The wall that protects us all

My father was from a Belgian and German Catholic family. When he was 5 his father died and the church arranged for his young widowed mother to work as a housekeeper for a priest in Las Cruces, New Mexico — a long way from Portland, Oregon, where the family lived. In Las Cruces — the Crosses — my grandmother was raped repeatedly by the priest who also gave my father brutal beatings. Though he spoke bitterly of these things, my father never abandoned the Church.

My mother was from a devout Norwegian Lutheran family — her grandfather was a minister. One member of the family was a Sephardic Jew who’d fled persecution on the Iberian Peninsula, going first to Amsterdam, then to Norway, where she was forced to convert to Christianity in order to marry. “Your great-grandmother never accepted Christianity,” my mother often told me. When I then asked her how she could embrace Martin Luther’s teachings given his hateful writings on the Jewish people, she said, “The truth of a doctrine is not negated by the limitations of an individual.”

Another of my great-grandmothers was a Sami who held to long-standing Indigenous beliefs in a time when European Norwegians were striving to eradicate Sami lifeways. I picture my Sami and Sephardic great-grandmothers sitting out back, sharing a meal of smoked reindeer and eggplant with chickpeas.

This is the religious world that has shaped me and led me to be what some of my friends jokingly call a Unitarian Pantheist Buddhist. It’s a rather small church, though I am surprised to find how many of its faithful I meet.

The vast mosaic of religious belief that is a hallmark of the United States has been protected by a long-standing commitment to the separation of church and state, a foundational pillar of both religious freedom and of democracy for all. More personally, the separation of church and state has protected me, especially now in a time of the virulent mixing of fundamentalist Christianity and white nationalism. This is, to a great degree, why I find the attempt to undermine the separation of church and state to be deeply unsettling.

In 2025, the Texas Legislature passed a bill signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbot requiring that all Texas public elementary and secondary schools “display in each classroom of the school a durable poster or framed copy of the Ten Commandments.” The text must be “as provided in the bill” on a poster “at least 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall” and “in a size and typeface legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.”

While the 2025 Texas law was overturned in two court rulings, it was upheld on April 21, 2026, by a 9-8 vote in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that requiring display of the Ten Commandments neither constitutes government endorsement of religion nor violates the separation of church and state. If I didn’t live in a time when disingenuousness might be called the law of the land, I’d say this ruling was disingenuous beyond my capacity to believe.

Even more worrisome is the fact that Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a member of the recently created U.S. Religious Liberty Commission, has said that the concept of a separation of church and state in our country is “the biggest lie that’s been told in America since our founding.”

Thomas Jefferson, quoting the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, wrote, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.” The separation of church and state as a protection of religious freedom and liberty has been repeatedly addressed and upheld in our courts over the past 200 years, including in the Supreme Court’s 1879 Reynolds v. United States ruling that Jefferson’s words “may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the [First] Amendment,” and in its subsequent 1947 Everson v. Board of Education ruling when Justice Hugo Black wrote, “In the words of Thomas Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect a wall of separation between church and state.”

We would be kidding ourselves to imagine that the mandatory posting of a given text of the Ten Commandments will not be felt as propaganda and coercion by many students, parents, teachers and community members. What if instead of posting only the Ten Commandments, we posted an array of texts from religious traditions of all kinds? We could post texts from Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Zoroastrianism. Or from Lakota, Arapaho, Crow and Cheyenne beliefs. Or from the people with whom I lived for some years — the Tlingit and Tsimshian. 

This is exciting — the walls of our classrooms will be covered with texts from the world’s faith traditions. The windows, the doors, the blackboards covered, too; a classroom record of the human longing to understand our lives, our fellows and the invisible mysteries beyond us.