context, it is especially critical in public schools, which must serve children of all religious and non-religious backgrounds. When schools impose religious doctrine, beliefs, or practices on students, it marginalizes students who don’t share those beliefs and treats them as unwelcome. Students who do not feel safe and welcome in their school cannot focus on learning.

That’s why, for more than a century, the ACLU has strived to safeguard secular public education.The First Amendment gives children and families, and all people, the right to decide for themselves which religious beliefs, if any, to follow. Politicians have no business interfering with these deeply personal matters, and misusing our public schools as vehicles to convert children to the state’s favored brand of Christianity betrays the democratic values at the heart of our public-education system. We will keep fighting on behalf of families until lawmakers get the message: Public schools are for education, not evangelizing.

Stefanie Mitchell contributed to this piece.