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While riding his bike Sunday, longtime political joker Chaz Stevens ruminated on a law that was irritating him: a Texas statute that required schools to post donated signs with America’s motto, “In God We Trust”.
Texas lawmakers, Stevens thought, were trolling people who don’t believe in a Judeo-Christian God.
Now, Stevens wants to troll them again.
The South Florida activist had raised more than $14,000 by Thursday evening to distribute “In God We Trust” signs in Texas public schools. The catch? The sentence is in Arabic.
“My focus,” Stevens said, “was how can I play Texas State by the rules?”
The Arabic text is meant to invoke Islam and some Christians’ discomfort with that faith, Stevens said. He hopes even one school will put up the sign, in his view, calling into question the controversial statute’s uniform application to people of any religion or no religion.
But Stevens, a self-described “staunch atheist,” is also ready to try to turn a loss into a win. If a school rejects his sign, he said, he plans to file a lawsuit and use the court case to challenge the statute.
Stevens’ stunt, previously reported in the Dallas Morning News, joins a history of challenges to the national motto that have been consistently rejected by the courts. It also adds fuel to a political firestorm that in recent years has turned schools in Republican-led states into culture war battlegrounds. Fights erupt over book bans, how race and gender are taught and religious practice on school grounds as politicians clash over what it means to be American and who gets to decide.
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Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes (R), who sponsored the sign law, said Stevens’ Arabic posters do not meet the statute’s requirements and should not be posted in schools. He pointed to the quotation marks around the phrase “In God We Trust” to suggest that a school need only hang a given sign with those words in English.
“That’s all they have to do,” Hughes said. “But they are free to post other signs in as many languages as they want.”
The law, which took effect last year, requires public schools to display “in a conspicuous place in each school building” a poster with the national motto if the poster was donated or purchased with donations private The sign must also include the US flag and the Texas flag, and “may not depict” any other words or images. The law does not explicitly state that the national motto must be in English.
The statute, Hughes said, is about “uniting as Americans.”
“The Declaration of Independence said that our rights come from our creator,” he said. “And so the idea of God’s recognition is nothing new in American life.”
Several Texas school districts have already posted donated signs with the national motto, local media reported. The Yellow Rose of Texas Republican Women, a group that promotes conservative values, said this month it had donated several posters to the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, about 25 miles northwest of Houston.
“Each visit was accompanied by staff smiles and ‘thank yous,'” the organization wrote. “This has been a blessing!”
“In God We Trust” officially became the nation’s motto in 1956, as declared by a resolution of Congress, but the phrase has been used since the country’s inception and has appeared on US currency since the 1860s.
Many states allow or require public schools to post signs. At least nine states, besides Texas, require schools to display the motto, and at least eight states allow it, according to the Education Commission of States, which tracks education policy. Some states specify that their policy applies only to given signs.
Courts have consistently ruled that the national motto’s reference to God is constitutional. In 1970, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the phrase did not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because it “has nothing to do with an establishment of religion.” and is, instead, about patriotism. Several other courts have issued the same decision since then.
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The direction of judicial opinions on the issue is unlikely to change now, after former President Donald Trump made the federal circuit courts more conservative, said Jennifer Clark, a political science professor at the University of Houston.
Texas lawmakers could amend the law to specify that the national motto must be in English, said Steven Collis, director of the Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center at the University of Texas at Austin. But he said the change could lead to litigation claiming that requiring the word “God” and not allowing “Allah” is discrimination against Islam.
“I don’t know if that would carry the day, but it seems like an argument that’s coming,” Collis said. “And we’ll see if some court bites it.”
The broader cultural issue, Collis said, is that how people view signs with the national motto depends on whether they view public schools as neutral or hostile to religion.
“Does having the national motto take schools that have become too secular and at least remind people that religion is out there and important to a lot of people in our country?” he said “Or is it taking it too far and pushing religion on people?”
For Stevens, poking fun at conservatives is a part-time hobby. His main job is running a company that connects people with mental illness with service dogs.
Among this work, Stevens plans to send 300 to 500 Arabic posters to Texas schools. He intends to start in the most liberal districts he can find, determined by coronavirus vaccination rates, in the hope that a school there will accept his sign.
“I see this as a teachable moment, a moment to teach inclusion,” she said. “And what better place than a middle school in Austin, Texas, or even better, a middle school in the reddest part of Texas, to say, ‘Think of all the others who are not of your tribe, who are allowed rights by the law.’ “
Stevens has experience in activism focused on the separation of church and state. Last spring, he called on dozens of Florida school districts to ban the Bible to draw attention to the growing challenges of books in schools. Before that, he pushed to open city commission meetings with a satanic invocation and erected a Festivus pole at the Florida Capitol to protest a nativity scene.
With his Arabic sign gimmick, Stevens is preparing for the possibility of taking his fight to the courtroom.
“We’ll wait for someone to say ‘No,'” he said, “and then here it comes.”