Activist plans to send Arabic In God We Trust signs to Texas schools
As he rode his bike Sunday, longtime political prankster Chaz Stevens ruminated on a law that was irking him: a Texas statute requiring schools to post donated signs with the United States motto, “In God We Trust.”
Texas legislators, Stevens thought, were trolling people who don’t believe in a Judeo-Christian God.
Now, Stevens wants to troll them back.
The South Florida activist had raised more than $14,000 as of Thursday evening to distribute “In God We Trust” signs to public schools across Texas. The catch? The phrase is in Arabic.
“My focus,” Stevens said, “was how do I game the state of Texas with the rules?”
The Arabic text is meant to invoke Islam and some Christians’ discomfort with that faith, Stevens said. He’s hoping for even one school to hang up the poster — in his view, making a point about applying the controversial statute evenly to people of any religion or no religion.
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But Stevens, a self-described “staunch atheist,” is also prepared to try to turn a loss into a win. If a school rejects his poster, he said, he plans to file a lawsuit and use the court case to challenge the statute itself.
Stevens’s stunt, previously reported in the Dallas Morning News, joins a history of challenges to the national motto that courts have consistently rejected. It also adds fuel to a political firestorm that in recent years has turned schools in Republican-led states into culture-war battlegrounds. Fights are erupting over book banning, how race and gender are taught, and religious practice on school grounds as politicians clash over what it means to be an American and who gets to decide.
Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes (R), who sponsored the sign law, said Stevens’s Arabic posters do not meet the statute’s requirements and would not have to be posted in schools. He pointed to quotation marks around the phrase “In God We Trust” to suggest that a school only has to hang a donated sign with those words in English.
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“That’s all they’re required to do,” Hughes said. “But they are free to post other signs in as many languages as they want to.”
The law, which took effect last year, mandates that public schools display “in a conspicuous place in each building of the school” a sign with the national motto if the poster was donated or purchased with private donations. The sign also must include the U.S. flag and the Texas flag, and it “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 coming together as Americans.”
“The Declaration of Independence said that our rights come from our creator,” he said. “And so the idea of the acknowledgment of God is nothing new in American life.”
Several school districts in Texas have already hung donated signs with the national motto, local news outlets reported. The Yellow Rose of Texas Republican Women, a group that promotes conservative values, said this month that it had donated several posters to the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, about 25 miles northwest of Houston.
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“Each visit was accompanied by staff smiles and ‘thank yous,’ ” the organization wrote. “This has been such a blessing!”
Share this articleShare“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 U.S. currency since the 1860s.
Many states allow or require public schools to post signs with it. At least nine states in addition to Texas require schools to display the motto, and at least eight other states allow it, according to the Education Commission of the States, which tracks education policy. Some states specify that their policy applies only to signs that are donated.
Courts have consistently ruled that the national motto’s reference to God is constitutional. In 1970, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that the phrase did not violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause because it “has nothing whatsoever to do with the establishment of religion” and is instead about patriotism. Several other courts have since ruled similarly.
The direction of court opinions on this 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.
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Texas legislators 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 that change could prompt litigation alleging 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 any courts bite on it.”
The broader cultural issue, Collis said, is that the way people view signs with the national motto depends on whether they view public schools as neutral or hostile toward religion.
“Does having the national motto up take schools that have become way too secular and at least remind people that religion is out there and is important to a lot of people in our country?” he said. “Or is it taking it way too far and pushing religion on people?”
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For Stevens, pranking conservatives is a part-time hobby. His primary job is running a company that connects people with mental illness with service dogs.
In between that work, Stevens plans to send 300 to 500 of the Arabic posters to Texas schools. He intends to start with 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,” he said. “And what better place than a middle school in Austin, Texas, or even better, a middle school in the deepest reddest part of Texas, to say, ‘Think about everyone else that’s not of your tribe, that they have rights allowed under law.’ ”
Stevens is experienced at activism centering on the separation of church and state. Last spring, he petitioned dozens of Florida school districts to ban the Bible to call attention to increasing 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 signs stunt, Stevens is readying for the likelihood of taking his fight to the courtroom.
“We’re going to wait for somebody to tell me ‘No,’ ” he said, “and then here it comes.”
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