The American Historical Association has sent a letter opposing Texas Senate Bill 10, which would require schools across Texas to display the Ten Commandments in each classroom. “SB 10 serves no clear educational purpose,” wrote the AHA. “The lawyers’ fees sure to result from passage of this bill would be much better invested in instructional materials and professional development opportunities for history and social studies educators across the state.”
Texas House of Representatives
Austin, TX
Dear Representatives,
The American Historical Association registers serious concerns about Senate Bill 10, which would require schools across Texas to display the Ten Commandments in each classroom. This bill challenges settled constitutional precedent without any obvious benefit to students.
Everything has a history, including efforts to put the Ten Commandments in public schools. The Supreme Court declared the core provisions of this bill unconstitutional more than 40 years ago. In Stone v. Graham (1980), the court struck down a Kentucky law to do exactly what SB 10 proposes. Further, when Louisiana enacted a bill (HB 71) along these lines last year, a federal judge almost immediately blocked its implementation. As such, the likeliest outcome of SB 10 would be prolonged litigation at significant expense to Texas taxpayers. Is it worth it?
SB 10 serves no clear educational purpose. The majority opinion in Stone v. Graham emphasized the importance of integrating the history of Christianity into the school curriculum but concluded that the “[p]osting of religious texts on the wall serves no such educational function.” More than a century of history pedagogy accords with this finding.
SB 10 does nothing to help students understand the founding principles of the United States. None of the founders would recognize the text of the Ten Commandments included in the bill. This version was written in the early 1950s by the Fraternal Order of Eagles in an attempt to produce an interfaith text that blended Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant translations. During the Cold War, some Protestant Christians sought to include Catholics and Jews in a larger movement to counter the perceived cultural and political influence of nonbelievers. These reformers invented the idea of a shared Judeo-Christian tradition and embraced the new version of the Ten Commandments (now in SB 10) as a vehicle to promote this approach.
The idea of displaying the Ten Commandments in schools owes more to the cultural politics of the Cold War than to the values of the founding generation.
The AHA agrees that it is important to address the comparatively limited coverage of religious history in public school curricula. But Texas students deserve more than a poster and a legal challenge. The spiritual beliefs and practices of Americans vary and change over time. The creative interaction of many different faiths and denominations is a defining feature of life in the United States. By insisting instead that a single Biblical text can stand in for the American political tradition, the bill misses opportunities to create space for wide-ranging, interesting classroom inquiry into the extent, character, and role of the Bible in a country awash with multiple Protestant, Jewish, traditional African, Catholic, Native American, and Islamic religious traditions.
The character and extent of the influence of the Christian Bible in the founding era has stimulated decades of thoughtful historical investigation. The US Constitution famously lacks any direct reference to the Bible or Christianity. Indeed, Article 6 specifically guarantees that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” The provisions of the First Amendment guaranteeing no “establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise” did not go unnoticed in the republic’s earliest years. The 1796 treaty between the United States and Tripoli stipulated that the young nation’s government was “not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” Writing to Baptist supporters in Connecticut in 1802, Thomas Jefferson described the First Amendment protection of the free exercise of religion as “building a wall between church and State.”
We encourage you to consider wiser and more productive investments of state resources and students’ time. The Texas Department of Education is just beginning a delayed revision of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for social studies. These academic standards already require teachers to discuss the history of the Bible and Christianity in a variety of contexts, but there is room for refinement. We encourage you to support this standards revision and provide necessary resources to schools, teachers, and students.
With more than 10,500 members, the AHA is the largest membership association of professional historians in the world. Founded in 1884 and incorporated by Congress in 1889 for the promotion of historical studies, the Association provides leadership for the discipline, helps to sustain and enhance the work of historians, and promotes the imperative of historical thinking in public life.
SB 10 resurrects the culture wars of the 1950s. We encourage you to set it aside. The lawyers’ fees sure to result from passage of this bill would be much better invested in instructional materials and professional development opportunities for history and social studies educators across the state.
Sincerely,
James R. Grossman
Executive Director