10 Commandements laws are about education, not evangelization

In an op-ed for Kentucky Today, I defended Louisiana's new law mandating the display of the 10 Commandments in classrooms in K12 schools and public universities:

Making sure every student is aware of the Ten Commandments is not an attempt to indoctrinate them into a specific religious belief. As evangelism, such an effort would be clumsy and ineffective. The Ten Commandments law is, rather, about forming students with an accurate historical understanding of the American system of government and its patrimony...

Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law, like Kentucky’s before it, does not infringe on any student’s right to believe whatever they choose about any religion. But it does recognize that students need to know the history of their government, and the civilization from which it emerged, and the religious ideas that informed it.

Read the whole thing here.