“My infidel fellow citizens, my Catholic neighbor, or Jewish friend, must have the same right to read or refrain from reading the Bible, to believe or reject the Bible as he chooses. These are fundamentally American principles.”
In 1923 President Samuel Palmer Brooks spoke before the Texas Senate in response to a bill concerning compulsory daily Bible readings in public schools. He openly opposed the bill, later saying in the same statement, “Don’t let anybody around the State Capitol building in Austin get the idea that his business is to show people the way to heaven.”
The former Baylor president would have no way of knowing that Texans would still be confronting the same issues over a century later. Recent legislation in Texas allows public schools to include biblical material on required reading lists, part of a broader national trend to influence the role of Christianity in the public sphere — a phenomenon called Christian nationalism.
Now, researchers at Baylor are quantifying where Americans actually stand.
Baylor Religion Survey Director Dr. Paul Froese and his team dedicated a section of the Wave 7 Survey to investigating Americans’ current positioning on the separation of church and state. While never asking about Christian nationalism directly, the survey posed questions that got to the heart of the phenomenon, such as whether Americans affirm the nation’s divinity and what they think the role of Christianity should be in the federal government.
While Christian nationalism has dominated headlines, the majority of Americans — 92 percent — believe the government should protect and respect all faith groups equally, not just Christians, according to the nationally representative Baylor survey. Some 76 percent of respondents want the federal government to enforce a strict separation of church and state.
Yet Christian nationalism continues to be a highly controversial and polarizing topic. Froese found that many of the same people who claim to affirm religious liberty also endorse ideas that fall under the ideology of Christian nationalism.
“My reading of that is most people we would categorize as Christian nationalists, in talking to them, they’re going to say, ‘I’m for religious freedom.’ But maybe as you talk to them you realize, ‘Oh, you want the Bible taught in schools, and you want prayer taught in schools, and you want the Ten Commandments in school,’” Froese explained.
“So, in other words, some survey data look like everybody is for religious freedom, but as you dig deeper, it’s maybe not true,” he summed up.
But before Baylor’s students and faculty were debating, researching, and discussing Christian nationalism, their focus was on church-state separation, a core Baptist principle embedded in Baylor’s DNA.
Given that he ran the nation’s largest Baptist school, President Brooks’ position on church-state relations and prayer in schools was unsurprising for the time, though possibly surprising now. Throughout Baptist history, the denomination has championed religious liberty. Baylor’s founding promise was built on those very ideals – Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana (For church, For Texas).
President Brooks was just one of many Baylor giants who openly advocated for the separation of church and state.
In 1948, incoming University President W.R. White took the opportunity at his own inauguration to, once again, reaffirm the University’s stance.
“Those who launched Baylor University had a definite concept of its two-fold purpose,” White said. “It was to serve the church and the state. I shall add what they always implied – the world,” White said, later adding, “We have always stood for the … separation of church and state.”
Baylor’s dedication to church-state separation was made clear later in White’s presidency when it launched the J.M. Dawson Institute for Church and State Studies. The institute was named after the longtime pastor of First Baptist Waco and the first executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, Joseph Martin Dawson, a passionate and vocal advocate for church-state separation.
But Baylor’s history of championing religious liberty could not insulate it from the emerging national debate over faith and politics. In the 1970s, as religious leaders beyond campus proposed new ways of thinking about church-state relations, fault lines appeared within the Baylor community.
In 1979, the popular preacher and televangelist Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a right-wing movement that sought to unite Christian fundamentalists on conservative ideologies.
Read now: The Last Great Heresy
“The recent politicization of religious fundamentalism as an organized and identifiable political movement has assumed a breadth and magnitude unknown in earlier periods of American history,” said Dr. James E. Wood, former director of the J.M. Dawson Institute, in a1984 Lariat editorial. “Aided particularly by fundamentalist Christian evangelists with vast television audiences … The New Religious Right has sought to unite right-wing conservative faith with right-wing conservative politics.”
But while many Baylor leaders backed Wood, some students found Falwell’s approach to faith and politics attractive, and they began to question and challenge the traditional Baptist perspective they had always known.
“In spite of the fact that historically our country was founded on God-centered principles and religious views of citizens were never separated from the way laws were made, many today argue for the fiction of the ‘separation’ of church and state,” wrote former Baylor Law student Gina Parker in a1984 letter to The Lariat.
But other students were skeptical of the message Falwell was promoting, aligning more closely with Baylor’s institutional positioning.
“Like the apostle Peter, Jerry Falwell … and other outstanding Christian leaders have taken their eyes off the Lord and instead looked down into the stormy water of party politics,” student writer Jimmy Puckett wrote in 1980.
The tension between Baylor and the Moral Majority came to a head in 1983 when Falwell openly condemned Baylor, saying Southern Baptists should no longer support the University because it no longer represented what he said were true conservative theological values.
Falwell’s statement prompted some confusion, as the Southern Baptist Convention did not financially support Baylor at the time.
In response, former Baylor President Herbert H. Reynolds said, “Mr. Falwell continues to exhibit his self-righteous approach to all things and, in this case, a most presumptuous attitude.”
This division foreshadowed a broader pattern. In the decades that followed, debates over the relationship between Christianity and American politics continued to evolve – both nationally and within the Baylor community.
Froese said the synonymization of conservative politics with Christianity has reached new heights.
“The Republican Party had always been kind of courting the religious right, but never to the extent where it was just fusing nationalist and even party symbolism with Christian symbolism,” he explained.
Froese said this is where party politics and President Donald Trump’s influence on Christian evangelicals come into play. According to data collected by the Baylor Religion Survey in the months following the 2024 Presidential Election, some 40 percent of Trump voters do not support church-state separation, and 15 percent believe not all faith groups should be protected equally by the federal government.
“[Christian nationalism] corresponds with the MAGA movement [and] rise of Trump,” explained Froese. “…The MAGA movement and the Trump administration, in particular, kind of leaned into a whole different level of religious symbolism and rhetoric.”
That symbolism, such as the president posting a photo of himself characterized as Jesus, or the “God Bless the U.S.A Bible” (often referred to as the Trump Bible), Froese said, is not only harmful but confusing.
“In the Trump Bible, they also put … the pledge of allegiance in it,” he said. “You could imagine somebody getting a Trump Bible and not really knowing … what’s the actual Bible and what’s the stuff they’ve tacked on to this?”
The integration of religious and political symbolism leads many Americans, specifically Republicans, to believe the nation is divinely favored. Some 71 percent of Trump voters agree that the U.S.’s success is part of God’s plan, while 80 percent of Kamala Harris’ voters reject that notion. Additionally, 84% of Trump voters support the idea that the president should defend Christian values as a part of his job.
The argument is no longer where the line of separation between church and state should fall, but whether any line should exist at all.
Dr. Jerry Park, an associate professor of sociology at Baylor, has been researching how minority groups experience the Christian nationalism debate. He said the movement’s momentum has been building for years.
Listen now: Religion in Every Space: An Interview with Dr. Jerry Park
“2016 through 2020 – [Christian nationalism] started just taking on a life of its own [and] started building up momentum. Then, January 6th happened in 2021. It just doesn’t seem to stop,” explained Park.
But not every politically active Christian is a Christian nationalist — a distinction Froese, like many academics, sees as essential.
“On some level, everybody’s religious or moral beliefs inform their policy decisions,” explained Froese. “We would always expect that whatever your religious belief system or your level of spirituality, it’s going to track into your policy views. That’s not unusual or even unexpected.”
“Some people are saying that people who are labeled as advocates for Christian nationalism may in fact be churchgoing Christians who just simply have a patriotic spirit, but they are not nationalists,” Park explained. “They love the flag, they like singing certain patriotic songs, but they don’t want white supremacy [and] they don’t want to force everybody to convert to their religion.”
