A federal appeals court held that Texas can require its public schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms.
On April 21, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas Senate Bill 10 does not violate separation of church and state. The law, enacted last June, requires every public school classroom or open-enrollment charter school classroom to display a “conspicuous” copy of the Ten Commandments.
“Students are neither catechized on the Commandments nor taught to adopt them,” the ruling states. “Nor are teachers commanded to proselytize students who ask about the displays or contradict students who disagree with them.”
The 9-8 ruling held that Stone v. Graham, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that barred Kentucky from requiring its public schools to display religious texts in classrooms, does not impact the Texas law. The 1980 Stone ruling was based on the “Lemon test,” an assessment once used to measure a law’s compliance with the First Amendment. The law has since been abandoned. A 2022 Supreme Court decision confirmed that it had “long ago abandoned Lemon and its endorsement test offshoot.”
After Gov. Greg Abbott signed S.B. 10 into law in 2025, organizations representing 25 families sued the state.
In two separate rulings, federal judges placed preliminary injunctions against the law, blocking its enforcement in 24 school districts on grounds that the law likely violates the First Amendment.
The full 5th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments over S.B. 10 in January, reversing the preliminary junction in the April 21 ruling.
“Because Plaintiffs fail to show that S.B. 10 substantially burdens their right to religious exercise, their Free Exercise claims must be dismissed,” the majority opinion explained.
Jonathan Saenz, president and attorney for Texas Values, which supported the law in a friend of the court brief, called the ruling “one of the most important religious liberty victories for Texas in our glorious history.”
“Today’s ruling confirms that our state can honor the moral heritage that undergirds our legal system without violating the First Amendment,” Saenz said. “This decision makes clear that acknowledging the historical foundations of our laws is not only permissible—it is fully consistent with the Constitution.”
State Sen. Phil King, who acted as the Texas Senate author of S.B. 10, believes the ruling honors American history.
“The Ten Commandments have been referenced throughout our nation’s civic life because they are part of the historical tradition that influenced American law,” King said. “The Fifth Circuit properly applied the Constitution as written and understood, rather than rewriting it to scrub away our heritage.”
In February, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit allowed Louisiana to proceed with its own Ten Commandments classroom mandate, reversing a previous ruling that barred the state from enforcing the law, which passed in June 2024.
