Sen. Keith Kelley, R-Anniston, listens to a budget presentation in the Alabama Statehouse on Feb. 6, 2024. Kelley said Wednesday he and Rep. Mark Gidley, R-Hokes Bluff, plan to bring back a mandate for public schools to display the Ten Commandments in the 2026 Legislative session.(Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)
A mandate to display the Ten Commandments in public schools did not pass in the 2025 Alabama legislative session, and court challenges are likely if it ever does.
HB 178, sponsored by Rep. Mark Gidley, R-Hokes Bluff, and SB 166, sponsored by Sen. Keith Kelley, R-Anniston, would have required public K-12 schools to display an 11-by-14-inch poster of the Ten Commandments in common areas and classrooms where American history is taught.
The House passed its version of the bill 81-11 on April 22, but it never received a final vote from the Senate. Kelley said in an interview Wednesday that he and Gidley will bring the legislation back next year as is.
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“I wished we could have gotten it through the legislature this past session,” Kelley said. “I think we had reached a point where we would have accomplished that.”
Alabama voters in 2018 approved a constitutional amendment allowing the Ten Commandments to be displayed on public property but not mandating such displays. Federal courts have allowed the displays of the Ten Commandments in historical contexts in schools but not as religious or moral displays.
The Louisiana Legislature passed a law in 2024 which, unlike the bills in the Alabama Legislature, required the document to be displayed in all classrooms. A federal court ruled last week that the law is unconstitutional, and violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, prohibiting the government from establishing a state religion or favoring one religion over another.
Despite the difference in the Alabama law, senior counsel Keisha Russell with the First Liberty Institute, a law firm that specializes in “defending religious freedom,” said that if the bill passes next year, it will still be challenged in court and likely deemed unconstitutional. She said in an interview Wednesday that whatever happens to a potential Alabama law will depend on what happens with the Louisiana law.
“I think it’s going to rise or fall based on what happens in this particular case with Louisiana, because the bills are pretty similar no matter what,” she said.
Kelley said he is not worried about an Alabama law being challenged in court, mostly because his legislation does not mandate the display in every classroom and because the intent is the historical context of the biblical text.
“I think ours is sticking with historical content, and so I think we’ll be fine with what we put together and the changes that we’ve made,” Kelley said.
A’Niya Robinson, policy and organizing director of the Alabama American Civil Liberties Union, said the ACLU has been opposed to the legislation from the beginning. She said that because the Ten Commandments is derived from religious text, it is inherently religious, not historical.
“I think that’s a really interesting argument to make, to allege that a document that has text that’s found in the Bible, in some folks’ Bible, is supposedly not religious,” Robinson said in an interview Thursday.
Russell said that requiring the text to be displayed where history is taught would require the text to be in every elementary school classroom and some middle and high school classrooms.
“It’s still going to be virtually everywhere, right? Common areas, lunchrooms, all of that,” Russell said. “I think there’s a better argument to say you’re going to put it in all the classrooms than to say that you’re just going to stick it in like the locker room or the lunchroom, which is a common area. To me, that has less sort of academic value than if it’s in the classroom.”
Robinson said the location of a poster does not make its presence any more constitutional.
“There is still a captive audience there,” she said. “They have to go to school, they have to be in classrooms, and they still are going to have to look and see that poster every day if this bill were to be signed into law.”
Opponents of the legislation argued during public hearings that the version of the Ten Commandments in the bill combines multiple versions of the text and is not historical.
“This bill is a violation of the First Amendment and imposes a certain religious understanding of a certain text that has been hodged-podged together and linguistically abused and has no place in our public schools,” Rev. Julie Conrady, a minister with the Unitarian Universalist Church of Birmingham, said in March.
Kelley said Wednesday that the intent of the bill was manipulated to be religious, and that his intent is solely historical and based on the founding of American law and the Constitution.
“It’s just the manipulation of what the intention is, of what the words are by others is where the conflict comes in,” he said. “Anybody that has learned history from an early age, they learned how it’s influenced us.”
Robinson said that the first amendment was inspired by the founders’ belief that religion should be separate from government.
“If we want to talk about historical importance, then I think it’s important to go back to the founders’ original intent,” she said. “There’s so many different versions of the Ten Commandments depending on what particular faith or translation you subscribe to. So by only posting one version of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, then really you could say that politicians have crafted their own version of the Ten Commandments, and they’re trying to impose it on public school students throughout Alabama.”
The Legislature’s 2026 session is scheduled to begin in January.
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Author: Anna Barrett