Louisiana’s Ten Commandments Law Isn’t the Only Public School Orthodoxy to Oppose

Louisiana aims to inject religion into public schools by requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed prominently in all public classrooms. Critics have challenged the move, arguing that the new state law infringes on the religious freedom of Louisiana residents by using government power to indoctrinate students with Christian views.

It’s true that this law infringes on religious freedom. Most who oppose religion in public schools, however, don’t raise the same objection to other forms of ideological indoctrination. But the same essential infringement occurs today when public schools treat other viewpoints as orthodoxies, such as schools that push controversial ideas about racism — even when these ideas are not explicitly religious. What’s at stake is not merely religious freedom, but a broader value: intellectual freedom.

Intellectual freedom is the principle that unites all the provisions of the First Amendment: the freedoms of religion, speech, the press, assembly and petition. The Amendment protects each individual’s right to think for himself and advocate his ideas without the interference of physical force. It means that no one, especially government, may coercively prevent the expression of certain thoughts or mandate the expression of other thoughts. As a result, Americans are largely free to think and express their views on all subjects: politics, science, art, etc.

As Louisiana’s critics have pointed out, the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause implies that the government can infringe on intellectual freedom not just by suppressing the expression of certain ideas, but also by promoting its own preferred views (as through the establishment of a church). Louisiana is attempting to do just that by promoting certain people’s religious views to the exclusion of religious views held by other residents. But how, exactly, does this infringe on freedom if it doesn’t outlaw the expression of other views?

The answer that few appreciate is that the state’s promotion of ideas compels citizens (through taxes) to hand over their resources to fund the promotion of ideas that they might otherwise choose not to promote. It gives those ideas a more prominent voice than they would have obtained by individuals’ freely made decisions, leaving them with fewer resources to promote their own ideas (for example, by paying for a private school, already unattainable for most people). Notice the commonality here with outright censorship: the government censors people by depriving them of the material resources used to spread their ideas (e.g., by destroying a printing press or by burning books).

Posting the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms that all taxpayers are forced to support compels all citizens to fund the promotion of religious doctrines as a sort of orthodoxy. Placing them on the classroom wall conveys that they constitute an officially approved doctrine that students should accept without evidence or argument. This is, as critics have rightly pointed out, an obvious attempt to use taxpayer money to indoctrinate students.

But the same is true when the state promotes as orthodoxy other ideological viewpoints, e.g., contemporary ideologies about race, with similar effects.

Consider state-mandated practices like teaching students that society is dominated by a “system” of “white supremacy,” in which everyone is either a participant as an “oppressor” or an “oppressed” victim. Even worse are state-mandated “privilege walk” activities, which require students to affirm their own “oppressor” or “oppressed” status.

Public schools that engage in these activities declare without argument that certain ideas are the right perspective for students to adopt. They encourage students to accept abstract conclusions (e.g., “American society is dominated by a system of white supremacy in which everyone is a participant”) that they lack sufficient knowledge to evaluate. Schools present these ideas as a set of moral dictates to be accepted as dogma, just as posting the Ten Commandments enforces its own religious orthodoxy.

How do these orthodoxies affect intellectual freedom? Taxpayers are compelled to fund the indoctrination of students with ideas about race that they may object to, and face the same predicament about their children’s education as atheists who disagree with the Ten Commandments.

There is no essential difference between the two cases. In both, the government compels citizens to support indoctrinating children with its chosen positions on serious, ideological issues that bear importantly on the direction of people’s lives. If it’s a problem for public schools to urge children to accept Christian ideas on faith, it’s also a problem to do so with other ideas. The fundamental issue is the freedom of citizens to think about these and other important issues, and to decide for themselves what views to fund and teach their kids.

Efforts to promote specific views as orthodoxy are particularly egregious ways that public schools can infringe on intellectual freedom. Not only are taxpayers forced to support ideas they disagree with, they are forced to support the attempts of public schools to pressure students to embrace ideas without evidence or argument, to blindly accept them without thought or understanding. That’s not education; it’s indoctrination.

However, even attempts to teach “just the facts” raise intellectual freedom issues. Decisions about which facts to teach involve judgments that some taxpayers will disagree with, violating their intellectual freedom even when they are mistaken in disagreeing. For example, I regard evolution as a firmly proven scientific theory, and I think a proper high school biology curriculum would include the essential tenets of this theory and their evidentiary basis. But it nonetheless infringes on the freedom of someone who rejects that theory — irrational as his rejection may be — to compel him to fund its teaching. (Such violations are not as destructive when at least some evidence and argumentation is presented, but the essential problem remains.)

But at minimum, everyone who recognizes that Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law egregiously infringes on intellectual freedom should consistently stand against such efforts by also recognizing and opposing attempts in public schools to promote other dogmas, which they themselves may favor.