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On Tuesday, the nation’s most reactionary appeals court allowed Texas to install the King James version of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom. By a 9–8 vote, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas did not violate the First Amendment by exposing students to the state’s chosen scripture all day, every day, gutting the constitutional separation of church and state in the process. What’s most remarkable about the decision, though, is not its support for theocracy, but its direct defiance of the Supreme Court. In 1980, justices struck down a law virtually identical to Texas’, forbidding states from placing the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. By flouting this precedent, the 5th Circuit effectively went rogue, daring the Supreme Court to check its brazen disobedience. SCOTUS’ conservative supermajority may be tempted to bless this ruling in light of its own rulings that have steadily allowed religion to encroach on public education. But doing so would come at a steep cost: imperiling its own authority to say what the law is.

Tuesday’s decision in Nathan v. Alamo Heights is the latest chapter in red states’ quest to put Christianity back in their public schools. So far, Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas have enacted laws requiring prominent display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom, with several more states poised to follow suit. Republican lawmakers crafted these statutes to test whether today’s Supreme Court will continue to shield students from sectarian indoctrination. For decades, the court held that Christianity in the classroom violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which bars the government from promoting or endorsing religion. It enforced this principle with extra vigilance in public schools, where children, as a captive audience, are uniquely susceptible to religious coercion.

In 1980’s Stone v. Graham, the justices squarely addressed a Kentucky law that, like Texas’, required the Ten Commandments to be posted in every public school classroom. They found the case so straightforward that they disposed of it summarily, without full briefing or oral argument. Kentucky’s goal, the court held, “is plainly religious in nature,” and the law’s likely effect would........

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