The Commandments on the Wall: Is Texas Violating its Own Commandments?

Several years ago there was a movement in the small city where I live to plaster "In God We Trust" all over public buildings, police cars, fire engines, etc. I was peripherally involved in preventing the movement from desecrating the library's building. Several years before that, I was intimately embroiled in charges made against a political science professor where I was a Dean that alleged he was "anti-Christian." The people leading both charges were the same. Perhaps had they trusted God more, we could have saved everyone a lot of paint, expense and time.

Having taught a course in civil liberties and the Constitution, I have always been fascinated by the inherent contradictions and confusion between the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment, a confusion that has bedeviled the Supreme Court as it has moved from emphasizing the Establishment Clause to interpreting the Free Exercise Clause far more broadly since the Rehnquist Court. That this shift has been spearheaded by the Catholics on the court is more than a little ironic.

Louisiana and Texas have both now passed laws that would require display of the Ten Commandments in a variety of places. The Texas law is the most prescriptive, requiring that only a certain (Protestant) version be used, that the text be of a certain height, and that it be posted in public school classrooms at a minimum size of 16” by 20,” and be readable from all parts of the classroom. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick tweeted: “Thank you to all our supporters for your thousands of calls and emails to legislators! Today, HB 3979, requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in all Texas public school classrooms, was passed by the Senate Education Committee. It now heads to the full Senate.” (S.B. 10)

Similar Kentucky legislation was rejected by the Supreme Court over fifty years ago on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment. The Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and nonreligious families engaged in the action are requesting that the Supreme Court consider their case and halt S.B. 10 after an appellate court determined that the bill does not violate the Constitution. The First Amendment guaranties families, not politicians or the government, the right to direct children's religious beliefs and education and forbids states from imposing scripture on public school pupils.

The statute, it seems to me, violates precisely those commandments it insists students rely on to develop their moral character. Indeed, that's the position of Steven K. Green who wrote a pertinent brief that was submitted to the district court in the case of Nathan v Alamo Independent School District. [1] Green is a scholar who specializes in the history of religion in law. Texas, not to mention Alito and Thomas, have insisted religion (theirs, not other's) is foundational to the Republic. In a 1999 article in the Journal of Law & Religion titled "The Fount of Everything Just and Right?" Green systematically examined the historical record and found that the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights contain no references to the Ten Commandments. The Federalist Papers contain no references to the Bible. The founding debates refer to Roman, European Continental, and British legal systems — not to Mosaic law. He even tracked down the famous quotation attributed to James Madison, that American civilization depends on individuals governing themselves "according to the Ten Commandments." The editors of the Madison Papers told him they found "nothing in our files remotely like" the quotation and that it conflicted with what they knew of Madison's views on religion and government. A search of the entire George Washington Papers turned up not a single reference to the Ten Commandments.

Green notes that Texas hasn’t selected a neutral text shared by everyone. It has selected a Protestant version, drawing on the King James Bible’s wording and a Protestant arrangement of the commandments.

That matters because Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant traditions differ in how they word, divide, and understand the text. Green highlights Texas’s omission of the statement about God bringing the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt—a passage central to Jewish understandings of the covenant. He also discusses “kill” versus “murder,” and differences involving the prohibition on “graven images.” In his account, these aren’t just editing choices; they carry religious meaning.

Texas can’t turn a religious classroom display into an American history lesson simply by saying the Ten Commandments helped found the country. In his expert report,[2] he argues that the historical evidence doesn’t support that story—and that the state’s chosen text favors a particular religious tradition rather than offering something religiously neutral.

Scripture is being used by the state in its political and civic endeavors. For Senator King, the commandments represent a moral compass. King believes that the commandments enlighten the foundations of the American legal system. They are part of the chronicles of the American experience, he adds. While this view may be legitimate, it converts the commandments to something they are not. Scripture is not, and is not expected to be, a declaration of American national identity. The Ten Commandments begin with a religious decree, "I am the Lord thy God." In this argument, it is also required to do double duty. It is also required to state what America is and what American laws are and where they came from and which moral tradition is appropriate to be taught in the American classroom.

Government shouldn't be picking which religious teachings are true. It's not the government's job to promote one denomination's beliefs over others, or make people's public life dependent on their faith. Protecting religious exercise and keeping government out of religious doctrine, these two things go hand in hand, according to Green, they're about protecting conscience. Green's brief is a model of historical analysis and worth reading.

Ian Klein's article [5] blames the Roberts court, especially Justice Thomas, for dumping established law with regard to the First Amendment: " A series of decisions over the past two decades, culminating in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District—which abandoned the longstanding test in Lemon v. Kurtzman [3] in favor of a test based exclusively and vaguely on “history and tradition has shifted the Court’s posture toward an expansive view of Free Exercise rights at the expense of Establishment Clause constraints. The result is not merely a reinterpretation of doctrine but a structural reordering of   constitutional priorities." Thomas's goal, promoted by the Christian nationalists is to disestablish the Establishment Clause, pun intended, i.e. upend the 14th amendments application of the clause to the states.

Klein fears a nation where states have far more flexibility to promote religion, possibly even declaring it an official religion, while the federal government is still prohibited from doing so. State constitutions and free-exercise rights would still impose restrictions. Eliminating the Establishment Clause wouldn't eliminate all other legal protections. Klein believes it would eliminate a crucial national protection, one that would make religious minorities and nonbelievers more reliant on their location and what the majority in their state would tolerate. He argues that if the government can use its resources, authority, and classrooms to support someone else's faith, then freedom of worship doesn't mean much. "Religious liberty" is being used to justify government-backed religious privilege, not to stop intervention, i.e. Klein’s argument is that the fights over classroom Bibles and Ten Commandments posters aren’t really about posters or books. He sees them as potential vehicles for a much bigger change: getting the Supreme Court to remove a major constitutional barrier against state-sponsored religion.

Nathan won in district court, but that was overturned by the Fifth Circuit. Interestingly, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in the Texas case that students "are not required to read the commandments, recite them, accept them, or participate in any religious activity related to the displays. Students are merely required to be in the same classroom with the displays." Erin Gray notes this makes the law legally indistinguishable from the Kentucky law which the Supreme Court struck down in Stone v. Graham (1980). The state insists the text must be seen while insisting nobody need heed it. The sacred text has become, quite literally, a fixture — wallpaper with theological claims.

It's now is headed to the Supreme Court. It's OK with me as it's probably the fastest way to secularize religion with which we would be better off without.

N.B.  If you are interested in the different versions of the Ten Commandments see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh9HMz1ItWc

References:

[1] https://www.aclu.org/cases/nathan-v-alamo-heights-independent-school-district

[2] https://ffrf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Steven-K.-Green-expert-report.pdf

[3] Lemon v. Kurtzman, a 1971 Supreme Court case, set a big precedent. It led to the creation of the "Lemon test". This test determines if a government law or program breaks the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. To be constitutional, a law needs three things. It must have a secular purpose, not primarily help or hurt religion, and not lead to excessive government involvement with religion.

[4] Green, S. K. (1999). The fount of everything just and right? The Ten Commandments as a source of American law. Journal of Law and Religion, 14(2), 525. https://doi.org/10.2307/3556579

[5] Ian G Klein,In Bad Faith: The Binding of the Establishment Clause on the Altar of Free Exercise, 57 ST. MARY'S L.J. 539 (2026). Available at: https://commons.stmarytx.edu/thestmaryslawjournal/vol57/iss3/4

Suggested reading:

Drakeman, D. L. (2010). Church, state, and original intent. Cambridge University Press.

Forum, C. (2024, September 9). "A 'Revolutionized' Supreme Court term" by Steven K. Green. Canopy Forum. [https://canopyforum.org/2022/07/29/a-revolutionized-supreme-court-term/]

Green, Steven K. (2021) "The Legal Ramifications of Christian Nationalism," Roger Williams University Law Review: Vol. 26: Iss. 2, Article 6. Available at: https://docs.rwu.edu/rwu_LR/vol26/iss2/6

Green, S. (2010). The second disestablishment: Church and state in nineteenth-century America. Oxford University Press.

Green, S. K. (2015). Inventing a Christian America: The myth of the religious founding.

 

Review: Call it Evil: Understanding the Trump Era

 I subscribe to an interesting magazine entitled Jacobin [1] and their latest interview with Susan Nieman argues that the left needs to abandon appellations like “facist” and “authoritarian” when referring to Trump and adopt the much clearer designation: Evil. I understand evil to be a theological description rather than a scientific one, a point Mary Trump [2] is careful to make when talking about her uncle.  In her book, Too Much and Never Enough, [3] she says, “I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label gets us only so far.”  She goes on, “Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests he’ll never sit for.”

Well that sent me down another rabbit hole, to read Nieman’s book. [4] In her interview in the magazine, she argues in order to effectively fight contemporary injustices and tyranny, the political Left urgently needs to reclaim moral terminology, particularly the word "evil." . According to Neiman, fundamentalists and right-wing actors who exploit these potent concepts for their own purposes have gained the moral upper hand as a result of progressive rejections of the religious or unscientific status of ethical terminology. That’s also pretty much the thesis of her book.

Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era is less a conventional book about Donald Trump than an attempt to explain the moral climate that, in her view, made the Trump era possible. Neiman, a moral philosopher whose earlier work has repeatedly returned to questions of evil, responsibility, Enlightenment values, and historical memory, argues that contemporary progressive Americans have become strangely reluctant to use moral language precisely when political life most requires it. Her central claim is deliberately provocative: the word “evil” should not be dismissed as religious, melodramatic, or intellectually unsophisticated. Properly understood, she argues, it describes circumstances in which the distance between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be becomes intolerably large.

Despite the subtitle, Neiman explicitly says that the book is “not a book about Donald Trump.” Trump is instead the culmination, or perhaps the most conspicuous symptom, of a much longer intellectual and cultural development. Her argument is that his political success cannot be explained simply by campaign strategy, economic resentment, racism, polarization, or institutional weakness. Those factors matter, but beneath them lies a deeper erosion of confidence in moral principles themselves. Over many decades, Neiman contends, Western societies have absorbed the idea that appeals to justice, decency, solidarity, or universal moral obligations are naïve. The supposedly sophisticated person assumes that everyone ultimately acts out of self-interest, that power matters more than principle, and that moral language is often merely a disguise for the pursuit of advantage. Ayn Rand springs to mind.

 Neiman traces this cynicism through a wide range of intellectual influences. She argues that simplified readings of Adam Smith have reduced human beings to economic maximizers, while equally simplified versions of Darwin have encouraged the belief that ruthless competition is the natural condition of human life. In politics, she sees similar assumptions reinforced by the market-oriented policies associated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Over time, according to Neiman, the idea that greed and self-interest are regrettable human weaknesses was transformed into something closer to a virtue. Empathy, shame, public service, and concern for the common good began to appear not merely impractical but foolish.

This is where Hannah Arendt becomes especially important to Neiman. Popular culture often imagines evil as something spectacular: a sadist, a monster, or someone who consciously enjoys inflicting suffering. Neiman thinks that conception is dangerously comforting because it allows ordinary people and institutions to escape moral scrutiny. Following Arendt’s famous discussion of Adolf Eichmann and the “banality of evil,” [5]  Neiman emphasizes thoughtlessness, emptiness, and moral vacancy. The most destructive evil may not come from people cackling over their wickedness. It may arise from bureaucrats, political functionaries, business leaders, voters, or ordinary citizens who stop asking basic questions about the consequences of what they are doing.

The Trump era therefore serves Neiman as a moral case study. She points to policies and practices she considers sufficiently destructive to justify the language of evil, but her larger concern is what happens when a society loses the confidence to make strong moral judgments at all. Political opponents commonly accuse one another of illegality, incompetence, hypocrisy, or corruption. Neiman believes those words sometimes fail to capture the underlying moral stakes. “Crime,” in her formulation, belongs to the realm of established rules and procedures; the idea of evil enters when an action seems to violate more fundamental assumptions about human dignity, justice, or the limits of acceptable conduct. Like ICE.

There is considerable power in this argument even if it’s basically theological and she’s appealing to a secular audience, although I sometimes wonder that it’s similar to calling someone a Nazi. Understandable but excessively hyperbolic. Neiman is especially effective in challenging the assumption that moral seriousness requires avoiding morally charged vocabulary. Modern political language often substitutes technocratic terms such as “norm erosion,” “institutional stress,” or “democratic backsliding” for ordinary moral judgments. Such language can be analytically useful, but Neiman argues that it can also sanitize events that ought to provoke outrage. Her broader philosophical point is that democracy depends on more than laws and procedures. It also depends on citizens believing that ideas such as equality, truth, justice, and human dignity are meaningful in themselves rather than merely weapons used by rival political factions.

Her argument also raises an obvious difficulty, however: who decides when the boundary into “evil” has been crossed? Jennifer Szalai, reviewing the book in The New York Times,[6] identifies this as one of its unresolved problems. Neiman deliberately wrote an intervention rather than an exhaustive political history, and she says she did not want to bury the book beneath endless qualifications and detail. That gives Call It Evil urgency, but it also means that readers who do not already share Neiman’s moral premises (how could one not?) may find some of her conclusions asserted more readily than demonstrated.

There is also a danger inherent in the language Neiman wants to reclaim. Once political disagreement is described as a struggle against evil, compromise can begin to look like complicity and political opponents can be transformed from fellow citizens into embodiments of wickedness. Neiman herself is aware of this problem. She acknowledges that “evil” is an explosive word and that irresponsible use of it can intensify the very moral and political breakdown she is trying to resist. Her case therefore depends on a distinction between condemning particular actions, values, and institutions as evil and simply declaring whole populations or political tribes to be evil.

The book is ultimately an argument for moral universalism. Neiman wants principles such as human dignity and justice to apply regardless of political identity, nationality, race, religion, or ideological allegiance. That helps explain why her discussion extends beyond Trump and includes American foreign policy and the war in Gaza. The consistency is intentional: if moral principles are universal, they cannot apply only when politically convenient.

Call It Evil is therefore best understood not simply as an indictment of one president but as a philosophical diagnosis of political cynicism. Trump occupies a prominent place in Neiman’s story, but the more important villains are the ideas that morality is childish, self-interest is the only realistic motive, and power ultimately determines what is right. Whether readers accept Neiman’s application of the word “evil” to particular policies will depend heavily on their own moral and political premises. The more durable challenge posed by the book is harder to dismiss: a democratic society cannot survive indefinitely if its citizens cease believing that there are moral standards higher than victory, profit, loyalty, or power. Neiman’s book asks readers to consider whether the current political crisis is therefore not merely constitutional or partisan but philosophical—a crisis over whether moral judgment itself still has a legitimate place in public life.

 Notes 

[1] “Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a web audience of over 3,000,000 a month.” (https://jacobin.com/about )

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_L._Trump

[3] Trump, M. L. (2022). Too much and never enough: How my family created the world's most dangerous man. Simon & Schuster. P. 17

[4] Neiman, S. (2026). Call it evil: Understanding the Trump era. W. W. Norton & Company.

[5] Arendt, H. (1992). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Penguin. (It was originally published in 1963, two years before I graduated high school, and it was assigned to us in college.  It made a profound impression on me.

[6] Nytimes.com. (2026, September 9). nytimes.com. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/books/review/call-it-evil-susan-neiman.html

N.B. Neiman is not the only one arguing for a moral stance.  David Brooks has been making similar arguments.