How the Bluenami Swept Away the Christian Right’s Texas Stronghold
In Church, Merch, and State , Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of Cafe, TPM's home for opinion and news analysis.
With the blue tsunami that inundated Texas on Election Day, the Christian right has lost the state that made it one of the most powerful forces in modern American politics. Since forging an unbreakable pact with the Republican Party in the Reagan era, for decades the Christian right purposefully notched its national successes by building robust state-level legislative and electoral machinery across the country. Texas was the crown jewel of this strategy, where operatives and elected officials together hatched plans to kill off church-state separation , Christianize the public schools , criminalize abortion, and eviscerate the civil rights of LGBTQ people.
For three decades, Republicans with close ties with the Christian right — George W. Bush, Rick Perry, and the outgoing Greg Abbott — have occupied the governor's mansion. The latter two, in particular, have worked hand in glove with the Christian right to make the country's second most populous state the proving ground for a white Christian nationalist agenda. Abbott's lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, who was first elected to the office in 2014, wielded enormous power over the state legislature to enact it. Like Abbott, he went down to defeat , on Tuesday, losing, like Abbott, to a woman.
Up and down the ballot, those decades of calculated power consolidation throughout the state government collapsed. What comes next will be crucial to watch. The Christian right is a movement with formidable staying power, owing to the determination of its funders and dedication of its foot soldiers. That is why this is not, by any means, a column about the demise of the Christian right. But it is about what we learn about how movements consolidate and later lose control.
The Republican drubbing in Texas in particular is a potent sign that voters there were not just done with Trump or MAGA. They were also, it seems, fed up with being ground zero for Christian nationalism . Now, without the power the movement once exerted in the Lone Star state, the Christian right will have to look elsewhere to rebuild on a map with a shrinking number of safely red strongholds.
Texas has long been the epicenter of the modern Christian right. In the 1970s, Paul Pressler, a state appellate judge, moonlighted as the architect of a far right takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. He waged a relentless campaign to purge anyone from the denomination who did not agree with his demand for "biblical inerrancy," particularly on issues relating to sex and gender. With this ideological capture of the nation's largest Protestant denomination in hand, evangelical preachers and operatives set out to make a pact with presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, culminating in his declaration at a gathering — of course, in Texas — that "I know that you can't endorse me, but I only brought that up because I want you to know that I endorse you and what you're doing."
Many years after his heyday, Pressler was sued over grooming and sexually abusing teenage boys; he settled the lawsuit before his death at 94 in 2024. But before these damning revelations came to light, he was a larger than life hero to many white evangelicals for his orchestration of the SBC takeover. He was also an important cultivator of the movement to build evangelical law schools to train attorneys versed in "biblical" law. In the mid-2000s, evangelical leaders sought to build an eponymous law school at a Southern Baptist college in Shreveport, Louisiana in his honor. Its founding dean was a young evangelical lawyer named Mike Johnson, but the fledgling school was never accredited and failed to launch, a now somewhat familiar trajectory for the soon-to-be former House Speaker.
The Texas Christian right continued to position itself as a national leader. In 2005, then-Governor Rick Perry made headlines for holding a controversial ceremony at an evangelical church, flanked by evangelical pastors and leaders, to sign a bill requiring that anyone under 18 obtain their parents' permission for an abortion, and another putting a same-sex marriage ban on the ballot for voters. Texas was so important to national aspirations that an ambitious preacher from Ohio, Rod Parsley, attended to declare gay sex "a veritable breeding ground of disease." Now, Perry's 2005 abortion bill seems mild in comparison to Texas Republicans' later assaults on abortion rights . These included the state's trigger law, which immediately criminalized abortion following the Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization , and its bounty hunter laws, aimed at prosecuting anyone who helps someone obtain an abortion. As a Texas abortion rights advocate told me in 2011, under Perry's watch, "Texas certainly led the way" in using a multitude of mechanisms to curtail access to abortion.
Texas produced megachurch pastors like Robert Jeffress, the leader of First Baptist Church in Dallas who injected himself into national GOP politics, and became one of Trump's most longstanding and loyal defenders . It gave us John Hagee, the San Antonio megachurch pastor, Trump cheerleader , and founder of Christians United for Israel, the Christian Zionist powerhouse that long advocated for the war with Iran that Trump finally delivered. It's Texas, so the megachurches are big, as are the megaphones that go with them.
As it became clear that the Supreme Court would strike down bans on same sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, Texas once again became the bellwether for finding new and devious ways to deprive LGBTQ people of their rights. In just one example, Ken Paxton, the outgoing attorney general who was handily defeated by James Talarico in the U.S. Senate race, spearheaded this effort by immediately issuing a legal opinion giving county clerks the right to refuse to issue same-sex couples marriage licenses. Accusing the U.S. Supreme Court of "manufacturing" the right to marriage equality, he wrote that "Texas must speak with one voice against this lawlessness." (On Tuesday, Texas voters elected Maggie Ellis chief justice of the state supreme court, the first woman elected to the post, and the first out LGBTQ person to be elected to statewide office.)
Anti-LGBTQ legislation became the hallmark of the Texas GOP, and Christian right and GOP leaders together led the pivot — which rippled across the country — to a viciously cruel anti-trans crusade. Steered by extremist activists that formed a tightly knit group in Houston, of which Patrick was a key part, operatives defeated a local civil rights measure by focusing their campaign solely on its trans-inclusivity, fear-mongering that it would allow "men in women's bathrooms." (The architect of this messaging, Jared Woodfill, was a protege and former law partner of Pressler.) In 2017, Patrick made passing a bathroom bill a top legislative priority, setting his sights on national recognition. "A strong America depends on a strong Texas," he told a group of pastors assembled at the state capitol for a hearing on the bill, earning him plaudits from national Christian right operatives. Although the bill did not become law, the Christian right, as is its habit, saw the defeat as reason to double down and seek new battlegrounds on which to attack the right of trans people to exist.
Now the Christian right, as always, is not giving up, even as leaders express astonishment at the scope and scale of Democratic victories, and mourn poor turnout by their partisans. They battled for 50 years to defeat Roe v. Wade , and have promised to do the same with Obergefell. They always play a long game, and are often even energized by losing. Whether they have suffered a generational defeat with permanence remains to be seen. But they certainly are not going away, even after the agony of resoundingly losing their Texas showpiece.
