A Republican effort to bring religion into classrooms faltered, though lawmakers were poised to allow chaplains to act as school counselors.

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Dade Phelan, in a dark suit and orange tie, raises a gavel in front of a lighted voting display.
Dade Phelan, Speaker of the House in Texas, overseeing debate in the House chamber at the Capitol in Austin on Tuesday.Credit...Eric Gay/Associated Press

J. David Goodman
By J. David Goodman
Reporting from Houston

May 24, 2023
Updated 7:42 a.m. ET
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A push to inject religion into public schools across Texas faltered on Tuesday after the State House failed to pass a contentious bill that would have required the Ten Commandments to be displayed prominently in every classroom.

The measure was part of an effort by conservative Republicans in the Legislature to expand the reach of religion into the daily life of public schools. In recent weeks, both chambers passed versions of a bill to allow school districts to hire religious chaplains in place of licensed counselors.
But the Ten Commandments legislation, which passed the State Senate last month, remained pending before the Texas House until Tuesday, the final day to approve bills before the session ends next Monday. Time expired before the legislation could receive a vote.

The bills appeared aimed at testing the openness of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court to re-examining the legal boundaries of religion in public education. The court sided last year with a Washington State football coach, Joseph Kennedy, in a dispute over his prayers with players at the 50-yard line, saying he had a constitutional right to do so.

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“The law has undergone a massive shift,” said Matt Krause, a former Texas state representative and a lawyer at First Liberty Institute, a conservative legal nonprofit focused on religious liberty, during a State Senate hearing last month. “It’s not too much to say that the Kennedy case, for religious liberty, was much like the Dobbs case was for the pro-life movement.”

In recent months, religious groups in several states have appeared interested in seeing how far states might now go in directly supporting religious expression in public schools. This month, the South Carolina legislature introduced its own bill to require the display of the Ten Commandments in all classrooms. In Oklahoma, the state education board was asked earlier this year to approve the creation of an explicitly religious charter school; the board ultimately rejected the application.

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“Forcing public schools to display the Ten Commandments is part of the Christian Nationalist crusade to compel all of us to live by their beliefs,” said Rachel Laser, the president and chief executive of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a nonprofit advocacy group. She pointed to new laws in Idaho and Kentucky permitting public school employees to pray in front of students, and a bill in Missouri allowing elective classes on the Bible. “It’s not just in Texas,” she said.

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The Texas bill on displaying the Ten Commandments resembled another bill, passed in 2021 during the last legislative session, that required public schools to accept and display donated posters bearing the motto “In God We Trust.” Patriot Mobile, a conservative Christian cellphone company outside of Fort Worth, was among the first to make such donations after the bill’s passage.

But the legislation on the Ten Commandments went further. It required schools to display posters of the words and to do so “in a conspicuous place in each classroom” and “in a size and typeface that is legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.”

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Schools that do not furnish their own posters will have to accept donations of posters, according to the bill. The legislation also specified how the commandments were to be rendered, with the text including prescribed capitalization: “I AM the LORD thy God.”

The words, taken from a Protestant version of the commandments from the King James Version of the Bible, are the same as those that appear on a monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol. Gov. Greg Abbott, when he was state attorney general, successfully defended the monument’s placement more than a decade ago before the Supreme Court.

Image
A younger Greg Abbott stands in front of a large tablet of the Ten Commandments.
In 2005, Greg Abbott, the Texas attorney general at the time, successfully defended before the Supreme Court the right to display the Ten Commandments on government land.Credit...Harry Cabluck/Associated Press

The legislation allowing school districts to hire chaplains or to accept them as volunteers was presented as a solution to a problem in Texas and other states: a shortage of school counselors. Opponents of the measure said that chaplains did not fill the need because they did not have the same expertise, training or licensing as counselors.

“The way the bill is crafted, a school board could opt to have no counselors, no family specialists, no school psychologists and replace them entirely with chaplains,” said Diego Bernal, a Democratic representative from San Antonio, during a hearing this month.

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