After losing a court battle over state law requiring the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in the state, the top law enforcement official in Texas is now urging students to recite the Lord’s prayer.
Texas lawmakers recently approved voluntary periods of prayer and Bible reading in public schools. But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is going a step further with his vision for state-backed Christian education by “encouraging” schools to “begin the legal process of putting prayer back in classrooms.”
Paxton “encourages all Texas schools to implement dedicated time for prayer and the reading of scripture,” his office said this week.
“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” he said on government letterhead, with a copy of the Lord’s prayer printed beneath his statement.
He claimed “twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth” and “dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society.”
“Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand,” he said.
“Texas schools don’t need the government telling kids to pray — much less which prayer, or which god,” the Freedom from Religion Foundation said in a statement in response. This isn’t ‘religious freedom,’ it’s state-sponsored Christianity.”
In a letter urging Paxton to retract his statement, the group wrote that “the ‘solid foundation’ of our country is not biblical truth, but rather our secular Constitution that protects the rights of all Americans, including Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, the nonreligious, and everyone else, to believe as they choose without government interference or favoritism.”
Last month, a federal judge temporarily blocked a recently passed state law requiring the Ten Commandments in classrooms, potentially setting up yet another Supreme Court showdown on the church and state firewall after several other Republican-led states have tried, and failed, to implement similar laws.
The Texas law, which was set to take effect September 1 as students returned to classrooms for the fall semester, likely violates the First Amendment’s prohibitions against government interference and endorsement of religion, according to the order from District Judge Fred Biery.
Paxton’s office has appealed the decision.
The law signed by Governor Greg Abbott forces all public elementary or secondary schools to “display in a conspicuous place in each classroom of the school a durable poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments.”
A lawsuit was filed by a group of Texas families with Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Unitarian Universalist, and nonreligious backgrounds, including clergy, with children in public schools.
The judge agreed with plaintiffs that those displays “are likely to pressure” children “into religious observance, meditation on, veneration, and adoption” of the state’s favored religious doctrine while “suppressing expression of their own religious or nonreligious background and beliefs,” according to the judge.
Lawmakers in Arkansas have advanced similar legislation, and Oklahoma’s chief school official mandated copies of the Bible and Ten Commandments in all classrooms with “immediate and strict compliance.”
Last year, District Judge John Wheadon deGravelles paused a similar Louisiana law that had swiftly drawn legal challenges from civil rights groups anticipating a Supreme Court battle.
Legislation to incorporate Christian teachings in public schools joins a nationwide effort from conservative special interest groups to move public funds into religious education.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court reached a surprise tie in a case that could decide whether Oklahoma could open the first-ever taxpayer funded Catholic public charter school, which triggered a high-profile legal battle to decide whether public funds can be used to create religious schools — setting up a major test to the First Amendment’s establishment clause.
The 4-4 decision, from which Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, upheld an earlier ruling that blocked the school’s opening — for now.
