Mayes Middleton, running for Texas attorney general, wants to “put God back in government”
By Eleanor Klibanoff, The Texas Tribune
October 9, 2026
When a group of parents sued earlier this year over a new state law requiring public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, state Sen. Mayes Middleton was ready.
“There is no such thing as ‘separation of church and state’ in our Constitution, and our schools are not God-free zones,” the Galveston Republican told Katy Christian Magazine.
A federal judge disagreed, blocking the law in 11 school districts based on a 1980 Supreme Court ruling that rejected a similar law in Kentucky. But Middleton, who helped carry the bill, was undeterred. His home school district, in Galveston, was not covered by the judge’s injunction, so he donated posters of the Ten Commandments and pressed the district to hang them. When the board demurred due to the pending lawsuit, Attorney General Ken Paxton sued and a judge ordered them to hang the signs.
Over the last decade as a state legislator, the otherwise mild-mannered Middleton has been a ferocious advocate for injecting Christianity into the public sphere. He has rejected the separation of church and state as a “false doctrine” and said Texas must remain “grounded in the Judeo-Christian principles that have made us strong,” while criticizing the “Islamification of Texas.”
As he runs for attorney general, Middleton’s record on these issues has generated fervent support from a GOP base eager to test the newly porous walls separating God and government. David Barton, a former Texas GOP chair and standardbearer for the movement to enshrine Christianity as the national religion, endorsed Middleton as a “man of sincere Christian faith.”
“With religious liberties increasingly at risk, we have the opportunity to elect someone who will be a defender of our right to practice and boldly proclaim our Christian faith — but only if Christians mobilize and vote in the rapidly approaching election,” the letter signed by Barton and other conservative Christian leaders said.
But religious freedom groups and non-Christians worry that Middleton will sideline the approximately 10 million Texans who do not identify as Christians.
Middleton “would have all those people be second-class citizens,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, the president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation Action Fund, which is the advocacy affiliate of the nonprofit suing over the Ten Commandments law. “If he was attorney general, he would have a much more powerful gavel, much more power to interpret the law and shut down the separation between religion and government.”
Middleton did not respond to questions for this story, nor has he ever responded to any questions or interview requests from The Texas Tribune about his campaign this year. He has also not agreed to debate his opponent, fellow state Sen. Nathan Johnson. Polls show Johnson running just a few points behind Middleton ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
Johnson said Middleton’s views about the role of religion in government make him “not fit to be the top legal officer of the state.”
“There’s 250 years of American jurisprudence, and it moves around a little bit, but it’s never not there,” he said in an interview with the Tribune. “That should frighten people.”
At Faith Fest, an annual event put on by the conservative advocacy group Texas Values, Middleton said his top priority if elected would be to remind Texans that “our rights come from God, not government.”
“Put God back in government”
In 2023, an evangelical Christian group had a novel idea to address Texas’ guidance counselor shortage: Allow religious chaplains to serve in schools.
Middleton, who was already pushing a bill in the Legislature to require the Ten Commandments in classrooms and another to allow prayer time during the school day, agreed to carry the proposal.
Immediately, there was pushback, including from state Rep. James Talarico, an Austin Democrat and Presbyterian pastor now running for U.S. Senate.
“It’s a Trojan horse to allow unqualified religious fanatics to enter our school and indoctrinate our kids,” Talarico told The Texas Tribune at the time. When the bill was signed into law, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which advocates for strengthening the separation of church and state, named Middleton to their wall of shame as “Theocrat of the Week.”
Even conservative activists were surprised by this “very bold move” by Middleton and the Texas Legislature, as Rick Green, a former state representative and arch-conservative, said on a podcast soon after the chaplain bill passed. (Today, there are six chaplains working in four Texas school districts, state data shows.)
On the podcast, Middleton acknowledged that this was not the type of legislation that could have passed even just a few years prior.
“So what happened is, our U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to President Trump’s appointments, made it possible for us to go win some of these fights and put God back in government,” he said.
For decades, conservative Christians had been pushing the Supreme Court to reconsider its seminal church and state ruling, which in 1971 found that the government and religion should only mix when there was a secular justification. The court laid out there should be no advancement or discrimination of any specific religion and no “excessive entanglement” between government and the church. Over the years, advocacy groups were repeatedly rebuffed in their efforts to push the boundaries on school prayer, the Ten Commandments and state funding for religious schools.
But in 2022, the high court ruled in Kennedy v. Bremerton that these cases should take “historical context and practices” into account. Many conservatives saw that ruling as permission from the court’s new conservative supermajority to start knocking down the wall between state and church.
As soon as the Legislature returned in 2023, Middleton took up the cause, telling the Washington Post that Texas needed religion restored to schools.
“When prayer was taken out of schools, things went downhill — discipline, mental health. It’s something I heard a lot on porches when I was campaigning,” he added. “It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time.”
Many legal scholars do not read the same green light into the Kennedy decision that Middleton does. The Constitution’s Establishment Clause, which prohibits the establishment of a state religion, and Free Exercise Clause, which allows people to practice their religion without government interference, remain undisputed bedrock principles, said Douglas Laycock, a religious law expert at the University of Texas.
“People like Middleton want the government to actively support not just religion, but their religion,” Laycock said. “When you have government actively supporting one religion, it’s discriminating against all other religions..”
The next legislative session, Middleton helped pass the Ten Commandments bill and the prayer time in school bill, over strenuous objections from Democrats and groups that advocate for the separation of church and state. Middleton took that criticism as a badge of honor, proudly waving an angry letter sent to him by the American Atheists on the Senate floor.
Several families and religious leaders sued over the Ten Commandments requirement, which is exactly what many conservative activists wanted. They’re hoping the Supreme Court will use the case as an opportunity to overturn the 1980 ruling that struck down a similar law in Kentucky.
“It’s a good gamble on their part, because if they lose, they’re no worse off,” Laycock said. “[The Supreme Court justices] haven’t shown their hand on classroom cases yet. So the $64 million question is, will they let the government promote particular religious views to schoolchildren over the objections of those children’s parents?”
The attorney general’s influence
As a legislator, Middleton had the power to help pass bills that could invite legal challenges. If elected attorney general, he would be empowered to take up the cause from the state’s top legal office, seeking out religious liberty controversies around the state and nation to get the agency involved in.
Over the last 30 years, the Texas attorney general’s office has become a more proactive and partisan agency that’s flexed its ability to bring lawsuits, initiate investigations, file amicus briefs and issue legal opinions to shape the state’s jurisprudence.
John Cornyn, the first GOP attorney general in Texas since Reconstruction, waded into the fight over school prayer in 1995, when the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Santa Fe Independent School District, near Galveston, for praying over the loudspeaker before football games.
Teaming up with a conservative Christian law firm, Cornyn personally argued before the Supreme Court on the district’s behalf. They lost, and after he was elected to the Senate and appointed to the Judiciary Committee, Cornyn said this was the case he discussed with Samuel Alito while interviewing him for his eventual Supreme Court nomination.
“He did commiserate with me a little bit,” Cornyn told The New York Times at the time. “I hope that he will be able to give the United States Supreme Court’s ruling some coherence, because frankly they are way out of step with what the founding fathers intended.”
As conservative Christians amassed more power in Texas politics, the attorney general’s office gradually took on more of these cases. Some were brought to them — in 2005, then Attorney General Greg Abbott defended the state capitol’s monument of the Ten Commandments after a legal challenge by an Austin resident. He personally argued before the Supreme Court that the monument had historical and secular value, and the court agreed, allowing the stone tablets to stay.
Abbott also got involved in a case in which the Kountze Independent School District near Beaumont told cheerleaders they couldn’t wave banners bearing bible verses and religious messages. Abbott threw the weight of the state behind the students, opposing the district and their lawyers, in a case that ultimately went to the Texas Supreme Court.
“The backdrop is that the Kountze battle is part of a larger war that we are defending against outside atheist groups trying to bully and steamroll school districts,” Abbott told the Tribune at the time.
By the time the high court ruled in the cheerleaders’ favor, Abbott had moved onto the governor’s mansion and he’d been replaced by Ken Paxton, who took on these issues with a new fervor.
In 2016, he issued a legal opinion saying that a Montgomery County judge’s practice of beginning courtroom proceedings with a prayer did not violate religious freedom laws. While attorney general opinions are not binding, they serve as influential guidance from the state’s top lawyer. That same year, he also intervened on behalf of a teacher in Killeen who was suing the district after they told her to take down a door decoration bearing a Bible verse.
Just a few months later, however, Paxton intervened on the other side of the issue, in this case to try to shut down a prayer room for Muslim students in Frisco ISD. “It appears that the prayer room is ‘dedicated to the religious needs of some students,’” a deputy attorney general wrote in a letter to the district, quoting an article written by an 11th grade student, “namely, those who practice Islam.”
That wasn’t true, Frisco ISD spokesman Chris Moore told The Washington Post at the time — the room was available to any student. “Muslims pray, Baptists pray, Catholics pray, Buddhists pray, Hindu students pray,” he said.
The controversy never resulted in a lawsuit, but with anti-Muslim sentiment on the rise once again in Texas, religious freedom advocates worry about a double standard from Texas’ religious leaders. Recently, Abbott asked the Department of Justice to investigate after it came to light that Dallas-Fort Worth Airport was considering adding washing stations for Muslim travelers who wanted to perform a ritual cleansing before their daily prayers. He said the washing stations were discriminatory against other religions.
“It’s religious liberty for me but not for thee,” Laycock said. “The political branches don’t feel any obligation whatsoever to try to apply the same rules to everyone. The courts, thankfully, are rarely that hamhanded about it.”
Advocates on both sides of this issue expect Middleton to take the same approach if elected attorney general. During the primary, he ran aggressively against Sharia law and the so-called “Islamification of Texas” and touted the lawsuits and outrage that he courted with his bills to push religion in schools.
Asked by a social media follower how he stays humble as an elected official, he said it comes from “putting God first and making sure every decision I make in government brings honor and glory to him.”
This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.