Vice President JD Vance and podcaster Joe Rogan agreed to disagree when they reached an impasse in views on mandating that public schools display the Ten Commandments.
“I know you’re Catholic and you’re very religious, putting the Ten Commandments in schools, I don’t think is the right way to do it,” the host of the Joe Rogan Experience told the vice president as they discussed Texas Senate candidate James Talarico (D), who is running against state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R).
“He just thinks that even though he believes in the Ten Commandments, if you’re just only representing the Christian faith in these schools, you’re forcing your religion into other people’s lives and that this is going to push people away from Christianity rather than encourage them to uh pursue it,” Rogan contended.
(Video: Joe Rogan Experience/YouTube)
But Vance disagreed, asserting that it is not about “forcing things on anybody.”
“But it’s public schools. So I mean, if you’re going to do that, why not put Buddhist scripture? Why not put, you know, you Muslim’s stuff? You could make an argument why you should have a bunch of different religious tenets in schools,” Rogan pushed back.
“I think in the Supreme Court there actually are a lot of different sort of historical, cultural, legal documents that are up there. And I want to say that Moses coming down with a tablet is one of them,” Vance replied. “But I think there actually are other cultural and maybe even other religious elements of this like, where you recognize that a big part of sort of the lawgiving tradition in Western civilization is the is some of these religious texts, not exclusively Christian religious texts.”
Schools spent decades removing the moral standards that taught children duty, restraint, and accountability, then replaced them with political ideology. The Ten Commandments teach that every person answers to a law higher than government, and the left cannot tolerate anything…
— Dan Holbrook (@DanHolbrook) July 15, 2026
“Our founders were people who were very much influenced, even if they weren’t Christians- a lot of them, of course, were- but were very influenced by Christian culture and articulating American law,” the VP continued. “Does seeing the Ten Commandments force religion on a non-Christian child? I mean, my argument would be no. And I’d illustrate this by saying, well, there are all of these ways in which you actually could try to force religion on a child, right?”
“Well, it’s not the worst way to force religion on a child, but to have it and not represent any other religion. This is Texas, by the way,” Rogan responded.
“So, what he’s talking about was that there’s these Christian nationalists, these guys that are very wealthy that are trying to fund Christian schools and trying to defund public schools, or any other kind of religious school, and what they want to do, and they passed this to get the Ten Commandments in all public school classes,” Rogan continued.
“And he’s fundamentally opposed to that as a Christian because he thinks it’s going to force people to have this in their class and it’s gonna push people away from Christianity,” he added, speaking of Talarico.
Talarico a Christian? That’s probably the most surprising thing about this clip…
— E_Boll (@ethanBoll) July 16, 2026
“I mean, I understand the argument. I just don’t see it that way,” Vance responded.
“I kind of agree with him,” Rogan stated.
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida. Powers also contributes to BizPac Review.
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