RealClearPolitics provides a link to a New York Times Magazine article about how Christian fundamentalism dominates politics in Texas. It’s behind the NYT paywall but you can see a disapproving summary of the article here.
Our personal experience with TX occurred early in retirement when we ‘moved’ there for a year, for fun. We were offered teaching contracts for a year in the area northeast of Dallas at an A&M branch campus.
We were both amazed at the robust role of religion in the lives of many of our students. Texans are friendly people, not standoffish, but we concluded we’d make few close friends of the sort you’d hang out with after work because their friendship networks were largely based in their churches.
At the time Texans took a very relaxed view of “the separation of church and state.” Separation was largely ignored in our experience. It wouldn’t surprise me if it were still largely true.
At an on-campus welcoming dinner party for new A&M faculty we saw our host, the university president, offer a long, detailed and specific Christian blessing before we ate. Since we’d all introduced ourselves I knew there were several likely Jews among the new hires. I wondered if they were feeling like strangers in a strange land? The other DrC saw morning prayers offered at rural public elementary schools she visited as part of her job.
What we’d just experienced we would have never seen in CA. It was an eye-opener. Relatively serious Protestant Christianity is as widespread and influential in TX as you’d imagine Catholicism is in the Irish Republic. I’d bet few win TX elections without making their faith a part of their campaign pitch.
One requirement for an MBA course I taught was to create a career plan for the next several years. Nearly half of the responses included how they also planned to become more involved in their churches. They considered this an integral part of their career, obviously we were using different definitions of the term.
