WallBuilders has conscripted the Ten Commandments into a Christian-nationalist legislative project that the commandments themselves, read in plain English, do not authorize — and the Texas public schools, by the operation’s own design, are where it is being taught.
I want to name the specific apparatus, because the apparatus is the point.
David Barton runs WallBuilders out of Aledo, Texas, twenty minutes west of Fort Worth. The August Wall Street Journal profile described the vault: climate-controlled, bulletproof-doored, a hundred thousand Revolutionary-era artifacts, what Barton claims is a lock of George Washington’s hair among them. Barton told the Journal what he tells every room: “I own the stuff. So I know more about this history than most of the professors.” From that vault he runs an annual closed-door legislative conference with his son Tim, advising hundreds of state legislators and consulting with the Speaker of the House and the White House. The Journal documents the legislative pipeline: WallBuilders drafts model legislation with the same phrasing — conspicuous, durable, donated — and state legislators introduce it.
Texas state Sen. Phil King worked with WallBuilders and a religious-liberty law firm to draft the Ten Commandments classroom-display bill now in Texas law. Louisiana state Rep. Dodie Horton drafted her bill after a WallBuilders email about the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton; Tim Barton testified at her committee hearing, bringing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century schoolbooks to make the case. By the Journal’s tally, four states have enacted the bill into law — Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Alabama — and more than twenty have introduced it.
In Texas, the operation is not only legislative. The Texas State Board of Education appointed Barton to help plan the social-studies curriculum for more than five million Texas public-school students. A memo he wrote this year, reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, instructed teachers to preserve third-grade lessons on “Moses, Hebrew slavery, the Exodus, and the Promised Land.” Much of his input made it into the final standards. Five million Texas children, this fall, will be taught a Bible reading drafted by a man running a Christian-nationalist legislative operation. Two dozen Texas families, represented by the ACLU and allied groups, are now asking the Supreme Court to review the Texas display law, after the Fifth Circuit’s April 22 affirmance allowed the displays to stand. That case will land somewhere.
This is not a religious-liberty fight in the abstract. It is a specific breach. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. A state-compelled display of a covenant document addressed to the Israelites, framed by a state-approved consultant as the foundation of “the Christian nation,” placed in every public-school classroom by statute, with the historical evidence curated by a single private organization whose founder claims to know more than the professors because he owns the artifacts — that is the establishment of a particular religious reading under state authority. The operation does not call it that. The structure is that.
Now let me show you what the operation has done to the text.
Open your Bible to Exodus 20. Before you read any of the commandments, read the first two verses:
“And God spoke all these words: I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.”
That preamble is the whole thing. The commandments that follow are not addressed to the United States of America — a nation that did not exist. They are not addressed to a civilization, a culture, or a political class. They are addressed to a specific people — the Israelites — whom God has just delivered from bondage. They are a covenant document, given at Sinai, on the wilderness side of the Exodus, before there is a kingdom, before there is a temple-state, before there is a capital-centered apparatus of any kind. The plain English of the preamble locates the commandments inside a liberation event. The commandments are about how a delivered people love the God who delivered them and the neighbor that delivered people live among.
What WallBuilders has made those same ten verses say, in the model legislation now law in four states, is something the preamble will not bear. The commandments have been turned into a national-identity prop. The Exodus has been turned into a heritage claim. Sinai has been turned into a State House. The ger in your village — the widow, the orphan, the stranger at the gate — has been turned into the patriotic parent who wants the tablets back on the wall. The chasm is the column.
The prophet Jeremiah saw this move seven centuries before Christ. In his Temple sermon, God speaks through Jeremiah to the people who had come to believe the building itself protected them: “Do not trust in deceptive words and say, ‘This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD!’ Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal, and then come and stand before me in this house, which bears my Name, and say, ‘We are safe’ — safe to do all these detestable things?” (Jeremiah 7:4, 9–10). Substitute “Christian nation” for “temple of the LORD” and the structural parallel lands clean. The prophet’s answer to WallBuilders is not the destruction of the United States — I want to be plain about that — but it is the destruction of the reading.
The captured operation will say it has a Bible basis. Jesus, asked which commandment was greatest, answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. … Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37–40). The neighbor, in the plain reading, is the one bleeding in the road in Luke 10 and the day laborer in James 5:4 whose unpaid wages “are crying out” against the operator. The weightier matters of the law, in Matthew 23, are “justice, mercy and faithfulness.” A wall display does not keep the Sabbath. A wall display does not love the neighbor. A wall display does not bear false witness or refuse to covet. It does nothing. It sits there. The Sermon on the Mount says blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness — not blessed are those who mandate a wall display in a third-grade classroom. The Kingdom of God, in the Bible’s plain language, runs through mercy, not marble.
The captured operation does not need to lose this argument on the Bible alone. The founders, who the operation claims as its authority, lost it on their own documents. Read the Treaty of Tripoli, ratified unanimously by the Senate and signed by President John Adams in 1797: “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” Read Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, in which he calls the First Amendment “an act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.” Read James Madison’s 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance against religious taxation, written three years before the Constitution was ratified. The founders were not the Christian-nationalist monolith WallBuilders markets. They were a divided, often conflicted, sometimes devout and sometimes skeptical group who deliberately chose not to entangle the new federal government with a religious test. John Fea, who chairs the history department at Messiah University — a Christian college — told the Journal that “for Barton, the past is instrumentalized for the present.” The historian at the Christian college sees it. The captured operation does not want to see it.
I have lived inside this version of the story. I taught it. I bought the WallBuilders Founders’ Bible when it came out. I sat at women’s-ministry tables where Barton’s books were passed hand to hand. I wrote letters. I voted. I tithed to the operation that was, in retrospect, already teaching me to read the Bible backward. So when I read what WallBuilders has built, I do not read it as a stranger. I read it as the thing I was being made into.
What the Journal record of the WallBuilders legislative operation does document, specifically, is Barton’s office advising state legislators on restrictions on in vitro fertilization and on the U.S.–Israel alliance. The five million Texas students receiving the social-studies standards Barton helped draft will find the Exodus and the Promised Land in their third-grade curriculum. They will not find Amos 5:21–24 in those standards — “I hate, I despise your religious festivals… But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.” They will not find the widow and the orphan of Isaiah 1, the “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow” (Isaiah 1:16–17). The model legislation’s enumerated purposes do not include those verses. The curriculum Barton’s memo preserved does not require them. The wall display does not require them. The captured operation’s Bible, in other words, has a particular shape, and the shape leaves the weightier matters out.
I want to say the same thing to every Evangelical who has sat through the Founders’ Bible conference and bought the laminated placards and gone home feeling they had done their part for the republic. I have been you. I have been in those rooms. I have made those calls. The Bible I read now tells me I was being made into something the prophets would have named. The Bible WallBuilders is reading tells them they are patriots. The chasm is the column. The people on both sides of it are people I love.
And I will name the same hermeneutic discipline I have named on this page before. If a religious-progressive political operation tomorrow conscripted the Sermon on the Mount to defend a partisan program, I would name that operation the same way. The shape of bad-faith biblical conscription does not depend on which coalition is doing the conscription. The Bible does not become a Democratic prop any more than it becomes a Republican one. The Bible reads the operator; the operator does not read the Bible.
The Ten Commandments are still on the page. They have always been on the page. They will be on the page after the WallBuilders vault has been donated to some other Texas museum and the model bill has been overtaken by the next model bill and the conference has moved on to its next project. The commandments have not authorized what has been done in their name. They do not authorize a Christian-nationalist prop. They do not authorize the conflation of Sinai and the State House. They do not authorize closing the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces — which is what Matthew 23:13 names, the same Matthew 23 that WallBuilders’ pastors never preach against their own operation.
The commandments are still on the page. They are still in plain English. They are still waiting to be read.