The Pattern
The National Association of Christian Lawmakers is a nonprofit run by Jason Rapert, a former Arkansas state senator, that writes “model legislation” for state lawmakers to introduce in their home states. The organization does not obscure its purpose. Its own website states the mission without qualification: to bring lawmakers together “in support of clear Biblical principles” and to “propose model statutes, ordinances and resolutions to address major policy concerns from a Biblical world view.” Since December 2024, one of those model policies has directed public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas have since enacted versions of it. Every one of those laws is now in federal court, and as of August 2026 the record on their constitutionality is genuinely unresolved. The rulings point in different directions.
This piece is about that organization’s documented legislative activity and its founder’s public statements. It is not about Christian belief, or about the many Christians and Christian institutions that take no part in this campaign.
What NACL says about itself
NACL’s website states its mission in the organization’s own words: the group exists “to bring federal, state and local lawmakers together in support of clear Biblical principles” by meeting to “propose model statutes, ordinances and resolutions to address major policy concerns from a Biblical world view.” The site describes its broader goal as helping “restore the Judeo-Christian foundation of our nation,” and names Psalm 33:12, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,” as a guiding verse.
Rapert, a Republican who served twelve years in the Arkansas Senate (2011–2023) and founded NACL in 2019 while still in office, has described the same project in his own remarks. Addressing NACL’s 2023 national conference at Liberty University, he told the audience that Genesis instructs believers to “take dominion and authority over everything in the Earth,” and that he takes the instruction literally, according to Right Wing Watch’s report on his remarks. Asked about the label critics apply to that goal, he did not reject it: “if you’re going to call me a Christian nationalist, so be it, baby.” He has told reporters he believes the United States was founded, in his words, “a Judeo-Christian nation very intently,” and at the organization’s 2018 launch he described its purpose as helping elect “Christians, people of faith, running for every single office in this country,” according to Arizona Mirror.
How the model-bill pipeline works
NACL operates through a small number of policy committees and an annual national conference, most recently held at Liberty University in June 2026. Members debate proposed statutes and vote to adopt the ones they favor as “model legislation.” That means template bill text any member-legislator can then introduce, largely unchanged, in their own state. The organization’s site claims dozens of model bills adopted since its first charter meeting in 2020.
The Ten Commandments classroom mandate shows how the pipeline runs in practice. Louisiana enacted its own version, House Bill 71, in June 2024. Five months later, NACL’s national membership formally adopted classroom Ten Commandments displays as model policy at its December 14, 2024 conference, alongside a companion policy permitting schools to release students during the day for outside religious instruction, Bloomberg Government reported. Arkansas’s Act 573, signed April 14, 2025, and Texas’s Senate Bill 10, signed by Governor Greg Abbott on June 21, 2025, both followed the national model-policy vote. The sequence is instructive: a member state moved first, and the national organization then formalized the approach into a template for other states to adopt.
The pipeline is not limited to religious-display bills. In July 2025, NACL’s conference adopted the App Store Accountability Act (which requires app stores to verify a user’s age and secure parental consent before a minor downloads an app) as model legislation, after versions had already become law in Texas, Utah, and Louisiana, according to the Digital Childhood Alliance. In February 2026, the organization adopted a Hospital Price Transparency Act and a companion charity-care requirement as new model bills, framing the target as a hospital-pricing system that “rewards special interests instead of patients,” NACL said in a release. Whatever the subject, the mechanism is the same: debate a bill at conference, adopt it as a template, distribute it to a membership of sitting officials across all 50 states.
Which states actually passed a Ten Commandments law
As of August 2026, three states have enacted classroom-display statutes: Louisiana’s HB 71 (2024), Texas’s SB 10 (2025), and Arkansas’s Act 573 (2025). Oklahoma has not. State Rep. Jim Olsen introduced a bill in 2023 as HB 2962; it died in committee without a hearing, and he refiled a nearly identical version for the 2025–2026 session as HB 1006, which has also stalled without reaching a floor vote, FOX23 reported. Model legislation moving through a national network does not guarantee passage. It guarantees that the same bill gets introduced, and heard, in more places, with mixed results.
The litigation is genuinely unresolved
Every enacted version is now being fought in federal court, and the rulings point in different directions.
Louisiana’s law drew the first and furthest-reaching challenge, Roake v. Brumley. A federal district court blocked it in November 2024, and a three-judge panel (three judges hearing the case, rather than the full court) of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit unanimously affirmed that injunction (the court order blocking the law) in June 2025, the ACLU said. Louisiana then asked the full 18-judge Fifth Circuit to rehear the case en banc, meaning as a full court rather than a three-judge panel, and in February 2026 an 11-7 majority, spread across four separate dissenting opinions, voted to lift the injunction on narrow, procedural grounds, per the court’s own opinion and the Louisiana Illuminator. The majority held it was too early to rule on the law’s constitutionality because no Louisiana school had yet finalized what a compliant display would actually look like; it did not hold the law constitutional on the merits. A cert petition is now pending at the Supreme Court (No. 25-1360, filed June 2026).
Texas’s law fared differently. After a federal district judge blocked enforcement in several school districts, the en banc Fifth Circuit ruled in April 2026, by a closely divided vote, that Senate Bill 10 does not violate the Establishment Clause, the First Amendment provision barring government establishment of religion. The reasoning: the Supreme Court’s 2022 shift away from the “Lemon test” (which had asked whether a law had a secular purpose, avoided the effect of advancing or inhibiting religion, and avoided excessive government entanglement with religion) toward a “history and tradition” standard lets a display with what the court called a dual religious and historical character stand, JURIST reported. That was not the end of it: a separate lawsuit filed under Texas’s own Religious Freedom Restoration Act and a parental-rights amendment, rather than the First Amendment, is now active. A state judge declined to block the law on an emergency basis on July 31, 2026, and a hearing on a preliminary injunction was set for August 17, 2026, the Texas Tribune reported.
Arkansas’s classroom law was first blocked in August 2025, when a federal judge enjoined it in four Northwest Arkansas school districts named in the lawsuit. Two more districts, Conway and Lakeside, were later added to the case, and in March 2026 Judge Timothy Brooks converted that injunction into a permanent one covering all six districts, while the law remains in force everywhere else in the state. In his original order, Judge Brooks, not Deceit, wrote that the law appeared to be part of what he called “a coordinated strategy among several states to inject Christian religious doctrine into public-school classrooms,” according to the Arkansas Advocate.
A separate, older Arkansas law belongs to the same throughline. In 2015, Rapert sponsored Act 1231, authorizing a privately funded Ten Commandments monument on the State Capitol grounds. He was a state senator at the time. The monument was installed in 2018. In April 2026, Chief U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker ruled that Act 1231 and a related 2017 law violated the Establishment Clause and ordered the monument’s removal, the Arkansas Advocate reported. Arkansas is appealing to the Eighth Circuit, and the monument remains standing while that appeal proceeds. Rapert, reacting publicly to the ruling, wrote that supporters “are going to fight to ensure that this monument as well as monuments like it are going to be upheld and standing across the country,” and traveled to the Alabama Capitol, where lawmakers were considering similar legislation.
Read together, the record as of August 2026 does not resolve in either direction. One federal appeals court found a version of the law unconstitutional and was then procedurally, not substantively, overridden. A different federal appeals court upheld a different state’s version on the merits. A federal district court partially blocked a third state’s version. A fourth, older law personally tied to NACL’s founder was struck down and is now on appeal. No court has issued a final, non-appealable ruling on any of them.
Where the courtroom argument and the group’s own language diverge
The argument that persuaded the Fifth Circuit majority in the Texas case was that the Ten Commandments carry a dual status: religious, but also historical, a secular artifact of American legal tradition that a state may display the way it displays other historical documents.
That argument sits next to NACL’s own description of the same legislative project. The organization’s model policy was adopted, in its own materials, as an exercise in “Biblical principles” and a “Biblical world view,” not as a project in secular historical preservation. Rapert has separately described the wider goal as electing “godly leaders,” and has described the specific goal here as restoring the nation’s “Judeo-Christian foundation,” and taking “dominion and authority” in the terms of the Book of Genesis. That is an explicitly religious framing, in his own words, delivered at the organization’s own conference. Both descriptions can be independently accurate: a court can find a legitimate historical rationale sufficient to satisfy the Establishment Clause, while the organization that wrote the model bill and built the network that carried it into three statehouses describes its own purpose, on its own website and from its own founder, in exclusively religious terms. That tension is documented in NACL’s own public record and in the courts’ own opinions. It is not a claim about what anyone privately intends.
Verdict: Documented pipeline. The National Association of Christian Lawmakers is a functioning legislative clearinghouse: it drafts template bills from a stated Biblical worldview, distributes them through a member network of elected officials across all 50 states, and has seen at least one of them, the Ten Commandments classroom mandate, enacted in three states and stalled in at least one more. Whether any version of that mandate survives ongoing federal litigation is not yet settled anywhere in the country.
Deceit did not contact the National Association of Christian Lawmakers or Jason Rapert for comment before publishing this piece. Every quote and figure above is drawn from the organization’s own published materials, from public court filings and opinions, and from the reporting cited below.