Texas today bans abortion, requires the Protestant Ten Commandments in classrooms, and gives the country the prosperity gospel of Joel Osteen. David Griscom’s review of Joseph L. Locke’s One State Under God: A History of Religion in Texas makes the case that none of this was inherited. It was built — against two working-class movements that had made religion a language of solidarity.

Early Texas was not a Bible belt:

  • Spain saw Texas as a bulwark against the French but never conquered it religiously; the San Antonio missions were sparsely populated, and when Mexico won independence only two priests remained in the territory
  • A Spanish official complained Texas stayed “under the domination of the barbarian”; Anglo migrants were frontier Protestants running on circuit riders and camp meetings, with Mexico uninterested in supplying priests
  • Life was largely secular — children unbaptized, marriages unrecognized, burials in secular graveyards
  • A Presbyterian minister wrote that Texans seemed to have forgotten “that there was a God, or a devil,” behaving as if crossing the Sabine line meant crossing “the line of spiritual accountability”
  • Into the early twentieth century, “Bible Belt” would have drawn puzzled looks; Texas Baptists and politicians alike valued church-state separation because they thought it kept religion “pure”

What brought evangelicals into politics was Prohibition, the jingoism of World War I, and the Klan. Governor Oscar Colquitt beat prohibitionists in 1910 with “the place of a preacher is in the pulpit and not in politics” — then the prohibitionists discovered they liked politics as a means of social purification. By the early 1920s the Klan had a hundred thousand Texans in white robes.

J. Frank Norris, the nation’s first megachurch leader, showed what the mix could do. He attacked communists, liberals, modernists, Catholics, and Jews; hounded a Baylor professor out of his job for teaching evolution; made common cause with the Klan; was tried for arson in 1912 and shot an unarmed man dead in his church office in 1926. He was acquitted both times.

The background Griscom says Locke underplays is the class war. Texas populists — including Black leaders like John B. Rayner, who called the life of Christ “the beginning of Christian socialism” — united laborers and farmers across the color line and were put down violently, followed by voting restrictions on Black Texans and poor whites alike. The Socialist Party then competed for tenant farmers. After the defeat, Rayner took money from the landlords and bosses he had fought and went to work for lumber baron John Henry Kirby, who was breaking the interracial Brotherhood of Timber Workers. Preachers bankrolled by the wealthy attacked the “sinful ways” of the poor and kept their attention off the men robbing them.

Reagan closed the loop in Dallas in 1980: “I know that you can’t endorse me, but I want you to know that I endorse you.” The value of Locke’s book, Griscom writes, is showing that this world was deliberately made — and what was made can be unmade.