Emily Roth’s daughter came home from kindergarten last year and told her younger sibling about heaven. It wasn’t something she’d learned from her parents, who are raising her in a non-religious home.
Roth couldn’t help but wonder if it was the Ten Commandments hanging on the walls of every classroom in Spring Branch ISD that prompted a discussion, either with a teacher or fellow student, about eternal life.
The Ten Commandments mandate was approved last summer by the state Legislature but has been challenged in court numerous times. Some districts named in federal lawsuits were permitted to pause on hanging the banners while litigation was pending. Spring Branch ISD put its posters up in October 2025.
Roth says she has many grievances with the state law but a major one is that the state law is destroying the idea that Houston is a diverse community open to all families.
“At the most basic level, public school needs to be a place where kids feel like they belong,” she says. “At these young ages when kids are developing, their environment really shapes who they are. Putting up a poster on the wall that is exclusionary is not OK. Assigning the concept to one religion and saying, ‘The one and only way that you can be a good person is through this religion that we’re not a part of,’ it makes the kid feel left out.”
So Roth joined forces with Audrey Nath, a parent of two Houston ISD elementary students, and Sanjam Kaur Sohal, a Sikh woman whose kids go to school in Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, and they sued the state of Texas and the districts where their children attend.
Unlike the other legal challenges to Senate Bill 10, this one relies on Texas law rather than the U.S. Constitution. “Every previous challenge has been a federal one,” Roth said. “Every one has failed. This case raises no federal claim at all.”
In the previous challenges, 16 families sued 11 school districts, including several in the Houston area, in July 2025. A federal judge blocked the law in the targeted districts a month later. Then the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled earlier this year that Senate Bill 10 does not violate the Constitution and can be enforced, meaning districts with donated posters have to put them up.
Roth and her comrades are suing under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by the Legislature in 1999 and written to keep the government out of how Texans practice their faith. It requires the state to “prove a compelling reason for its actions and demonstrate that there was no gentler way to do it,” Roth says.
They are also suing under the Parental Rights Amendment that Texas voters approved in November 2025, which says parents, not the state, direct how their children are raised.
That’s important to Nath, who, like Roth, is a product of Spring Branch ISD and remembers a time when she felt different because she is the child of Chinese and Indian immigrants. Her father practices Jainism and observes Hindu holidays. He has a small statue of Shiva, the god of destruction and rebirth, in his home.
“I remember being ‘othered’ and thinking that if I didn’t bow my head for a prayer, the teachers might not nominate me for a scholarship,” says Nath, who graduated from Memorial High School in 2001.
“We should be proud of our diversity,” she says. “Houston is the melting pot of melting pots. My parents got here in the ‘70s because this is where the jobs were and where they could get an education. It’s the American dream.”
The Lawsuit
According to the 21-page lawsuit filed July 30 in Harris County District Court, the plaintiffs disagree with the religious content of the state-mandated display of the Ten Commandments; believe the Texas Education Code infringes upon and undermines their right to direct their children’s religious upbringing; and believe their minor children will feel pressured to adopt or revere the Ten Commandments to avoid disfavor from peers or school officials.”
The lawsuit further states: “If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments. However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective.”
The Ten Commandments mandate and recent adoption of Bible-based curriculum is absolutely an effort by Texas Republicans to ensure that youth learn about Christianity during their formative years, says Nancy Sims, a political science lecturer at the University of Houston.
“It’s not just posting the Ten Commandments but it’s in the curriculum and demanding that Bible passages be taught,” Sims says. “Last time I checked, that’s what Sunday school was for.”
Nath agrees and says she wasn’t planning to have conversations with her kids about what it means to covet a neighbor’s manservant, which Nath interprets to be a discussion about slavery. But now, because of the religious displays, those conversations are likely to occur among parents and their public school students.
“I would hate to see classroom discourse among kids devolve into what a bunch of Twitter comments look like,” Nath says.
Roth, who is recognized as the “lead plaintiff,” says because her lawsuit was filed after her child had already been in a classroom with the posters, she can claim that damage has already occurred.
“I have talked to [my daughter] about the Ten Commandments, which is certainly not something I expected to do with my 5-year-old because it’s not the set of morals that our family runs on,” Roth says. “I try not to talk down about religion because religion is meaningful and beautiful for families everywhere, and that’s fine. I’m not anti-religion.”
“She brought home this thankfulness flower after Thanksgiving that had’ God’ written on one of the petals,” Roth added. “There’s definitely the chance that it was just a short word and easy to write because she’s 5, but it is certainly a topic that comes up at school.”
Bluebonnet Curriculum
Houston, Conroe, New Caney, Liberty and Santa Fe ISDs are among more than 600 districts and charter school networks in Texas that have adopted the Bluebonnet Learning curriculum for the 2026-27 school year.
Bluebonnet’s Reading Language Arts curriculum includes Bible passages, and students can opt out of those lessons, but they may appear on the STAAR test, according to advocates for church-state separation. The program offers a $60-per-student incentive. The HISD Board of Managers adopted the controversial program in June and was told it would get an extra $3.3 million for the district for doing so.
Shortly after that June board meeting, it was revealed that the state would have to spend more than $8.4 million in taxpayer funds to correct thousands of errors in Bluebonnet Learning texts.
Wil Jeudy is an urgent care physician, board member of the nonprofit news outlet Progress Texas and founder of Secular Houston, an advocacy group that helps to promote political candidates based on their position on the separation of church and state and provide a unified response to the growing influence of Christian nationalism across all levels of government.
Jeudy told the Houston Press that Christian nationalism “is kind of the bogeyman that wants to tear down the wall between church and state.
“If they succeed, then we become a theocracy and everything we enjoy about the United States of America goes away,” he says. “The founding fathers wanted no part of state-sponsored church. They knew what happens with that: oppression, violence, blood in the streets. They did a really good job of separating government and religion.”
Jeudy, 53, grew up in south Texas and was a Christian but began questioning his beliefs as a young adult and now refers to himself as an atheist and a humanist, which he describes as “the golden rule without the supernatural.”
“Christian nationalists conflate themselves with Christians, and nothing could be farther from the truth,” he says. “All those red letters in the Bible [considered to be the words of Jesus], Christian nationalism is 180 degrees from that. Christian nationalism is a political movement. It has nothing to do with religion, Jesus or morality. “
“The danger is that they want to tear the Constitution up,” he added. “Their vision of what America should be, with the state imposing its favored religion on everybody, is absolutely unconstitutional. In decades past, we’ve had pretty good guardrails of preventing these people from doing what they wanted to do. Now they hold power at all levels of government.”
The debate over “Christianizing” public schools also brings up concerns among parents that not all denominations of Christianity offer the same teachings. There are different versions of the Ten Commandments. Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant iterations of the Old Testament passage are ordered differently and offer varied wording,, Nath says.
“I think we could be inviting bullying and implying that one Christian religion is the right one because it’s the one on the wall,” she says. “You see that on the wall and, as a little kid, you think that’s what they’re telling you to do, but what about my kids’ Muslim friends and Hindu friends? Hinduism has a bunch of gods. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“I worry that, by putting a poster up of one religion’s teachings, that can imply a Christian nationalist mindset, which basically is, in my interpretation, an idea that one religion supersedes all the others,” she added. “This country was founded on religious freedom.”
Additionally, while not all public school districts have adopted the Bluebonnet curriculum, they do have to follow standards set by the State Board of Education, which voted in June to adopt a Bible-infused curriculum in which Christianity is taught as part of social studies and Bible passages are on the required reading list for each grade.
Sims says she goes to church most Sundays and is a Christian, but she doesn’t necessarily want her child learning about someone else’s version of Jesus.
“My child learned to love immigrants, gay people and people of all colors,” she says, noting that she’s not sure some of the state’s high-ranking Republican officials feel the same.
In March 2026, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick created the Texas Senate Select Committee on Religious Liberty, saying its mission is to “find ways to educate Texans on their God-given religious liberty rights” and ensure those rights are not infringed upon.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has suggested that Bible passages like the Ten Commandments are an important part of American history, and that the posters don’t qualify as coercive because they’re displayed rather than taught. Patrick, Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott, all Republicans, are on the November ballot, either seeking re-election or, in Paxton’s case, a new elected office.
What’s the motive of the politicians pushing the Christian nationalist agenda? Jeudy says it comes down to power.
“They are wrapping themselves in this ‘patina of goodness.’ For odious candidates running for office here in Texas, they’re horrible human beings, but if they wrap themselves in this cloak of goodness, their chances of getting elected are better because of this myth that Christian nationalism affords,” he says. “This is not about them trying to educate children about Jesus or make them morally better. It’s a power play.”
Nath agrees that there may be a small percentage of people who “feel seen” by legislation that espouses what they believe to be Christian values, and there may be “an electoral advantage” for the candidates who are pushing it.
Back to Public School, Not Sunday School
Nath, a former candidate for HISD school board and Houston City Council, has a “Go Away Miles” sign in her front yard, signifying her displeasure with HISD Superintendent Mike Miles, who is named in the lawsuit along with Paxton and Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath.
Nath says she didn’t set out to sue the district but was approached by a team of attorneys and is friends with the other two plaintiffs. She says she believes her kids deserve to be educated in an environment where they feel safe and accepted.
Why not pull her kids out and put them in a private school or charter that hasn’t adopted the Bluebonnet curriculum? Nath, a pediatric neurologist, says she wants her children to grow up in a diverse environment and doesn’t want them to think everyone’s parents are doctors.
Roth didn’t want to sue the state either. But when she got a letter from her child’s kindergarten last year saying that the posters were going up on the walls, she responded, “Like hell they are.” She sent a letter to the district and went through an official grievance process. Her appeals were denied at two hearings, and then she went before the entire school board.
“They had an attorney opposing me and denied my request to remove the Ten Commandments posters,” she says. “I also requested that if they can’t remove the Ten Commandments posters to adopt an inclusion policy. Both were denied unanimously.”
The moms demanded in their lawsuit that the Ten Commandments displays be taken down before school starts, but that’s unlikely to happen. HISD goes back to school today, Monday, August 10. Cy-Fair ISD returns on August 12, and Spring Branch ISD starts August 13.
Cy-Fair parents were emailed last week and told that the donated posters were going up due to an appeals court ruling that the displays are constitutional. Nath said she called her children’s school on August 5 and was told the posters weren’t up yet and she wasn’t sure if they’d be there by the time the first bell rings.
The plaintiffs in the Ten Commandments case appeared before Harris County District Court Judge Nathan Milliron on Friday, August 7, requesting a temporary restraining order to halt the poster displays. Milliron denied the request and said the law will remain in effect while the case proceeds.
Roth says not only are her kids getting exposed to teachings she doesn’t want them to learn but the state mandates also put teachers in an uncomfortable position when specific questions are asked.
“Our daughter was in kindergarten last year and was learning to read,” Roth says. “The words ‘kill,’ ‘adultery’ and ‘manservant’ are on the walls. It really upsets me because people say it’s just a poster. As a 5-year-old, the concept of people killing people is not something she’s developmentally ready to process and certainly not from school.”
When her son was in the first grade, Nath and her husband discovered he was dyslexic. “He turned in a blank sheet of paper for a spelling test,” she says, noting that kids already feel different sometimes and don’t need another layer added to the insecurity. “It can be hard enough just being a kid and trying to find your way,” she says.
Megan Hassan, lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said in a statement that the plaintiffs didn’t want a legal battle with the state. “They wanted a poster removed from a classroom wall. That should never have required a lawsuit,” she said.
When the Press asked Roth if she thinks Texas Republicans are trying to Christianize public schools, she says, “I can only give my opinions, but it sure seems like they’re trying to make public school uncomfortable for students who are not Christian.”
