Texas Is One State Under God, But Only for the Last 19 Years

In 2007, then-Governor Rick Perry signed into law House Bill 1034, squeezing the words “under God” into the Texas pledge.

Joseph L. Locke speaks at First Light Books on July 15 Credit: University of Texas Press

At the time, Joseph L. Locke was a senior at Bowie High School. Now a historian and assistant professor at the University of North Texas, Locke’s latest book, aptly titled One State Under God, chronicles the vast, erratic, and perhaps surprisingly diverse history of religion in Texas.

The line in the pledge “hardly captures a rollicking religious history of freethinkers, cult leaders, failed evangelists, religious dissenters, and fundamentalist brawlers, nor does it reflect the perpetual spiritual warfare waged in Texas over everything from slavery and blue laws to segregation and church-state separation,” Locke writes in the book’s introduction. “Instead, ‘one state under God’ represents a politically self-serving, twenty-first century attempt to flatten and distort a far more dynamic story.”

“I mean, if you’re going to high school in [Texas] and saying the Texas pledge, it just seems natural. It seems timeless,” Locke tells the Chronicle. “What I wanted to do was really show that this slice that we’re used to, that we’re obsessed with, that we’re consumed by really, is kind of an exception to a much longer history.”

By weaving together the stories of people whose names can be vaguely remembered from seventh grade Texas History class, Locke anthologizes a compelling narrative history. Bringing the lives of figures like Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca into conversation with that of fiery Christian fundamentalist J. Frank Norris and modern day humanitarian Sister Norma Pimentel, he suggests that the current state of Texas’ religious politics is the product of a long winding history, and that it might just be untenable.

Historians don’t like to predict the future, Locke says, but “if you look at it purely from demographics, it seems like this current incarnation of Texas’ Christian politics just can’t sustain itself.”

Currently dominated by electeds hacking away at the gap between church and state, Texas public schools now display the Ten Commandments in each classroom, and families can receive state funds to pay for religious private schools. Starting in 2030, public school curriculums will be required to include the Bible.

Before the June 26 decision by the State Board of Education approving the Bible requirement, board member Brandon Hall said at a press conference, “Our nation was founded as a Christian nation, and Texas is a Christian state.” History, the historian writes, would beg to differ.

Stephen F. Austin, in founding his Austin colony, was expressly anti-religious. “Folklore had him saying this phrase that he’d rather have a dozen horse thieves than one Methodist circuit rider,” says Locke. “Anglo settlers willingly left religious freedom behind to come to Texas.”

“Southern evangelicals traditionally believed that religion was a matter between individual souls and God, not governments and citizens,” Locke writes. But as the New South rose, so too did the political power of Christianity. Southern Baptist preacher and fundamentalist pioneer Benjamin Harvey Carroll became a rising star in Texas’ religious world in that period, leading Christianity’s first foray into state politics: prohibition. 

“That’s what really hooked me,” Locke says. “I had no interest in studying religion when I started out. I remember I wanted to study populism and progressivism. I was at UT and I was like, okay, what are people talking about during this time period of the progressive era? And it was just prohibition.”

Though prohibition laws passed eventually, the movement initially failed by wide margins in Carroll’s Waco and then statewide. 

“You had governors and senators and representatives attacking preachers and very loudly dismissing this kind of religious politics,” Locke says. “This was the culture war of the progressive era, and the debate was not just, ‘Hey, should we have liquor laws?’ It was, ‘What is the role of religion in public life?’”

In such a storied history, Texas has inevitably faced many forks in the road, which for better or worse have led us to where we are today. In November, Texas voters will elect a religious populist to the Senate – whether he is conservative or progressive remains to be seen.

“There’s no fundamentalist core in which Ken Paxton’s version of Christianity is somehow more authentic than James Talarico’s version,” Locke says. “In fact, I think part of the appeal of Talarico for many people has been his ability to point to actual verses … and if you drew politics from that, he can argue convincingly, for a lot of folks, that his politics is what you would end up with, not the politics of Ten Commandments posters and Bible readings.”

Joseph Locke will discuss One State Under God with Greg Garrett at First Light Books on July 15.

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