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Have you heard the good news that the Ten Commandments will soon be displayed across classrooms in multiple states? Many people think these legislations fly in the face of laws written to separate church and state, but there are no laws — and never have been — that separate the church and public spaces in America.
Are you shocked? You should be! The anti-faith lobbies within lawmaking have done an amazing job convincing at least four generations of Americans that they cannot practice their faith in the spaces their taxes fund.
Libraries, schools, universities, so many different public spaces are now in for a rude awakening: not only is the short-held precedent that allowed us to remove Christ from our classrooms falling apart at the federal level, but states are taking serious action to educate and implement His word in public spaces.
Listen to Lakepointe Church Pastor Josh Howerton discuss this issue in a recent post on social media:
Why Do People Think The U.S. Separates Church and State?
In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-to-3 in favor of high school football coach Joseph Kennedy’s right to pray at the 5-yard line at the end of each game. The decision overturned a short-held legal precedent regarding the constitutionality of public religious displays. It’s believed the Ten Commandments were a prominent part of American education for almost three centuries prior to 1980, when the prior legal precedent was held against it.
“Respect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse Republic. Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a personal religious observance, based on a mistaken view that it has a duty to suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech. The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination. Mr. Kennedy is entitled to summary judgment on his religious exercise and free speech claims,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch at the time.
The first purely American educational textbook “New England Primer” was published by Benjamin Harris in Boston in 1690, featuring an in-depth section on the Ten Commandments.
In the context of American history, 45 years, from 1980 to 2025, without having the Ten Commandments in our education system doesn’t seem like a very long time, especially when you take into account it was part of our curriculum from at least 1690 to 1980 (that’s 290 years). But ask yourself: how do the last 45 years or so compare to the previous 290?
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