The Ten Commandments From a Child’s Desk

What belonging looks like before it becomes a constitutional question

Greenbelt schoolroom, Maryland, 1937. Photograph by John Vachon. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.

Gym class in middle school required shorts. I wore pants instead because my faith requires modesty. A twelve-year-old in navy sweatpants stands out fast against fifteen pairs of bare knees.

Nobody said anything cruel. A girl named Jenny, pulling her ponytail tight before a lap around the track, asked once why I dressed “like that.” I gave her some short, half-true answer.

She shrugged and went back to stretching against the fence. The exchange was enough for me to spend the rest of the period doing the math: how many more times today will something make me explain myself.

Explaining myself as a child

My name did it, too. Substitute teachers turned it into three different words before they gave up and just pointed at me. I learned to raise my hand at all three.

And then there was the pre-Christmas buzz, with a tree in the classroom corner and carols in music class. It was December 21st, the last day before break, when one of my 7th grade teachers pulled her chair into a circle with ours and asked what everyone was doing for Christmas.

I waited with dreaded anticipation. “Grandma’s house…new bike…Midnight Mass with the cousins.” The circle reached me, and I said, “we don’t really do Christmas.”

The room went quiet, and nobody looked at me. Then somebody’s hand shot up to talk about their tree and the room moved on without me. I don’t recall the moment as unkind. The classroom was simply a space intended for one kind of December, and I was there, holding a different one.

Ten Commandments in the classroom

That circle comes to mind now as the fight over the Ten Commandments moves through federal courts in Texas and Louisiana. Both states passed laws requiring Ten Commandments displays in public school classrooms across the state. This spring, a deeply divided federal appeals court upheld the Texas law by a single vote. The Louisiana case has so far turned on procedural questions rather than the constitutionality of the law itself.

I am not against religion in public life. I want a country where people can talk about God without embarrassment, where a menorah glows in one window, a nativity scene stands down the block, and a crescent moon hangs somewhere between them.

Pray in the town square. Live your faith out loud. But for me, a classroom wall is a different question. While children can study and debate the Ten Commandments in a history class, Texas and Louisiana did something very different. The two states chose a sacred text and required it to hang, without context or explanation, on classroom walls across their states.

A child doesn’t choose that classroom. She sits under the display for hours, year after year. The Ten Commandments are there, proclaiming a truth, whether she agrees or not.

The Supreme Court drew the line once already, in 1980, when it struck down an almost identical Kentucky law. That ruling, Stone v. Graham, has never been overturned, but the way the Court thinks about religion and government has changed since then. Courts no longer ask whether a law’s main effect is to promote religion. Now they ask whether the practice fits within history and tradition. Texas and Louisiana are both betting their laws will survive that test.

Competing arguments, different history angles

But “history and tradition” sounds narrower and more modest than it turns out to be, because instead of handing judges a single, clear answer, history and tradition hand them a series of arguments.

One argument, the one the Texas court accepted, goes like this: the Ten Commandments have appeared in public buildings and schools across American history, and the Commandments helped shape American law and culture. A poster on a wall fits within that tradition. What’s more, no student is forced to recite the Commandments or believe them, so there is no imposition.

The other argument digs deeper. It asks: what were the Establishment Clause’s authors afraid of? They worried about the government using its authority to foster religious conformity among people who have no way of opting out. Public schools as we know them came much later than the founding era, but they give the state precisely that kind of authority over children.

Bolted on the wall

School is compulsory, and teachers decide who speaks, who passes. A child in that room is still learning which parts of herself can pass without comment and which ones she’ll need to explain. Nobody has to make her recite the words on the wall for her to do that math.

A law putting a state-chosen sacred text on every classroom wall is not the quiet nod to tradition its defenders describe. I believe it comes much closer to the government-directed religious conformity the Establishment Clause was meant to guard against.

I don’t carry the gym pants around with me anymore, or even most of December 21st. The moments themselves have receded. The question of belonging has not. Kids absorb that weather and keep walking, mostly. What worries me about the Ten Commandments law is that it takes cultural weather children already learn to navigate on their own and makes it permanent, government-issued, bolted next to the chalkboard.

In that vision, the room isn’t just designed for one community’s normal. It tells everyone else what belongs there—and what doesn’t. The room says so. In writing. Every day.

This piece was previously published in Deseret News.