Texas AG Ken Paxton encourages students to recite Lord’s Prayer in latest test of church-state separation

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With a new Texas law in effect allowing time for prayer and reading religious texts in public schools, Attorney General Ken Paxton on Tuesday encouraged students to practice the Lord’s Prayer as relayed in the King James Version of the Bible, marking the latest instance of a Texas public official endorsing Christianity over other faiths.

The U.S. Constitution prohibits states from promoting one religion over another, but in a news release asking Texas schools to comply with Senate Bill 11, Paxton called on schoolchildren to consider utilizing prayer time to engage with the Lord’s Prayer “as taught by Jesus Christ.”

“In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” Paxton wrote. “Twisted, radical liberals want to erase Truth, dismantle the solid foundation that America’s success and strength were built upon, and erode the moral fabric of our society. Our nation was founded on the rock of Biblical Truth, and I will not stand by while the far-left attempts to push our country into the sinking sand.”

The attorney general’s endorsement of a Christian prayer in Texas schools comes as he seeks to pick up more conservative support in an effort to unseat U.S. Sen. John Cornyn. It also went out just weeks after a federal judge found a state law requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms unconstitutional.

The attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Texas Tribune on whether Paxton’s messaging violates the Constitution or why Paxton found it appropriate to use state resources to endorse a particular religion.

The Ten Commandments law and SB 11, a law allowing school boards to require their campuses to provide students and staff time to pray and read religious texts every day, were part of a slate of bills during this year’s regular legislative session seeking to infuse more religion into public education and testing the legal limits of church-state separation.

The state also passed a law allowing families to pay for their children’s private, religious education using taxpayer dollars. Before that, the state approved an optional elementary school curriculum filled with lessons on the Bible and Christianity.

Texas Republican lawmakers see the Bible and Christianity as foundational to the country’s educational and legal systems, a belief religious scholars have debunked. But those on the religious right view the current U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority as an ally in their decades-long fight to knock down the church-state wall and allow more Christianity in classrooms.

They specifically point to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton, where the court ruled that a Washington state school district could not prevent a high school football coach from engaging in prayer with students on the 50-yard line after games. Justices said the district’s efforts to discipline the coach and prevent his praying violated his right to free speech and to exercise his religion.

The court also outlined that it would move away from a long-established legal test courts used to determine whether a government was inappropriately promoting or endorsing religion. That test was used in cases like Stone v. Graham, the 1980 Supreme Court decision striking down a Kentucky law requiring the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. Prior to the test, the Supreme Court had also found school-sponsored prayer unconstitutional.

Under Texas’ SB 11, students and employees can decide whether to participate in the prayer period, which cannot substitute instructional time. It requires the attorney general’s office to legally defend any school district that adopts the prayer policy. And it allows the office to recommend “best methods” for a district or school to comply with the law.

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