On April 21, 2026, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Texas law called Senate Bill 10. The vote was 9 to 8. The law says every public school classroom in Texas must hang a poster of the Ten Commandments. The poster must be 16 inches wide and 20 inches tall, and the letters must be big enough for any child with average vision to read from anywhere in the room. WFSB Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama have passed similar laws. Other states are working on their own. Daily Wire
For Adventists, the reflex is to fight. A state that posts the commandments today may enforce them tomorrow. We have said so for 150 years, and we have often been right. The Sabbath commandment names the seventh day, not Sunday, and we know what can happen when governments decide to legislate religion.
But before we rush to the courthouse steps, we should read what Ellen White wrote when this same question came up for the first time in 1893. Her answer was not what you might expect.
A Letter from New Zealand
On April 9, 1893, White sat down in Napier, New Zealand, and wrote a letter to Alonzo T. Jones. The letter is kept today in the Ellen G. White Estate archives. Someone wrote the subject across the top of the first page: “Teaching the Bible in Public Schools.”
Jones was the strongest voice in the Adventist church on religious liberty. In 1889, he had gone to Congress to argue against a bill that would have made Sunday a national day of rest. He was also fighting the National Reform Association, a group that wanted to amend the Constitution to declare America a Christian nation and put the Bible in every public school.
White agreed with Jones on the substance. But she wrote to tell him something hard.
The Key Sentence
“There is a subject which greatly troubles my mind,” she began. “While I do not see the justice nor right in enforcing by law the bringing of the Bible to be read in the public schools: yet there are some things which burden my mind in regard to our people making prominent their ideas on this point.”
She said the law was wrong. Then she said Adventists speaking out loudly against the law might also be wrong.
She was not confused about religious liberty. She was worried about a trap.
Her First Reason: Strategy
“Our enemies will make a decided argument against us if we shall give them a semblance of a chance.”
Here is what she meant. The same people pushing the Bible into schools were also pushing Sunday laws. One of their papers, the Christian Statesman, had said in 1887 that people who kept a different day had no right to their beliefs at all. The two fights, Bible in schools and Sunday laws, were one fight run by the same people.
If Adventists became famous for fighting to keep the Bible out of classrooms, people would call us enemies of the Bible. Then, when the Sunday law fight came, nobody would listen to us. We would have burned our credit on the wrong battle.
Her Second Reason: The Text Does the Work
“If such a law were to go into effect the Lord would overrule it for good, that an argument should be placed in the hands of those who keep the Sabbath, in their favor, to stand on the Bible foundation in reference to the Sabbath of the fourth commandment.”
Think about what she is saying. If the state puts the Ten Commandments on every classroom wall, the fourth commandment goes up with the other nine. The fourth commandment names the seventh day. It does not say Sunday. It says the seventh day.
Let them hang it, she said. The text will do the work.
She ended the letter with a soft plea. “I hope the Lord will help us to not make one wrong move; but please be cautious in this point.”
What She Was Not Saying
It would be easy to read this letter and think White had gone soft. She had not.
That same year, she published a book called Christian Education. In it she said the Bible had been pushed out of schools and that this was a terrible loss. She believed the Bible should be at the center of every child’s learning.
She just did not think the government was the right one to put it there.
Her problem with a law like Senate Bill 10 would not have been that the commandments were on the wall. Her problem would have been the state choosing which version. Which translation. Which numbering. Which size.
That is exactly what the lawsuit is about. Rabbi Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District was filed by 15 Texas families from different faiths. Some are Jewish. The version Texas picked is a Protestant version, and it does not match what Jewish families teach their children. American Civil Liberties Union
A Poster Is Not a Sunday Law
White saw a line that we sometimes miss. There is a difference between a law that tells you what to do and a law that hangs a poster on the wall.
A Sunday law would tell an Adventist family to stop working on Saturday’s second day. That reaches into the conscience. It forces a choice between God and the state.
A poster does not do that. The Fifth Circuit said no child in Texas has to recite the commandments, believe them, or say they are from God. WFSB The poster just hangs there.
These two kinds of laws are not the same. If Adventists treat them as the same, we will use up our energy on the small fight and have nothing left for the big one.
Triage, Not Giving Up
Jones wanted to fight every battle. White wanted him to win the war.
She knew the church only had so much credit with the public. She wanted to save it for the day when persecution in the name of religion would really come. She warned elsewhere against people who “sit down in a calm expectation of the event,” waiting for prophecy to happen while doing nothing themselves. Ellen G. White Writings
She was not telling Jones to do nothing. She was telling him to save his voice for the fight that mattered most. That is not giving up. That is picking your moment.
The Question for 2026
So what should Adventists do now?
The easy answer is to fight. Join the ACLU. File briefs. Write op-eds. Treat every poster as the first step toward a Sunday law.
White chose a harder answer. She chose to wait.
She knew the church could not win every fight at once. She knew that if Adventists became famous for opposing the Bible in schools, people would stop listening when we spoke about Sunday laws. They would say, “These are the folks who don’t even want the commandments on the wall.”
So she told Jones to be careful. Let the commandments go up. Let the children read them. The fourth one is still there, and it still says what it says.
The fight in Texas is about a poster. The fight that she believed is coming is about what day a person rests. Those are not the same fight. White could see that in 1893. We should be able to see it in 2026.