When Faith Becomes Power: The Long History Behind Today’s Religious Politics of Controlling Culture in Texas, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 When Faith Becomes Power: The Long History Behind Today’s Religious Politics of Controlling 

Culture in Texas

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

May 3, 2026

Before you read further, take a few minutes to watch this chilling snapshot of Texas history narrated by Drew McCoy on his Youtube channel, "Genetically Modified Skeptic." What it documents is not just “interesting history.” It is a chilling and largely buried account of state-sanctioned and vigilante violence in Texas—targeting German immigrants whose only real crime was thinking differently.

Many of these settlers were freethinkers, abolitionists, and skeptics of organized religion. For that, they were surveilled, harassed, and in some cases murdered. Their communities were policed not just for political loyalty, but for ideological and religious conformity. This is Texas history—but not the version that makes it into textbooks.

We should be asking why.

Because what this video reveals is not an anomaly. It is a pattern.

There’s a moment in the video where the past collapses into the present. What initially appears to be a critique of religion opens into something far more consequential: a genealogy of power. This is not simply about belief systems. It is about how dominant religious ideologies—particularly forms of conservative Protestantism—have historically aligned themselves with political authority to discipline populations, define belonging, and consolidate control over public life.

What begins as theology becomes governance. And what cannot be controlled becomes a threat—in this case, German “freethinkers,” white people stripped of belonging—exposed as not white enough when they refused ideological conformity.

At its core, the video underscores a critical truth: the modern religious right—also known today as “Christian nationalists”—did not emerge out of nowhere. It is the product of long-term, strategic organizing rooted in earlier histories of exclusion, enforcement, and at times, outright violence. From the suppression of dissenting religious communities to contemporary campaigns around “family values,” education, and national identity, the throughline is clear—power is maintained by controlling culture.

And culture is controlled, in large part, through education.

If that sounds abstract, consider what is happening right now in Texas.

At the K–12 level, battles over the State Board of Education’s social studies TEKS standards have become proxy wars over history itself—what counts as legitimate knowledge, whose stories are centered, and which truths are softened, distorted, or erased. The same impulse that once targeted German freethinkers now operates through curricular gatekeeping—policing how young people come to understand democracy, race, religion, and dissent.

At the university level, the struggle over Ethnic Studies—and more recently, the passage and implementation of SB 17 and SB 37—extends this project. Programs, scholarship, and entire fields that interrogate power, colonialism, and racial hierarchy are cast as threats to the state. Faculty governance is restructured. Academic freedom is narrowed. Knowledge itself is disciplined.

The tactics are strikingly familiar:

The manufacturing of moral panic.

 The targeting of educators, intellectuals, and marginalized communities.

The insistence that dominant norms are under siege.

These are not new strategies. They are recycled technologies of power.
And they work.

This is why the video matters now. Because the battles we are witnessing across Texas—over curriculum, DEI, academic freedom, and even the right to teach truthful histories—are not isolated skirmishes. They are the latest expression of a much longer project: the regulation of knowledge in the service of ideology.

In this light, policies like SB 17 and SB 37 do not stand alone. They are part of a broader architecture of governance that seeks to narrow what can be known, said, and taught. This is not simply policy—it is the institutionalization of a worldview.

A worldview that has always required enemies.

What Drew McCoy ultimately offers is not just historical recovery, but a warning. Movements built over generations do not disappear when challenged. They adapt. They rebrand. They relocate their battles—from churches to school boards, from pulpits to legislatures, from doctrine to policy.

And they continue.

So the question is not whether this history is relevant.

It is whether we are willing to confront what it reveals about the present.

Because once you recognize the pattern—the suppression of dissent, the policing of thought, the fusion of faith and state power—it becomes impossible to dismiss what is happening now as accidental or benign.

This is not new.

It is simply returning in a different form.

If this history troubles you, it should. And it should move you—not just to reflection, but to action. The next battleground is already set. The Texas State Board of Education will meet June 22–26, 2026, where proposed, deeply reactionary social studies standards will be debated—standards that will shape what millions of Texas students are allowed to know about their own history. 

Show up. Testify. Bear witness. Refuse the erasure. And stay connected to those organizing on the ground by following Social Studies Advocate on Instagram. The struggle over knowledge is not abstract. It is happening now—and it requires all of us.