Inside Christian Nationalists’ Legal Long Game to End Church-State Separation

When schoolchildren across Texas return to classrooms next fall, thousands could encounter new, Bible-infused lessons. The Texas board of education voted Friday to approve “Bluebonnet Learning,” an optional, state-developed curriculum for public elementary schools that includes Christian teachings like the Gospel of Matthew and Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount.

The 8-7 vote by Texas officials arrives as Christian nationalist groups nationwide intensify their efforts to inject religion into state curricula. Earlier this month, a federal judge temporarily blocked a Louisiana law requiring every public school classroom to display the Ten Commandments by January 1. Meanwhile, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction, Ryan Walters, sent a memo in June ordering all 5th through 12th grade teachers to incorporate the Bible into their lesson plans.

Similar directives have failed legal tests in the past. The U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment is widely interpreted to enshrine church-state separation, prohibiting the government from establishing a national religion or favoring one system of belief over another. But armed with a new conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court and a federal judiciary stacked with Donald Trump’s picks, the Christian far right sees a revived opportunity to overturn decades of legal precedent.

“With more conservative leaders being elected, and with the U.S. Supreme Court becoming more conservative and issuing a series of decisions weakening the separation of church and state, all of that has emboldened Christian nationalist and other religious right groups,” said Alex J. Luchenitser, associate legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a co-counsel in litigation over Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law and the Oklahoma superintendent’s Bible mandate.

One of these decisions was issued in 2021, when the Supreme Court found that Maine had to include religious schools in its publicly funded education assistance program. The following year, shortly after issuing the landmark decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court overturned another six decades of legal precedent in the case Kennedy v. Bremerton. Joseph Kennedy, a high school football coach, had established a practice of leading group prayers in the middle of the field after each game. After attempting to negotiate religious accommodations with Kennedy, the public school district in Bremerton, Washington, ultimately declined to renew his contract, citing fears that his conduct was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court found that the First Amendment protected Kennedy’s public school prayer and safeguarded the inclusion of religious institutions in state school voucher programs.

Attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in an analysis that, together, these two rulings could render “the lines between church and state hopelessly blurred, if not eliminated altogether.”

As a lawyer with Americans United, Luchenitser has been fighting the religious right’s attacks on public education for more than 20 years. But, he told Truthout, the organization has seen “much more aggressive efforts by Christian nationalist groups” in the last year alone.

“Before that, we weren’t really seeing these kinds of efforts to just defy existing precedent and directly try to push religion into the classroom in a very overt way,” Luchenitser said. So far in 2024, Americans United has tracked at least 91 state bills that would promote religion in public schools, including protecting school prayer. That’s nearly double the amount of similar bills that were proposed last year.

But in chipping away at foundational constitutional protections, Christian nationalist groups stand to win more than prayer in schools or Bible-based lesson plans. The legal battles playing out in federal courts could give rise to anti-LGBTQ violence and state-sanctioned discrimination against religious minorities.

“Children can be made to feel that they’re marginalized, made to feel like outsiders or ostracized by their peers if there’s any indication that they don’t believe in the majority religion,” Luchenitser said. “These actions threaten the most vulnerable among schoolchildren in these states.”

Still, Luchenitser said he thinks that Supreme Court precedent remains a sound bulwark against Christian nationalists’ latest legal attacks, particularly in the Louisiana Ten Commandments lawsuit. After all, the Court already issued a ruling in a near-identical case, Stone v. Graham. In 1980, the justices found that a Kentucky statute requiring public schools to post copies of the Ten Commandments was unconstitutional and violated the First Amendment.

Why, then, might state legislators attempt to blatantly defy such clear constitutional protections? Luchenitser said Louisiana’s legislation was likely “passed with the intent of trying to trigger a lawsuit” that would make its way through the federal courts, in the hopes that SCOTUS would eventually take it up and overturn the Stone precedent. Indeed, Louisiana has already appealed the district court’s ruling to the 5th Circuit.

“We think the Supreme Court continues to recognize the fundamental principle that public school students should not have religion forced upon them in public schools,” Luchenitser said. “But maybe we’re overly optimistic.”

A report by the Center for American Progress, a progressive policy institute, called the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, “rogue.” In recent years, the 5th Circuit, which oversees Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi, has issued a series of decisions that have “allowed extremist lower court judges to issue sweeping, politically fraught rulings.” This approach, the report’s authors write, “has helped undermine the separation of powers, established precedent, and principled legal reasoning to accomplish right-wing policy goals.”

The far right groups pushing for legislative change are also well-funded and highly coordinated. The First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit Christian law firm, raked in nearly $25 million last year and has served as co-counsel in several major Supreme Court victories, including Kennedy v. Bremerton. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a far right Christian advocacy organization classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBTQ hate group, says it is involved in “more than 1,000 active legal matters” at any given moment. Both, First Liberty Institute and the Alliance Defending Freedom, serve on the advisory board of Project 2025, a conservative coalition led by the Heritage Foundation that has drafted an extremist policy blueprint for Trump’s second term.

“There is a much larger, broader movement that is attempting to erode and destroy the wall between church and state using schools as the vehicle,” said Colleen McCarty, founding executive director of the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, a co-counsel in the lawsuit against Oklahoma state superintendent Walters, the Oklahoma department of education and the members of the state’s school board.

In a CNN interview last week, Walters decried “gaslighting from the left” and “hatred for this country pushed by woke teachers’ unions.” In addition to his Bible education mandate, Walters has demanded that Oklahoma schools screen a video for students that begins with him praying for president-elect Trump, and he recently announced that the first batch of Trump-endorsed “God Bless the USA” Bibles had arrived for public instruction.

“President Trump has a clear mandate: He wants prayer back in school. He wants radical leftism out of the classroom,” Walters told the CNN host. “His agenda is crystal clear.”

Correction: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Alex Luchenitser’s name, and to clarify that Americans United and Oklahoma Appleseed are representing plaintiffs in their legal cases, rather than plaintiffs themselves.