DALLAS-FORT WORTH, Texas — Before the school year started, teachers in Texas began their typical process of preparing to welcome students back to class. They hung decorations to give their rooms a personal touch, picked out which books they’d have on their shelves and stocked up on supplies.
But there was one new thing they also had to do, thanks to Texas lawmakers: hang a copy of the Ten Commandments where every student in the class could see it.
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In late May, the Texas legislature passed Senate Bill 10, which Republican Gov. Greg Abbott then signed into law. It said that each public school classroom must display the Ten Commandments, religious directives found in the Hebrew and Christian bibles, in a “conspicuous space” by Sept.1.
The First Amendment contains the Establishment Clause, which states the government cannot sponsor any religion. Despite this, Texas earlier this year joined Louisiana and Arkansas in passing bills that would inject Christianity into public schools by mandating that the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms.
“Why would you post the Ten Commandments?” asked Fred Clarkson, a senior research analyst at Political Research Association who focuses on far-right Christianity. “Because you have a theocratic vision of what should be taught in public schools.”
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A Christian nationalist movement — one that seeks to remake the secular American government into a religious one — has been bubbling just under the surface of the broader conservative movement for decades.
“They believe America was once a Christian nation, things have gone astray and that Christian nation needs to be restored,” Clarkson said.
Its adherents see schools as an opportunity to weave Christianity into public life. “The church, as they understand it, is in competition with public schools for the minds of their children,” Clarkson said.
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The goal, ultimately, is to dismantle the existing school system and remake it in a Christian nationalist image, which includes not just inserting religion but white supremacy, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and an ability to censor and control the information provided to students.
There have long been complaints about the United States’ public school system. When the U.S. Supreme Court ordered schools to be racially integrated in the 1950s and ’60s, white conservative parents looked for ways to avoid having their children attend schools with Black kids. They set up segregation academies, or private schools where they would not have to comply with pesky federal mandates.
And in 1986, Robert Thoburn, a Virginia pastor and Christian school founder, wrote in his book “The Children Trap” that Christians’ must work “to shut down the public schools, not in some revolutionary way, but step by step, school by school, district by district.”
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For 40 years, the movement has built upon that philosophy. Echoes of Thoburn’s beliefs can be heard from today’s conservatives who seek to dismantle teachers’ unions, use public money for Christian schools and shut down the Department of Education.
And now that Donald Trump is back in the White House and emboldening their cause, the movement is primed to spread across the U.S. Trump is not a particularly pious man. Still, he has had no qualms about climbing into bed with the evangelical Christian right in exchange for votes and resources. In turn, Trump has to remain interested in their causes, and they have the leverage to shape his policy positions.
Christian nationalists may seem like extremists with fringe views, but Clarkson cautioned against dismissing them.
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“They’re politically powerful,” he said, “and it’s not to be underestimated.”
Feature, Not A Bug
Conservative leaders in Texas have been building an environment where Christian nationalism can thrive — even when there have been setbacks.
Shortly before the school year started, the Texas law about the Ten Commandments hit a hurdle: Several religious freedom groups, civil rights organizations, and parents of public school kids sued the state and their respective school districts over the measure, saying it violates the First Amendment, which requires separation of church and state. A federal judge agreed and issued an injunction.
“[T]he displays are likely to pressure the child-Plaintiffs into religious observance, meditation on, veneration, and adoption of the State’s favored religious scripture, and into suppressing expression of their own religious or nonreligious background and beliefs while at school,” Judge Fred Biery said in his ruling last month.
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But the ruling only applied to the 11 districts named in the lawsuit, and Texas’ Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, said school districts not named in the lawsuit still had to hang the Ten Commandments in classrooms. He appealed the ruling earlier this month.
“The woke radicals seeking to erase our nation’s history will be defeated,” Paxton said in a statement. “I will not back down from defending the virtues and values that built this country.” (Paxton has been involved in several scandals, including the public dissolution of his marriage to Angela Paxton, a state senator. Angela Paxton has accused her husband of being unfaithful in their marriage, which would be a violation of the seventh commandment — “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”)
The court documents surrounding the divorce are sealed, but Paxton has blamed the divorce on his political enemies.
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Paxton did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
In September, another group of Texas parents filed a similar lawsuit, while the religious directives continue to appear in classrooms around the state.
Being in conflict with the Constitution may be a feature, not a bug, of laws regarding the display of the Ten Commandments.
Legal observers, including a federal judge, believe Republican legislators in Texas, as well as in Louisiana and Arkansas — which passed nearly identical laws that are now making their way through the courts — actually want to be sued over the blatant constitutional violation to run a case all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. The conservative-majority court has been extremely friendly to plaintiffs alleging their religious freedom has been violated, including cases involving kids and education.
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The Ten Commandments law is not the state’s sole foray into reshaping schools. Over the last several years, Texas has enacted numerous laws targeting the public school system, including those that restrict the types of books available to children. State laws have also limited what teachers can say about racism or current events in the classroom. (In 2021, the first Black principal at a high school in the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District, just outside of Dallas, resigned after facing allegations of teaching “critical race theory” to children.) A law passed this year bans LGBTQ+ themed clubs and other diversity, equity and inclusion groups in public schools.
The common thread in all this legislation? The belief that school was a place where left-wing radicals could indoctrinate your children and turn them against you and your religious beliefs.
The Key That Picks The Locks
Before the Ten Commandments saga, there was the book challenge drama.
In October 2021, parents in Keller, Texas, a well-to-do suburb of Fort Worth, complained about “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe, saying the book about the author’s struggle with their own sexuality was inappropriate to be in school libraries.
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To quell anger, the Keller Independent School District, which boasts 39 schools and 34,000 students, organized a book review committee comprising educators and parents to determine if any books available in the district were truly inappropriate for children.
Laney Hawes, whose four children are enrolled in schools in the district, volunteered to be on the committee.
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Her goal was to protect students’ freedom of speech while taking the concerns of her fellow parents seriously. The dozens of books being challenged were largely the same ones that were being targeted nationwide.
Under the review committee’s decision-making, most of the books in question remained on school library shelves and in classrooms, Hawes said. Designations were changed for a handful of others so that only older grades could access them. None were removed entirely.
Hawes assumed the issue had been resolved and things would return to normal.
“I thought I was walking into this organic situation, working with parents in the community. It turns out that wasn’t true,” Hawes told HuffPost over lunch at a fast-casual taco place in North Fort Worth. “I had actually stepped into a political machine.”
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Keller would soon become a flashpoint in the battles over public school policy, especially after some influential conservatives in Texas saw an opportunity.
In 2021 and 2022, Patriot Mobile Action, the political arm of a self-described “Christian conservative” cellphone company, spent millions of dollars on local races in Texas. “At Patriot Mobile, we are guided by biblical principles, putting God first in everything we do,” the company website says.
The political action committee backed three extremely conservative candidates for the seven-member school board in Keller. School board races in Keller, according to Hawes, used to be boring, non-partisan affairs that didn’t get much attention.
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All of the group’s candidates won in 2022, pushing the board to the right. “Patriot Mobile Action believes to save America, we must save our Public Schools,” the website reads.
Patriot Mobile did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Right before the first day of school in 2022, the new board announced that 41 books would be removed from school libraries, including the Bible and a graphic novel adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” due to concerns about inappropriate content. The committee Hawes was on had just deemed all those books acceptable for students the year before.
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It’s unclear how the Bible got caught up in the removals, but Kathy May, a local GOP leader, said the Bible was only removed because of a “leftist.”
“We were challenging books at the very beginning with a lot of explicit content, and some leftist came in and challenged the Bible,” she said on a 2022 episode of Allen West’s podcast “Steadfast & Loyal.” West was the Texas Republican Party chair from 2020 to 2021.
Keller ISD later reinstated the Bible and the Anne Frank adaptation, but said the other books would remain banned.
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Two years later, the school board, still with the Patriot Mobile-backed members, unanimously voted for a policy that would require parental permission for students to use pronouns that don’t match the sex listed on their birth certificate. Many conservatives rail against the usage of different or gender-neutral pronouns because they believe sex and gender are ordained by God. The change sparked fear that transgender students could be outed to unsupportive or abusive parents.
“[Right-wing Christians] want to force God in and take away access to any ideas that don’t fit in,” Hawes said. “They’re just trying to force their narrow version [of Christianity] on everyone. They’re trying to take us back to the 1950s.”
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Hawes recalls listening to Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign manager, interview Glenn Story, the CEO of Patriot Mobile, at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference. The annual gathering of conservative lawmakers and influencers was held in Dallas, a few months after the Keller school board races.
The two men were discussing Patriot Mobile’s success in school board races, particularly in Keller. They saw it as the first step in a larger agenda.
“The school boards are the key that picks the lock,” Bannon said.
Patriot Mobile’s influence in Keller and beyond was the culmination of a conservative movement that had reached a fever pitch in 2020 after the coronavirus pandemic shuttered schools at the same time police violence launched a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement.
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Where some saw Black Lives Matter as a plea for equity, many conservatives saw “critical race theory” and anti-white hatred. And when public health experts asked people to stay home for their own well-being, conservatives framed it as an assault on freedom. Their concerns over CRT and race morphed into a disdain for diversity and inclusion in all its forms, including LGBTQ+ rights. It was an attempt to dismantle and remake public schools into a haven for conservative Christian ideals.
By the time Trump lost the 2020 election, the rightward shift among school boards was already taking root across the country. Moms for Liberty, a right-wing organization founded in Florida in 2020, quickly grew to have over 300 chapters nationwide. The group championed “parental rights,” a buzzword for conservative parents who think they should be able to dictate what their kids learn at school — even if it means overhauling the system for everyone. The group led the charge on book bans and endorsed school board candidates who would bring a far-right agenda to public schools.
‘You have to be able to make people scared…’
Polling indicates that many Americans are dissatisfied with the public school system as a whole. Most respondents, however, indicated that they were satisfied with their own school district.
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In this year’s PDK International’s annual poll on public education, which surveyed about 1,000 parents in June, respondents were asked to give their local schools and the nationwide system a rating of A through D, or Failing.
Forty-three percent of respondents gave their child’s school either an A or B grade. Conversely, only 13% said the nationwide system deserved an A or B. And 70% of parents said they were satisfied with the amount of say they had in their child’s education.
In order for the Christian right to succeed, fearmongering about education in general wouldn’t suffice, said Chris Tackett, an activist and former school board member in Granbury, Texas.
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“You have to be able to make people scared of their own schools,” Tackett told HuffPost.
Tackett and his wife run an Instagram account where they educate followers about Christian nationalism in Texas and beyond. As a school board member in his hometown about 35 miles from Fort Worth back in 2014, Tackett has a theory as to why Republicans have targeted public schools.
“If you get [kids] early, you can control where society is going in the future,” he said. “I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but that’s what Hitler was talking about.”
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But there are some limitations to the Keller school board’s power, even though parents have widely welcomed — or at least tolerated — its conservative ideology.
At a closed-door meeting in December 2024, the Keller Independent School District board introduced the idea of splitting the school district. (A lawsuit filed in August accuses the board of planning the split as early as May 2024.)
The school board didn’t disclose many details in its proposal, but the plan essentially involved creating two separate districts. The whiter, wealthier side would remain Keller — along with its tax base and nicer facilities. The new district would make up the more diverse and lower-income part of the district.
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It seemed the board had gone one step too far: Parents across the political spectrum pushed back on the prospect when the members discussed the plan at meetings earlier this year.
“The whole community just, like, fell apart because there was a secret plan to cut out the rich white kids from the district,” Hawes said. “The boundaries [of the new districts] were literally the railroad track,” invoking images of being from “the wrong side of the tracks.”
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Following widespread public backlash, including a student-led walkout at Keller High School and the superintendent’s resignation, the board abandoned the plan.
And in May, two Patriot Mobile-backed board members lost their races. The new members who won instead did not receive any money from the cellphone company and had spoken out against the proposal to split the district in two.
But still, it would be a stretch to call the Keller school board progressive.
“A district like mine feels like a lost cause to a degree because [the conservatives] still have a majority,” Hawes said.
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She doesn’t think a minor setback will derail the entire Christian right’s cause.
“Our schools were the testing ground for this,” she said. “We now know that we were a blueprint for the rest of the state and the nation.”
Taking It National
During his first presidential campaign, Trump went to the ultraconservative Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, in an attempt to win over evangelical voters.
“Two Corinthians 3:17, that’s the whole ballgame. Is that the one you like?” he asked the thousands of students who were required to attend the service before quoting the passage. “Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”
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The book of the Bible is actually pronounced “Second” Corinthians.
Trump’s lack of religious bona fides isn’t a problem, though. Christian nationalists don’t actually need Trump to practice Christian virtues — as long as he goes along with their vision.
“Trump is not religious, but he is the vehicle for them,” Tackett said.
In May, Trump created the Religious Liberty Commission through executive order, announcing at the time that it would be tasked with protecting “parents’ authority to direct the care, upbringing, and education of their children, including the right to choose a religious education,” “permitting time for voluntary prayer and religious instruction at public schools; government displays with religious imagery.”
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Earlier this month, the committee held a meeting where Christians were able to tell members about alleged religious persecution. At this hearing, the president announced that the Department of Education would update guidance for prayer in public schools, which currently allows individual students to pray at school. The details of the new guidance remain unclear.
The Department of Education did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
“For most of our country’s history, the Bible was found in every classroom in the nation,” Trump claimed at the hearing. He did not mention any other religious texts like the Quran or the Torah.
“Yet in many schools today students are instead indoctrinated with anti-religious propaganda and some are even punished for their religious beliefs and very, very strongly punished,” he added. “It’s ridiculous.”
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Christianity in public schools was fairly routine before a series of rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1960s, which prohibited school-led prayer and Bible readings.
Despite its name, the commission only appears to be supporting religious freedom for one religion. Attendees at the hearing said their rights had been violated by allegedly not being allowed to pray at school, being forced to read books with LGBTQ+ themes expressing Christian beliefs, or claiming that their children had been secretly transitioned by their schools.
“Joe Biden’s administration targeted people of faith, specifically Christians, and encroached on their God-given, inalienable First Amendment right to religious freedom,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement to HuffPost, without providing any evidence. “President Trump and the Religious Liberty Commission are ensuring people of all faiths are able to worship freely — without government overreach — and their rights are protected. The Founding Fathers came to America seeking religious freedom and it is a founding principle that cannot be ripped away by radical politicians.”
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“Let me be clear: when school board members, administrators, and other government officials threaten law-abiding parents, they can and will be held accountable. Conspiring to violate constitutional rights is a crime under federal law,” she said.
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The Supreme Court under Trump has also moved to enable the insertion of religious ideology into schools across the nation. In June’s ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the court said that parents could remove their children from lessons to which they had religious objections. Critics warned that the ruling created a mechanism by which, using the threat of lawsuits or leveraging the school’s need to have students attend, religious parents could force the school’s curricula to adhere to their values.
And many of the figures in Trump’s orbit who have become influential on religious issues and education cut their teeth in Texas.
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Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who Trump appointed to chair the Religious Liberty Commission, touted Trump’s commitment to making America a Christian nation after the September event.
“No President since our nation’s foundation has put faith and freedom at the forefront of his entire agenda,” Patrick said in a statement. “President Trump’s emphasis on religious liberty will restore our nation, once again, to send a clear message to the world that we are a nation that was founded on the word of God.”
Patrick is not the only leader of Texas’ Christian right movement who has ended up in Trump’s orbit — and with a nationwide stage.
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Kevin Roberts was executive vice president at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation from 2016 until 2021. (Brooke Rollins, who is now the Secretary of Agriculture under Trump, previously held the role for many years.)
Before he left the foundation, Roberts sent a letter to donors, asking them to commit dollars to the fight against public education.
“The time is ripe to set Texas children free from enforced indoctrination and Big Government cronyism in our public schools,” the letter reads. It goes on to say that if Texas children aren’t “set free,” freedom and constitutional law will be gone “within a generation.”
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“But if we do liberate these students from captivity to indoctrination, you and I will be remembered as those who saved freedom, prosperity, and constitutional rule of law. And by liberating those kids, we will have saved Texas and America.”
The next month, Roberts left to take the helm at the Heritage Foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, launching him directly into a position to influence Trump. The 900-page playbook, put together in the lead-up to the 2024 election, details the policies the next conservative president should push for, including inserting religion into public schools and taxpayer-funded private religious schools. Trump initially claimed he didn’t know about the project and attempted to distance himself from the guide during his campaign.
Roberts did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Now, his administration appears to be making education policy based on the guide.
There were hints that Trump’s second term would be a boon for Christians looking to dismantle the public school system and rebuild it in their own image. After all, he campaigned on several of their long-term goals — like shutting down the Department of Education — and at a Moms for Liberty event last year, he wasn’t afraid to lend credence to the unproven rumor that public school teachers were performing gender transitions at school.
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“The transgender thing is incredible. Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation,” Trump falsely claimed during an interview with Tiffany Justice, a Moms for Liberty co-founder. “The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”
And during his first days back in office, Trump signed an executive order on “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” The order had a long list of measures schools must take or ideas that were now prohibited, including ending funding for schools that had programs that run afoul of the Trump administration’s policy goals and going after educators who socially transition students without parental consent.
The document didn’t mention Christianity or any other religion, but it didn’t need to. It was still a Christian conservative’s wishlist — and it was finally coming from the federal government.