Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

August 27, 2025

The Battle over the Ten Commandments in Schools Returns

It is not an “establishment” of religion for governments to do things that benefit religious believers and institutions.

In the past two years, both Louisiana and Arkansas have enacted laws that would mandate the presence of the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms. But legal rulings—including from the Supreme Court—going back at least to 1980 have blocked precisely such measures. Richard Garnett explains that the issue has returned because the Court has moved away from the so-called Lemon test for evaluating religion-infused legislation, named after the 1971 case of Lemon v. Kurtzman.

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