There’s not a whole lot of room for interpretation in what author Joseph L. Locke means when he writes. It’s all there in the first words of his introduction.
“Religion reigns over Texas. It dominates the landscape, shapes the culture, and determines the state’s politics. The scale of religion in Texas is simply staggering.”
And in the next few paragraphs, he spits out a litany of truths. Texas is home to tens of thousands of places of worship. A 19-story steel cross stands overlooking the city of Amarillo. Prayer rallies are held in football stadiums, and the State Board of Education bends to the will of religiously conservative textbook checkers.
A Princeton sociologist wrote “Texas is American’s most powerful Bible Belt state.” And homeboy Joel Osteen’s services grew so large, they had to be held in a facility that formerly hosted the Houston Rockets and Led Zeppelin at their peaks.
But, he says before page two in One State Under God: A History of Religion in Texas (344 pp., $34.95, University of Texas Press), it wasn’t always this way. And while religion and conservative (often Baptist) politics are invariably intertwined today, Locke says the state’s religious history also encompasses many other faiths—with varying degrees of influence. And that extends to the world’s most famous Atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Branch Davidian leader David Koresh and polygamist Warren Jeffs.
Locke starts way, way back where Native Americans etched images of their god on cave walls and conducted ceremonies. When Spain got interested in Texas, they hoped the 40 missions they built throughout the state would help spread Catholicism and give them a toehold to take over the state. They did not.
Of the Protestants and Baptists that increased in numbers, many were slaveholders. And used Biblical verses as support for the practice, even as they held mandatory religious classes to save heathen, enslaved African souls.
Catholicism’s hold on the state ended when Mexican rule ceased to exist, but the Protestants who came in had their work cut out for them. Upon visiting Houston in 1843, a Methodist bishop opined “They have here more of infidelity, subtle, organized, and boldly blasphemous than I have met in any place of its size in all my journeying.”
Locke writes of how in the wake of the Civil War (where, of course, many Texans at least initially felt “God was on the side of the Confederacy”), Black churches became (and remain) far more than just a place to worship, but a place of community where they actually felt safe from prying white eyes and attitudes.
In the late 19th/early 20th centuries, churches also discovered they could have power beyond the pulpit, their leaders now being looked at as business, political, and moral beacons even outside their walls. The Southern Baptists rose under the steely gaze and 6’4” frame of Benajah Harvey Carroll, who by the mid-1890s was pulling a then-whopping $2,500 a year.
Women, while denied many powerful positions in the church, nonetheless were the driving force behind Prohibition. And the Fundamentalist surge of the 1910s and ’20s sometimes meant strange bedfellows between congregations and the Ku Klux Klan.
In fact, the editor of the Houston Chronicle wrote that the Houston Klan’s “initial roster represented literally a glossary of Houston’s Who’s Who.” Crusading, Bible literalist and pugilistic-like preacher Frank Norris turned the First Baptist Church in Fort Worth into arguably the nation’s first “megachurch.”
Surprisingly, as civil rights heated up, Locke notes that not every Black Baptist pastor was on board with desegregation or attracting attention. Houston religious leader and activist Bill Lawson remembers here how local preachers shied away from King the two or three times he came to town.
Locke pinpoints the late ‘70s when many Texas churches began tilting even more towards the right, freely mixing politics and religion, and making moral/culture wars topics to be discussed from the pulpit.
Bumper stickers proclaiming “G.O.P. – God’s Official Party” were plastered on cars without irony. And it’s strange to read so many of today’s “talking points” in this area are nearly world-for-word from five decades ago. And a frequent “obsession” with homosexuality.
Credit: Lomax Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
Yet, Locke finds some hope in the final chapter “Mosques and Megachurches.” And that’s with the sheer level of religious diversity in 2026 Texas, often fueled by immigration bringing in their non-Christian faith. Though it is still No. 1 by far.
“Joel Osteen pastors the largest church in America and preaches to the largest following of any Christian pastor in American history,” Locke writes. The “Smiling Preacher” doesn’t yell, scream, cajole, or strike the fear of God into people with visions of Hell. And he’s a helluva salesmen when ‘sin’ can be described as ‘bad choices.’” And what does Locke say is not visible in the auditorium at Lakewood Church? Any evidence of a cross.
Still, Osteen’s parishoners are equally divided between whites, Blacks, and Latinos. Perhaps not so dedicated to diversity is Second Baptist Church, which Locke writes that the Young family’s sermons routinely and freely mix conservative politics into homilies.
The influence of religion on political and social worlds is more evident today than ever, with the Houston Independent School District adapting the Bible-heavy “Bluebonnet Curriculum,” or Ken Paxton’s crusade to put the Ten Commandments in every classroom, hysterical calls about “Sharia Law” coming to cities like Frisco, and the just-decided move by the Texas Board of Education to now require the reading of Biblical stories as official school curriculum.
And the book’s title? It comes from a phrase that, in 2007, then-Governor Rick Perry, had officially inserted in the Texas Pledge of Allegiance. One recited every school day by more than five million children.
It was co-sponsored—unsurprisingly—by now Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. The man who is now apparently also arbiter of who gets into the holy gates and who is burning in eternal damnation, with recent comments that Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate James Talarico (an actual seminarian), is probably “going to hell.” He said this on his new podcast where the guest was Talarico’s opponent, current Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Jesus, to date, has not endorsed either candidate.
