Office of Speaker Mike Johnson
House Speaker Mike Johnson stands behind Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry at his gubernatorial swearing in, January 2024.
Louisiana House Bill 71 (HB 71), recently signed into law by Governor Jeff Landry, will soon require all public school classrooms in the state to display the Ten Commandments, alongside a write-up about their historical use in American education. According to the bill, the Commandments are to be “printed in large, easily readable font” on donated posters no smaller than eleven by fourteen inches. Civil liberties groups including the American Civil Liberties Union have swiftly sued to challenge the law.
And they’re right to do so: The bill is an unserious piece of legislation based on shoddy evidence, flimsy argumentation, and historical distortion.
For one thing, while the law is purportedly a civics education measure meant “to educate and inform the public as to the history and background of American and Louisiana law,” it’s evidently more about proselytizing. Particularly telling is its selective endorsement of the Commandments above other key documents, such as the Declaration of Independence (which the law authorizes, but doesn’t require, to be hung in classrooms) or the Napoleonic Code (an undoubtedly more direct influence on Louisiana’s legal structures). Landry’s own justification was that, to respect “the rule of law,” one must “start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses.” This falters by its own logic, given the existence of legal codes predating the Commandments that Landry hasn’t ordered to be affixed to any classroom walls.
One need not speculate much about the legislation’s ulterior motives; its primary author, Republican Representative Dodie Horton, was candid in admitting that its goal is to promote certain beliefs over others. When asked about teachers who may not recognize the divinity of the Ten Commandments, she said she is “not concerned” with “an atheist” or “a Muslim,” but only “with our children looking and seeing what God’s law is.”
The text of the legislation insists that the new mandate, by promoting “civil morality,” aligns with the Founding Fathers’ vision of self-government—a daring intellectual juggling act by its authors, who, at once, claim the heritage of the founders and flout what Thomas Jefferson called the Constitutional “wall of separation” between church and state. Naturally, attempting such an act, they drop the ball here and there—for example, when they employ a long-debunked quotation, falsely attributed to James Madison, as evidence of the law’s alignment with the founders. HB 71 reads:
“History records that James Madison, the fourth President of the United States of America, stated that ‘(w)e have staked the whole future of our new nation . . . upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.’”
History actually records no such thing. First ascribed to Madison by an evangelical author in 1989, the quote cited in HB 71 was disproved in 1993 by the editors of James Madison’s papers at the University of Virginia. “We did not find anything in our files remotely like the sentiment expressed in the extract you sent us,” they wrote at the time. “In addition, the idea is inconsistent with everything we know about Madison’s views on religion and government.”
After all, Madison—the principal author of the First Amendment’s freedom of religion guarantees— tirelessly defended religious pluralism and liberty of conscience from state incursion. In his 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance, he railed against publicly funded religion in Virginia on the grounds that state support for one faith “degrades from the equal rank of Citizens all those whose opinions in Religion do not bend to those of the Legislative authority.”
Similarly, in a 1822 letter to Edward Livingston (who, as it happens, was then drafting proposed legal codes for Louisiana), Madison expressed, with satisfaction, that the American example had disproven the notion that “the true religion ought to be established in exclusion of every other,” by showing “that all Sects might be safely & advantageously put on a footing of equal & entire freedom.”
Far from offering a justification for HB 71, then, Madisonian thought actually refutes Horton’s authoritarian desire to impose “God’s law” in public schools.
Finally, HB 71 claims that forcing the Ten Commandments into public education supports “our state and national history, culture, and tradition.” The “context statement” required to appear alongside the Ten Commandments gives a history of their presence in popular American instructional materials, which ostensibly helps bolster the case for their reintroduction in schools. It mentions The New England Primer, a Puritan schoolbook first published in 1688, which “contained more than forty questions about the Ten Commandments.” It also notes the Commandments’ presence in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century McGuffey Readers, which were among “the most popular textbooks in the history of American education,” as well as in The American Spelling Book, first published by Noah Webster in 1783.
But to say that the Ten Commandments once held a prominent place in our country’s educational tradition has no bearing on the case for their reintroduction. Creationism and other anachronisms, for example, were once taught in our schools, but are now absent from them. There’s a reason books like the doctrinaire New England Primer are no longer in fashion; the Primer is now regarded as an antiquated means of spoon-feeding Puritan teachings to colonial school children. Its “main intent,” writes author Dale Roylance, was to “proselytize the young.”
It’s also unsurprising that the McGuffey Readers contained Christian dogma (historian Henry Steele Commanger notes that they were a product of a time when “the exclusion of religion” from schools “seemed preposterous”). However, it’s worth noting that later editions were increasingly secular. One study of the Readers finds that, between 1844 and 1901, the percentage of religious passages in the books fell from 30 to 3 percent.
As for Webster’s Spelling Book, education scholar Joseph J. Ellis writes that it was explicitly designed to be a “secular successor” to books like the Primer. Read in this light, the texts invoked in HB 71’s “context statement” seem to chronicle the American education system’s gradual secularization from the Puritan period to the early American Republic—a process that, to the apparent chagrin of Louisiana Republicans, didn’t stop then.
If HB 71 is upheld in the courts, the result could have far-reaching consequences. Texas, Oklahoma, and Utah’s legislatures are already considering similar Republican proposals. In the meantime, supporters of HB 71 and its analogs in other states would do well to consult what Madison had to say about public officials who “overleap the great Barrier” between church and state: “The Rulers who are guilty of such an encroachment, exceed the commission from which they derive their authority, and are Tyrants.”