By Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, Voices Contributor
Sitting across from Vice President JD Vance last week, Joe Rogan asked a question about a new Texas law: if the state can post the Ten Commandments in every classroom, why not Buddhist scripture, why not the Quran?
He’d asked it before when speaking with Matthew McConaughey a year earlier over the same statute, crediting Democratic state Rep. James Talarico both times for the argument that requiring one faith’s text amounts to state coercion.
Rogan’s question is based on a misunderstanding of where the law stands. It’s an honest mistake, given that most of us were taught that anything “religious” has no place in the public square. Fortunately, this Supreme Court has been steadily clarifying things.
For decades, courts applied a fuzzy standard from a 1971 Supreme Court case, Lemon v. Kurtzman, when reviewing claims that the government was violating the Establishment Clause. The Supreme Court finally threw that test out in 2022 in a case involving a football coach who prayed after games. This spring, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting en banc noted this shift when it upheld the Texas law. Judge Kyle Duncan traced the logic plainly: the 1980 Supreme Court case that struck down an identical Kentucky law was built entirely on the now-discarded Lemon test, so once Lemon fell, that precedent no longer stood.
The Texas law doesn’t tell any church what to believe and doesn’t tax anyone to support clergy, a far cry from the “wall of separation” people keep invoking from a 1802 letter Jefferson wrote to a group of Baptists, language that never made it into the Constitution itself. The Ten Commandments are carved into the Supreme Court’s own courtroom, for the same reason they’re now on Texas classroom walls: not as religious instruction, but as a source of our nation’s legal heritage.
What about Rogan’s “why not Buddhist scripture” question? Nothing stops a legislature from adding the Tripitaka to the wall too; that’s a legislative choice, not something the Constitution forbids.
The ACLU, representing a group of Texas parents challenging the law, makes an additional claim: that the specific wording Texas requires favors Protestantism. The Fifth Circuit was right to stay out of that fight, since deciding whose Bible translation counts as more “authentically” religious isn’t a job for judges. But Professor Mark David Hall, Rabbi Stuart Halpern, and I offered a response earlier this year. The text posted in these classrooms traces back to an interfaith committee a Minnesota judge assembled in the 1950s, deliberately stripped of the verse numbering that had made earlier monuments look distinctly Catholic; the word “Thou” shows up just as often in Jewish and Catholic translations as in the King James Bible most people picture. A federal appeals court called this exact wording nonsectarian in 2005, and the Supreme Court let a nearly identical version stand at the Texas Capitol two decades ago.
The deeper confusion is the one that matters most. Talarico and the ACLU also claim that the display is coercive, that it violates the free exercise of religion. It doesn’t, because it can’t. Coercion and invitation aren’t the same thing.
Coercion compels belief, which is why the Supreme Court struck down mandatory classroom prayer in 1962, and why it sided last year with Maryland parents who weren’t allowed to opt their kids out of LGBT-themed classroom instruction. In both cases, the state was directing belief with no way out. A poster carries no such mandate. It asks nothing of anyone, because there’s nothing to excuse anyone from. A student can look at “Thou shalt not steal” and think about property, or nothing at all. A wall poster can’t force belief on anyone. But the absence of coercion isn’t the absence of meaning.
A display can still function as an invitation, a quiet, unforced encounter with a text that has shaped law and conscience for thousands of years, and there’s nothing improper about a public space also being a place where old and important ideas get a hearing. Inviting someone to consider a truth is different from forcing them to accept one, and Talarico’s mistake is treating the first like the second.
Rogan’s instinct, that public schools shouldn’t pick a favorite religion, is aimed at a target that doesn’t exist here. The state isn’t picking a religion; it’s remembering one strand of where law came from. The vice president had the better argument, but the point isn’t scoring one off a popular podcaster. It’s that the doctrine here is more settled and less alarming than the shorthand most people were taught.
Nobody is asking Texas classrooms to make converts. They’re asking them to leave a door open, a much less alarming thing to hang on a wall.
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is director of the Conscience Project and recipient of the Religious Freedom Institute’s 2025 Religious Freedom Impact Award.