Despite a string of court losses, supporters of state laws that require the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms are hopeful that the Supreme Court could soon settle the issue in their favor.

Outside advocates told The Hill they believe that supporters of Ten Commandments statutes in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas are currently trying to get the high court to take up their cases. But in the meantime, those supporters are incurring repeated legal losses, including in some of the nation's most conservative-leaning courts.

The laws, which use similar language, have reportedly been challenged in court on First Amendment grounds, however, supporters believe the Supreme Court will ultimately rule differently than the lower courts.

"I don't think anybody is surprised that these policies, these laws in the states that seek to put the Ten Commandments back in schools, have been challenged in court," Matt Krause, counsel with the First Liberty Institute told The Hill. "They're making their way through the proper channels, and we still are very confident that at the end of the day, when these cases get to the Supreme Court, that they're going to uphold them based on the new history-and-tradition test."

According to the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, the Lemon test — so named for the Supreme Court's 1971 landmark decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman — was used by the high court for nearly 40 years to determine whether a law or government activity violated the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. The three-pronged test was largely abandoned after the court's 2022 Kennedy v. Bremerton School District decision, which found that the school district violated a public school football coach's First Amendment rights when it suspended him for postgame prayer.

"I think once they threw out the Lemon test and instituted this history-and-tradition test, there's really no way for this — this matter that was decided under the Lemon test — to be fully resolved without the Supreme Court speaking on it, and so, they've given us the history-and-tradition test, but it hasn't been fleshed out necessarily in the last several years," Krause said.

"This Ten Commandments case, I think, helps give the justices the opportunity to provide even more of a framework of what they started in Kennedy," he added.

Opponents of the laws say it's not a foregone conclusion that the Supreme Court would side with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which ruled last month that Louisiana's Ten Commandments law is unconstitutional. The Fifth Circuit is widely considered one of the most conservative appeals courts in the country.

"The problem is, I just don't think the court itself — this court — would be friendly to a claim that it's permissible to post the Ten Commandments in the public schools," George Washington University Law School professor Bob Tuttle told The Hill. "In other words, I think [proponents] are operating on a misconception."

"So the people that won the case in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District made a big point of going around and telling the school districts that all kinds of things had changed in the law now, and they were free to bring religion back into public schools, and that is not what the case stood for at all," Tuttle said.

The Supreme Court's six-justice conservative majority has tended to rule along ideological lines on matters of religion and education, including a case this term when justices in the majority handed conservative parents a victory by allowing them to opt-out of instruction that included LGBTQ books.

"I don't think the Supreme Court is going to see this, and if they did see it, they would be forced to make a choice," Tuttle added. "I mean, they would be forced to really confront radical change in Establishment Clause law affecting the teaching in schools, and they have not done that."

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