Anatomy of a Christian Nationalist Strategy: Ten Commandments in Louisiana

The Republican governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, has signed the country's first state law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in all public school classrooms.

The law's supporters claim they're just trying to teach kids historic American values. But they are actually promoting a Christian nationalist revisionist history: that America was founded as a Christian nation, but decades of secularists, feminists, LGBTQ people, and other proponents of freedom and pluralism have subverted it.

The Ten Commandments mandate is a means of gaining acceptance for their core belief that America should be governed according to "biblical law."

The law's sponsors could barely hide this purpose during an April 4, 2024 hearing on the bill by the Louisiana House Committee on Education. Video of the hearing is an astounding window into how conservative political activists, legislators, and legal eagles work together to maximize the chances that the Supreme Court will more explicitly rubber-stamp states' promotion of this right-wing, ahistorical version of the American founding in public schools. The bill's proponents do not merely want the Ten Commandments to be displayed. They want their interpretation of them—and the Bible—to be understood as the only legitimate foundation of all American law.

These politicians recognize they are now on the precipice of achieving a decades-long goal, much in the same way the right achieved its goal of overturning Roe v. Wade. They are now confident their view that Christianity is under threat is shared at the highest echelons of American government, including by House Speaker Mike Johnson and a majority of Supreme Court justices. They know this not just because Trump stacked the court with right-wing ideologues. They know it because the court has said so.

The Christian right celebrated the court's 2022 decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District as the final nail in the coffin of Establishment Clause jurisprudence that had protected public school students from being compelled into a state-mandated religion. The Kennedy court held that it was constitutional for a public high school football coach to lead players in post-game Christian prayers on the field.

As Establishment Clause experts Ira Lupu and Robert Tuttle put it, the court has "jettisoned the entire post-World War II constitutional project of maintaining a secular state."

Christian right lawyers had spent decades trying to obliterate the separation of church and state, and in particular, the test for determining constitutional violations in the court's 1971 decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman. They have now largely succeeded, owing to development of a cottage industry of revisionist historians claiming the founders did not intend church-state separation; the funding and promotion of Christian lawyers specifically trained to subvert the Establishment Clause as an anti-Christian invention of an "activist" Supreme Court; the recruitment of legislators who would pass laws like Louisiana's; and the appointment of judges who would uphold them.

To them, the protection of secularism and pluralism was a disturbing interregnum in the history of the "Christian nation." They seek a complete reversal.

The Christian right sees an opportunity to convince the court to approve their government-mandated Ten Commandments posters in every classroom. Their goal is not necessarily to make the students see the posters every day. It's to reinforce the false history that American law is based on biblical law, and to act on what follows from that. If the Supreme Court approves the posters based on "historical practices and understandings" and the "understanding of the Founding Fathers," as it said it would in Kennedy, then the justices would have taken another step towards affirming the Christian right's claim that American law is based on biblical law. Rightwing lawmakers will then have more ammunition for other types of "biblical" infringements on other peoples' freedom, like book bans, discrimination against queer people, restrictions on health care, and more.

As Rep. Dodie Horton, the chief sponsor of the bill, told her colleagues at the hearing, "The Ten Commandments is the plumb line on which all laws in our country were founded." Echoing the Christian right trope that liberal forces are trying to suppress and silence the nation's supposed Christian heritage, she added, "for the last several decades, the expression and heritage of the Ten Commandments has been denied."

But, she admitted, "the legal landscape has changed, which now allows us to present a bill like the Ten Commandments." The bill's co-sponsor, state Senator Adam Bass, was more explicit that the bill was crafted with the Kennedy holding in mind.

Ronald Hackenberg, a lawyer from the rightwing Pacific Justice Institute, told lawmakers that for decades Lemon had been "used to shoot down bills like this, to take down monuments, it was used by those with an atheist point of view to make a lot of headway, and, I believe, to hurt our nation as a whole." The Louisiana bill, he said, "historically and faithfully reflects our founding fathers' reliance on the Ten Commandments as the foundation of America's justice system, and thus is essential for proper understanding of our American history and heritage."

The hearing also featured the endorsement of Elijah O'Neal of the American Journey Experience, a museum, training, and event space launched in 2020 by Glenn Beck and David Barton, the discredited revisionist historian who has been the driving force of the false claim that the separation of church and state is a "myth" and that the founders intended America to be a Christian nation. O'Neal was praised by Louisiana Rep. Kathy Edmonston, who recounted attending a conference, where "I learned everything that you were saying, and that's what prompted me want to carry this bill." She lamented the loss of Ten Commandments in public schools: "we have really dumbed our children down."

Perhaps comically, the version of the Ten Commandments Louisiana lawmakers used here is not even a century old. Instead, as Fred Clark documents, it is a version developed in 1950 by a moralizing state juvenile court judge and the Fraternal Order of Eagles to get misbehaving kids in line, and to promote the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille film The Ten Commandments. This version contains slight deviations from any existing bible translation (and in fact contains 12 edicts, not 10). Kevin Kruse has more about this Hollywoodification of the Ten Commandments, and how it morphed into an effort to push state religion in public schools.

I suspect the bill's supporters think using this version will shield them from accusations that they are forcing a particular version of the Ten Commandments, such as the King James translation. But the underlying purpose is clear. To restore their mythical Christian nation, the advocates of this new law believe they must start with convincing the courts and the public that the Bible—their version—is the only legitimate foundation of American law.