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Indiana lawmakers have advanced a bill allowing school districts to permit the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms and elsewhere — but teachers would be prohibited from reading it aloud in front of students.
Lawmakers also stopped short of requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in all public school classrooms and libraries, as the original bill proposed.
Under HB 1086, which advanced out of the House Education Committee Tuesday along party lines, school libraries would also be required to keep a copy of the Ten Commandments, and students would be allowed to cite the text in their work without consequence. Districts could also display the text elsewhere in school buildings and at events.
If passed, the bill could embroil Indiana in an ongoing legal fight across the country over the display of the Ten Commandments in schools. While recent laws requiring the display of the text in other states have been struck down, the issue is once again under review in a federal appeals court.
Moreover, critics of HB 1086 said giving Indiana districts permission to display the Ten Commandments rather than a mandate would effectively shift the legal burden from the state to school districts.
But the Indiana School Boards Association, which expressed a neutral position on the bill, said Indiana schools already have permission to display on their property an “object containing the words of the Ten Commandments,” along with “other documents of historical significance that have formed and influenced the United States legal or governmental system.”
Supporters of the bill said the Ten Commandments are commonly posted in public and in government buildings, including in the U.S. Supreme Court. They said many of the country’s founding documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are steeped in an understanding of the text.
“These are just kind of the basic underpinnings of morality within Western civilization that really we should all support and want to get behind within our culture,” said Ryan McCann, executive director of the Indiana Family Institute.
Supporters of the bill also said the Ten Commandments teach students character education, and that they will be accountable for their actions to a supreme being.
But the bill’s critics, who outnumbered supporters at Tuesday’s hearing on the bill, said the key difference between schools and other government buildings is that students are compelled to attend schools.
And there’s a clear distinction between student-initiated religious expression and school actions that could be seen as coercive and in violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, like posting the Ten Commandments, said Samantha Bresnahan, senior policy specialist at the ACLU of Indiana.
Religious leaders who spoke in opposition to the bill said that critically, the bill does not specify which version of the Ten Commandments would be available in Indiana schools. Some versions are specific to different faiths and contain key language differences, they said.
Moreover, the task of interpreting the Ten Commandments belongs to faith communities, which can best derive meaning from the text, said Timothy McNinch, an assistant professor of the Hebrew Bible at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis.
“How are Hoosier first graders supposed to understand on their own what to make of commands about adultery or graven images or Sabbath-keeping or coveting your neighbor’s wife?” he said. “Posting without interpretation transforms the commandments from a meaningful text into an abstract symbol … that seems to signal our preference for Christian scriptures to the exclusion of sacred texts of other faiths, even the ones that communicate the same moral values that we hope our children acquire.”
HB 1086 is moving to a full vote in the House, where lawmakers must pass bills by Thursday in order to send them to the Senate.
Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.
