A Wall That’s Worth Defending, by David R. Brockman, Texas Observer | March 17, 2026

I have had the good fortune of encountering the work of religious scholar and Texas Christian University professor Dr. David R. Brockman, whose Christian thought resonates deeply with my own. I grew up in the Mexican Baptist Church, where we understood faith as inseparable from justice. Ours was a social justice gospel—not because we agreed on everything, but because the church offered a space for moral reflection, honest questioning, and collective care. For many of us, it was also a refuge from the gaze, exclusion, and unsafety often experienced in predominantly white university institutions.

This is why Christian nationalism feels so profoundly alien to the Christian theology many of us inherited. Glenn Bracey and Dr. Brockman's Baker Institute colleague Michael Emerson contend that Christian nationalists are defending a “religion of whiteness” against religious and racial diversity. Alternatively, in their book on Christian nationalism, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry argue argue that Christian nationalism is less about religion itself than about the pursuit of power. However one frames it, Christian nationalism is not about Christ or Jesus. It is hateful and hurtful, profoundly antithetical to a faith tradition rooted in love, humility, justice, and care for the vulnerable.

—Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

A Wall That’s Worth Defending

Some evangelical Christians are hammering away at the very church-state separation that allowed them, and other believers, to first flourish in America.


by David R. Brockman | Texas Observer | March 17, 2026

When our nation’s Founders took the revolutionary step of creating a republic with no state religion, they likely never envisioned how religiously diverse the nation would become. Drive around my hometown of Fort Worth, or any populous Texas city, and you’ll see Muslim mosques, Hindu and Buddhist temples, Sikh gurdwaras, and Jewish synagogues, as well as Christian churches of all sizes and varieties.

Once-predominant Christians now account for less than two-thirds of Americans, and their faith has fragmented into hundreds of denominations that differ over theology, morality, and politics. One out of 15 Americans now belongs to a religion other than Christianity. Almost a third of Americans don’t identify with any particular religion, yet belief still flourishes. Over half of Americans consider religion very important in daily life; that share struggles to reach 20 percent in other economically advanced nations.

As America grows more religiously diverse, the Founders’ decision to separate church and state looks increasingly wise. Though it’s easy to spot flaws in the Founders themselves and the Constitution they crafted (the Electoral College, for instance, or the three-fifths clause), what Thomas Jefferson called the “wall of separation” was one thing they definitely got right.

Two centuries on, it’s easy to overlook just how novel that wall was in its day. Whereas both America’s adversary (Britain) and main ally (France) in the Revolutionary War officially endorsed one religion (the Church of England and the Catholic Church, respectively), the U.S. Constitution explicitly prohibited the “establishment” of such an official religion, instead guaranteeing individuals’ right to freely practice their own beliefs. The Founders also went against the grain in prohibiting any religious tests for holding public office, a requirement both in Britain and in many of the states at the time (North Carolina and Georgia, for instance, restricted public office to Protestant Christians).

As historian Steven K. Green notes, leading clergy of the day attacked the Constitution’s “irreligious” character—particularly the fact that, unlike most public documents of the time, including the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, it neither invokes nor mentions a deity.

Scholars and jurists have long debated how church-state separation should be interpreted and applied, but it remains a cornerstone of our democracy. And it’s one worth keeping, according to most Americans. Fifty-four percent want the federal government to enforce church-state separation; 69 percent believe the United States should never declare an official religion—and with good reason: Just imagine the mess if the government tried to foist one religious group’s beliefs on so varied a people.

Yet that’s effectively what Christian nationalists are attempting to do today. This largely white evangelical movement, which holds sway in GOP politics, especially here in Texas, seeks conservative Christian domination over law and public policy.

Despite contrary evidence offered by mainstream historians, many leading Texas lawmakers and politicos apparently agree with Aledo-based David Barton that church-state separation is a “myth” liberals and secularists concocted to conceal the Founders’ alleged intent to create an explicitly Christian nation. The Texas GOP has pledged to work “toward dispelling” this purported myth. Both Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and state Senator Mayes Middleton, a Galveston Republican, have declared there is “no such thing” as church-state separation.

At the Capitol, Texas lawmakers have sought to weaken Jefferson’s wall, especially in public education. In 2021, they required “In God We Trust” be posted in public schools. In 2023, lawmakers authorized school districts to hire chaplains as counselors, with no prohibition on proselytizing. In 2024, the State Board of Education gave its blessing to a “Bible-infused” K-5 curriculum featuring instructional materials more appropriate for Sunday school than public schools. And last year, lawmakers mandated that all public schools display one religious tradition’s sacred text—the Ten Commandments—and provide a daily period for prayer and Scripture reading.

These measures arguably promote one religion over others, and religion over non-religion, threatening to turn students, families, and teachers who don’t subscribe to Christian-nationalist religiosity into outsiders in their own public schools and communities.

As a recent book, Randall Balmer’s America’s Best Idea: Separation of Church and State, makes clear, what the author calls our “best idea” was no deus ex machina; it emerged from a particular history and particular coalitional forces. America’s “grand experiment of constructing a government without … an established religion,” Balmer writes, grew from an alliance of “two unlikely camps,” secular rationalists and—ironically—evangelicals.

The latter group had their own history of persecution under state religion. In colonial Virginia, where the Church of England was the established religion, “a sheriff brutally horsewhipped a Baptist minister,” Balmer recounts as an example. Quaker William Penn, persecuted in Britain by the Church of England, and Baptist Roger Williams, who suffered at the hands of Puritan colonial officials, worked to free people from the yoke of official religion; they established colonies (Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, respectively) that offered religious freedom, setting a precedent for the later First Amendment.

Secular, Enlightenment-minded Founders like James Madison had their own reasons for rejecting state religion. They needed to accommodate the religious diversity already present in the new nation, where religious groups “rang[ed] from Catholics and Moravians to Jews, Quakers, and Dutch Reformed—and perhaps hundreds more.” Moreover, Madison linked religious establishment with political tyranny and violence; he wrote that “torrents of blood” had been spilled in official religion’s “vain attempt” to proscribe religious differences.

In rejecting official religion, the Founders created what Balmer calls a “free marketplace of religion”: Since no religious group holds a state-sanctioned monopoly over religious life, “religious groups … compete for adherents on an equal footing.”

Pushback to the Founders’ free-market approach, though, does have a long history. In the 19th century, for instance, the elaborately named National Association to Secure the Religious Amendment of the Constitution pushed for explicit acknowledgment of Christ’s will as the law of the land. Though this group’s efforts failed, it foreshadowed today’s Christian nationalism.

Then and now, Christian nationalists threaten a system that has actually benefited both government and religion. Though Americans haven’t always lived up to the promise of religious tolerance, we have been spared widespread sectarian bloodshed. Meanwhile, “religion has flourished in America,” Balmer writes, “precisely because the government (for the most part, at least) has stayed out of the religion business.”

Separation has perhaps benefited no group more than evangelicals themselves. They have proved far more adept than other groups at adjusting to social and technological changes (think of their adroit use of digital media or their move to megachurches featuring multisensory worship experiences). And, of course, there’s the unprecedented political power evangelicals wield, especially here in Texas.

So why the eagerness of many evangelicals to kill the golden goose of separation? Balmer blames evangelical leaders’ (and President Donald Trump’s) “rhetoric of victimization.” However, he leaves unanswered the question of why they find such rhetoric so compelling. Other scholars offer possible answers. For instance, Glenn Bracey and my Baker Institute colleague Michael Emerson contend that Christian nationalists are defending a “religion of whiteness” against religious and racial diversity. Alternatively, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry argue that Christian nationalism is less about religion than the pursuit of power.

Like other bedrock principles of our democracy—say, the separation of powers or freedom of the press, both also under threat today—church-state separation was born of mixed motives, has not always lived up to its own promise, and remains subject to shifting interpretations. At times, it has functioned more as a hedge than an impermeable wall (as when a Cold War Congress made “In God We Trust” the national motto). Yet, it’s no myth. It has prevented any one religion from gaining a state-sanctioned monopoly in the religious marketplace, and that has served us well, fostering a pluralism that makes us stronger and freer. As Jefferson’s wall faces perhaps its most severe tests to date, it is up to all of us, religious and nonreligious alike, to speak out in its defense.


David R. Brockman, Ph.D., is an author, Christian theologian, and nonresident scholar in the Religion and Public Policy Program at Rice University’s Baker Institute. He teaches at Texas Christian University.

I shudder as I read this piece by Marilynne Robinson published in The Guardian.  She aptly characterizes religion as profoundly caught up with partisanship politics—even to the point of taking a blind eye to the otherwise obvious cruelty of U.S. border policy that involves the ripping away of children from their parents' bodies if they cross the U.S.-Mexico border and attempt to seek asylum or try to enter the country without papers.

Christianity that has spread through the culture on the strength of the old American habit of church-going, and which propounds a stark vision, the embattled faction of “the saved” surrounded by continuous threats to their souls – otherwise known as the American population at large.

This is a very arrogant and destructive kind of Christianity that needs to open its eyes to its own interest in preserving existing hierarchies of privilege and power even if at the expense of their own humanity as so-called Christians. 

While this may get rationalized by some on the right as "nation building" or "making America great," this is nothing short of a pact with the devil that magically and mysteriously never presents itself lucidly in this way.  

Given that the devil is the master of deception, masquerading as an angel of light, what may seem righteous and good is actually woefully and horribly wrong. Take it from the Bible itself in 2 Corinthians, chapter 11, verses 13-15 as follows:

13For such men are false apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ. 14And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. 15It is not surprising, then, if his servants masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their actions.

Nothing good, my friends, can possibly come out of a policy that brutally tears families apart—either for us as a country or those who are directly affected.  

Speak up, everybody!  Get woke!  Do something!  Call all of those that represent you and speak against this tragedy that is already of unspeakable proportions. 

We are truly in the grips of a profound, moral crisis to which we are all obliged to respond if we ourselves, by our silence or inaction, are not to be complicit. 

And for Christians, please don't let your brand of Christianity fall prey to the lies and distortions of the evil one.  And let's all disavow policies that would make Jesus cry. 

Angela Valenzuela

A moral crisis grips the US border. Yet the religious right is shamefully silent

Marilynne RobinsonThe Christian right is allowing Trump to escape responsibility for the immoral policy of separating children from their parents. Have they no shame?

As a matter of recent policy, agents of the American government take children from their parents’ arms at our southern border. They are kept at separate facilities for indeterminate periods of time. The parents are jailed and the children are put in the care of non-governmental agencies, sometimes in other states. It is hard to imagine that the higher rate of incarceration and the new system of calculated injury to children would not soon overwhelm existing arrangements no matter how many shelters and beds are provided for a frightened, heartbroken population of the very young, whose miseries are intended as a disincentive to future potential border-crossers.

The only nod to shared humanity in this policy is an obvious understanding that a child’s grief is a particularly wrenching experience for a parent, powerful enough – so the designers of the policy clearly believe – to weigh against the threats to that same child’s safety and health and prospects for a better life that bring parents and children to the American border. This effect would be much heightened by any parent’s knowing that the one sufficient comfort for any child in almost all circumstances, and especially one like this, is to be taken into his mother’s or his father’s arms.

I am sure that, among these non-governmental caregivers, good-hearted people can be found at more or less the same rate as in the general population. But the policy in question is new, and the demands it entails are special and grave. The child grief they try to deal with must include mourning, feelings of abandonment, a kind of visceral knowledge of loss that can be quieted sometimes but never dispelled. Especially in the case of the small children, their parents’ arms would have been home and comfort through the whole length of their journey to our border.

What have we become? America is not alone in struggling with the flow of refugees from actual and virtual wars. Desperation and destitution obscure the dignity and worthiness of people when they are dealt with in such numbers. Given the will, some can see them as alien in the most negative sense, and threatening. Nothing is excused by the fact that this is predictable, perhaps inevitable.

But there is nothing inevitable about this recent change in American policy, this “zero tolerance” that separates families by jailing all adults who try to enter the country illegally, as well as some of those who come seeking asylum. Donald Trump, who has called the policy a “horrible law”, though his own administration put it in place, pretends that the Democrats must be forced to change it, when the Democrats are very much out of power, and when he could reverse the policy as readily as it was put in place. By speaking as if it were a political issue he suggests stalemate, deadlock, precluding any thought that the policy will be changed.

It should be obvious that without politics there can be no such thing as representative government, and equally obvious that politics as now understood and practiced is a great threat to our democracy. Partisanship has hardened into empowered irrationality. I read from time to time that liberals are offensively self-righteous, perhaps because we say this kind of thing: people on the right are so utterly certain they own the moral high ground that for them Trump’s lie can have the ring of truth. After all, who but Democrats would do something so patently horrible? Sometimes at least Trump does find just the right word.

 

Partisanship has hardened into empowered irrationality

Party identification at present aligns with important asymmetries in the American population. Relatively speaking, it is Republicans who own guns, who claim to be religious, who resent immigration. This list only hints at the profound differences of worldview that lie behind these partisan divides. There is a generalized fearfulness on the right that makes many people feel they need guns. Their fears are stoked when they are told that immigrants are criminals, rapists and animals. Behind much of this is a spurious Christianity that has spread through the culture on the strength of the old American habit of church-going, and which propounds a stark vision, the embattled faction of “the saved” surrounded by continuous threats to their souls – otherwise known as the American population at large.

'We live as second-class citizens': what it's like to face border agents every day

Read more

Insinuating an element of demonism into the interpretation of ordinary life justifies the word and the concept “horrible”, and retaliation in kind, whence all those guns. We have patriots who hate the country, Christians who insult and deprive the poor and the stranger. We have a president who, with the decisive support of self-declared conservativeness, acts with contempt for law and custom, and for decency. He has a degree of latitude, where his base is concerned, that is incomprehensible to those whose mental landscape is not demon-haunted. His moral shabbiness is a minor thing, they say, over against the forces of evil that assail him.

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Can a movement that defines itself by its vehement rejection of American culture ever really wish or work for civility and accommodation? Might not such a movement resist solutions to social problems, for example gun violence and poverty, because these things confirm a view of the culture that is central to their rejection of it? Do they place any value on America’s good name? Questions like these arise from the social and political consequences of the years in power of the so-called Christian right. They are uniquely Trump’s prop and stay. Will they let him escape his responsibility for a policy that even he denounces in moral terms, and allow him to keep it in place? The question cannot be avoided – have they no shame?

• Marilynne Robinson is an American novelist and essayist.

RENDER TO CAESAR: Some Baptists feel ‘caught in the middle’

Hmmm. A new awakening or re-awakening of the religious right? Quote: "“It’s evangelicals reclaiming their birthright and their historical legacy as reformers, in the 19th-century sense of the term,” he said, noting that evangelicals in 19th-century America and Britain often were at the forefront of progressive political movements. They led fights against slavery, for women’s rights and for child welfare, for instance." Read on.

-Angela

RENDER TO CAESAR: Some Baptists feel ‘caught in the middle’

By Robert Marus / Associated Baptist Press / 6/22/07

It may look dead, but it’s really just evolving—even though its members might not like that word. And it may be developing into something its founders wouldn’t recognize.

That’s what some experts say about the future of the Religious Right as a political movement. And even many very conservative Southern Baptists are part of the trend.

The recent death of Virginia Baptist pastor and political activist Jerry Falwell put an exclamation point on months’ worth of media attention to the ever-more-evident fissures within conservative Christian ranks over how to proceed in secular politics.

Although his influence had waned in recent years, Falwell widely was regarded as a godfather of the Religious Right. Historians of religion and politics regard his launch of the Moral Majority in 1979 as seminal in unifying conservative Christians as a voting bloc.

But now Falwell is dead, and his peers in the “Big Three” of the Religious Right—Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson and Focus on the Family head James Dobson—are advanced in years.

The movement they launched, meanwhile, seems to have passed the apex of its power. In 1994, Christian conservatives helped elect a Republican Congress dominated by their own kind; it stayed in power more than a decade. They twice helped provide the margin of victory for a president—George W. Bush—who not only spoke their theological language, but also provided at least lip service to their favorite legislative goals. And they, with the elevation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, finally were within reach of having a reliable socially conservative majority on that powerful body.

But Democrats won the 2006 congressional elections handily, and the current top contenders for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination don’t inspire in Religious Right leaders the same kind of trust that Bush did—to put it mildly.

At the same time, many younger evangelicals are rethinking which issues influence their voting. Some are beginning to assert that protecting the environment, supporting international human rights and avoiding war are “pro-life” issues just as much as efforts to stop abortion. And polls show homosexuality and government-sanctioned prayers don’t get young evangelicals nearly as exercised as those old “wedge issues” do their elders.

Is it time to break out the dirges and the black veils for a political movement?

“No,” says Barry Hankins, an expert on Christian conservatives who teaches at Baylor University, noting it’s not the first time some prematurely have declared the Religious Right dead.

“It came up in about 1989 or so when Jerry Falwell shut down the Moral Majority,” he recalled. Another flurry of eulogies for the Religious Right appeared in the press in the late 1990s, after the Moral Majority’s successor—the Christian Coalition—began to flounder.

Several years ago, Hankins proposed the notion the Christian Right wasn’t dying; it was maturing. Rather than existing as a single, highly visible organization, it was becoming a movement with diverse influences.

Such maturation could be happening to the Christian conservative movement again, Han-kins said—but it might end up looking fundamentally different as a result.

“I think you have this new kind of wider segment of evangelicals who are publicly oriented and politically conscious, but they’re not tied to the old Christian Right machinery,” he said.

Randall Ballmer, a Columbia University historian and expert in American evangelicalism, agreed. “The younger folks are worried about the environment, they’re worried about climate change, they’re worried about global warming,” he said.

Younger evangelicals also focus on international human rights, poverty and healthcare. Southern Baptist mega-celebrity Rick Warren, for instance, has adopted alleviating the AIDS crisis in Africa and other Third World concerns as a major emphasis of his California church’s ministry.

The divide between the Religious Right power structure and new leaders who want to adopt a broader set of causes as core emphases has been laid bare by well-publicized intramural battles in recent months.

One was a long-simmering dispute over the chief public-policy officer for the National Association of Evangelicals. In March, a group of conservative Christian luminaries—including Dobson and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council—sent a letter to NAE board members asking them to rein in or fire Richard Cizik, the organization’s vice president for governmental affairs. Dobson and his colleagues were upset with Cizik for his outspokenness on confronting global warming.

He and other environmentalist Christians have argued that, if the scientific consensus is right that global warming is real and human-induced, millions of the world’s poor people’s lives and livelihoods are threatened by rising sea levels and changing weather patterns. Therefore, Cizik has said, drastic action to reverse global warming’s effects is necessary.

Not so fast, said the letter writers, who echoed the view of many pro-business conservatives that whether global warming is human-caused still is an open question—as is the question of whether drastic efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions would end up having a more detrimental economic effect than climate change itself.

Just as importantly, they argued, Cizik was “using the global-warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time, notably the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage, and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children. In their place has come a preoccupation with climate concerns that extend beyond the NAE’s mandate and its own statement of purpose.”

They released the missive to news outlets in an effort to mount a public-relations campaign against Cizik, but NAE board members rebuffed the ouster attempt.

Ballmer hopes a broadening of the evangelical agenda reflects the movement coming back to its past.

“It’s evangelicals reclaiming their birthright and their historical legacy as reformers, in the 19th-century sense of the term,” he said, noting that evangelicals in 19th-century America and Britain often were at the forefront of progressive political movements. They led fights against slavery, for women’s rights and for child welfare, for instance.

“What I hope is happening is that evangelicals are beginning to wake up to that, to recognize that evangelical activism in the 19th century—particularly in the antebellum period—was oriented toward those on the margins of society,” he said.

Whether it’s a departure from the Religious Right or an evolution of it, the trend is evident even within the Southern Baptist Convention. Some blogging Southern Baptist pastors have included, among their complaints about the SBC leadership, critiques of its close relationship with the right wing of the Republican Party.

“While I’ve been a card-carrying member of the so-called ‘Religious Right’ since I first voted for Pat Buchanan in the 1996 Presidential primaries, I’m sick and tired of the Religious Right,” said Texas pastor Benjamin Cole, in a post on his blog (baptistblog.wordpress.com) written prior to Falwell’s death.

“I can no longer stand to see Southern Baptist leaders pander to Republican politicians, and I’m ready for a man to occupy the White House who won’t shun evangelical voters on the one hand, or flirt with them on the other.”

Cole, pastor of Parkview Baptist Church in Arlington, said merely opposing legalized abortion doesn’t make someone 100 percent pro-life. For example, messengers to the SBC annual meeting watered down an already-mild resolution about global warming after some objected the resolution encouraged too much government involvement in the issue.

“Our predecessors in the Southern Baptist Convention, the most ardent supporters of the conservative resurgence, somehow see global warming and … ecological concerns among young evangelicals (as) somehow apart from any Christian concern,” he said. “But they think the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is very much an issue of religious liberty.”

Cole said pastors like him find a dissonance in such views. “I think there’s a lot of young, emerging, arising—whatever you want to call it—evangelicals who watch that and go, ‘There is no coherent political philosophy of the Religious Right. There is no unifying theme except for support for the Republican Party,’” he said.

Paul Littleton, an Oklahoma pastor who operates the “Caught in the Middle” blog (middlekid.typepad.com) said in a December post that he—a Republican—is nonetheless tired of evangelicalism’s close association with the GOP.

“I’m conflicted because I am a part of an American evangelical Christianity that is almost entirely and uncritically in bed with the Republican Party—who will support them as long as they support capitalism and oppose abortion and homosexual marriage. Do that, and we’ll vote for you, we’ll go to war with you, we’ll let you spend the country into oblivion, and we’ll be silent when you make sexual advances toward minor pages. And I don’t go for any of that stuff,” said Littleton, pastor of Faith Baptist Church in Sapulpa, a suburb of Tulsa.

Baylor’s Hankins said the SBC’s leaders getting closely involved with the Republican Party was an understandable part of the “ebb and flow” of Southern Baptist life.

“I think part of what we’ve seen over the last quarter-century is that, as the Southern Baptist conservative movement gained ascendancy and gained control of the denomination, it was a heady experience to be aligned with political power. But, on the other hand, it was genuinely a way of having an influence in the culture,” he said.

“And as these things go, the avenue to Southern Baptists exercising influence in the culture can also work the other way around, with the Republican Party utilizing the power and influence of Southern Baptists for Republican ends. So, you had a nice symbiotic relationship there.”

Cole hopes his generation is beginning to “regard partisan politics as the ‘tar baby.’ You know, you can punch at it, but you’re going to get stuck in it,” he said.

“As a Southern Baptist, I don’t want to wake up any more in the morning and look on the pillow beside me and find an elephant.”



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