Analysis | The U.S. decline in religiosity isn’t from a lack of Ten Commandments (2024)

It was eventually revealed that the author of the decision in Stone v. Graham was Justice William J. Brennan Jr. You are probably aware that Brennan is not a sitting justice; he died in 1997. That’s because the determination that the law at issue — passed in Kentucky in 1978 — was unconstitutional came not this week but in the year 1980.

It is worth revisiting because, on Wednesday, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) signed legislation that similarly mandates the placement of copies of the Ten Commandments in schoolrooms. At a signing ceremony, Landry suggested that the impetus was not boosting religion but, instead, bolstering the legal system.

“If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver,” he said, “which was Moses.”

The bottom of each copy of the Ten Commandments placed in Kentucky schools tried the same ploy, insisting that there was a “secular application of the Ten Commandments.” Brennan didn’t buy it.

“The Commandments do not confine themselves to arguably secular matters, such as honoring one’s parents, killing or murder, adultery, stealing, false witness, and covetousness,” his decision read. “Rather, the first part of the Commandments concerns the religious duties of believers: worshipping the Lord God alone, avoiding idolatry, not using the Lord’s name in vain, and observing the Sabbath Day.”

Given the current composition of the Supreme Court, there’s no guarantee that a majority would again object to a state mandating the display of the Ten Commandments. But it does seem clear that the law effected with Landry’s signature is less about ensuring that young Louisianans have a healthy respect for laws than that Louisiana plant an “Appeal to Heaven” flag in support of Christian values. In February, PRRI released state-level analysis of support for the values of Christian nationalism, the idea that the United States should be explicitly Christian. Louisiana had one of the largest densities of support for that concept, in keeping with the state’s densely right-wing politics.

Landry, who took office earlier this year, has politics that match the state. He is Catholic; it seems worth noting that his mother taught religion at a Catholic school. If advocates of the law think that the effect of the law will be to increase the religiosity of Louisiana students, though, they are probably going to be disappointed.

The American National Election Studies (ANES) survey is conducted around federal elections and has since 1948 included a question measuring religious identity. That allows us to see that the percentage of Americans who identify their religion as “other” — that is, not Protestant, Catholic or Jewish — was rising from the mid-1950s until the 1980 Stone v. Graham decision upending Kentucky’s law. Among younger Americans, that increase was steeper.

In 1960, 2 percent of Americans identified as “other,” a category that includes the nonreligious. In 1980, 10.2 percent did. In 2000, 19.5 did. By 2016, it was over a third.

There was a lull in growth in the 1980s, after Stone v. Graham. We see a similar lull in other measures of religiosity, such as the General Social Survey’s question about the theological nature of the Bible. In 1984, about 14 percent of Americans indicated that they thought the Bible was little more than a book of old stories that had no divine connection. By 2022, about a quarter of Americans held that view.

Notice the shift that began in about the year 2000. That’s also reflected by Gallup. Since the late 1970s, the venerable polling firm has regularly asked Americans how important religion is in their lives. From about 2000 on, the percentage of people saying that religion isn’t important has climbed steadily.

This shift is not obviously a function of removing the Ten Commandments from public spaces or the end of prayer in schools. That change followed the Supreme Court’s 1962 Engel v. Vitale decision; conservatives are hoping that the current court might move in the opposite direction.

It seems unlikely, then, that introducing the Ten Commandments into classrooms would suddenly influence a new generation of students to embrace Christianity (which, of course, is not a defense of doing so). But this idea is itself in keeping with current right-wing orthodoxy, which holds that a main reason that young people express more-liberal politics is that they have been unduly brainwashed by nefarious leftists who work as teachers and professors.

For Landry, the move is a great bit of publicity. Civil liberties organizations have already filed suit over the move, something Landry probably won’t hesitate to add to his conservative résumé. In fact, if his endorsem*nt of the policy is at all centered on boosting his own political position, that format of self-promotion itself has a historic precedent. In the mid-1950s, director Cecil B. DeMille partnered with the Fraternal Order of Eagles to have copies of the Ten Commandments put up all over the country to promote his film of the same name.