A Cross in the Road

~ In Partnership with Democracy Forward ~

As the aggressive, Trump-fueled Christian nationalist movement threatens the line between church and state around the country, a growing community of Christians are standing up and speaking out against it in Texas

Words by Robyn Ross | Illustrations by Cristiana Couceiro

October 28, 2024

As a board-certified chaplain, Deborah Reeves usually preferred listening over public speaking. But the night of January 29 was different. The school board in her town of 4,700, a short drive from Austin, Texas, was poised to make a momentous decision — one Reeves feared would erode the boundary between church and state. That night, the board would vote on whether to allow religious chaplains to serve in public schools in the roles traditionally held by guidance counselors. Reeves was not particularly comfortable in the spotlight, but she considered the policy dangerous enough that she felt compelled to tell the school board what she thought.

As the pastor for children and families at First Baptist Church in Austin, Reeves was always tired on Mondays. But her alarm went off at 6 a.m. on school days, launching her into a rush to bundle her two elementary school kids to the bus stop in the dark. That morning, she had cleaned the house, then sat down to email church members, reminding them to sign kids up for summer camp. But the evening’s school board meeting kept creeping into her mind, and between projects she drafted remarks to read during the public comment forum. She barely finished in time to pick up the kids from school and make dinner. To get to the meeting by 6 p.m., she’d had to leave without eating anything herself.

Reeves had worked hard to become a chaplain and maintain her credential. She had earned a master of divinity degree, completed a chaplaincy internship and residency, and been endorsed by the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. She had served as a chaplain for three years in a hospital and five with a nonprofit hospice agency, and she maintained her board certification by earning 50 hours of continuing education each year. Her training had taught her how to prioritize the spiritual needs of the person in her care and how to avoid transferring her own emotions, beliefs, or biases onto that individual. But the policy the school board was considering didn’t require any of that training.

Reeves suspected the policy the board was considering was, at its heart, a move to inject Christianity into public schools. Any chaplains who volunteered to help in the schools would be well-meaning folks who wanted to help kids; there was a good chance they'd be Baptist pastors. But she could think of too many ways things could go terribly wrong. A teen could tell a school chaplain about suicidal thoughts, and the chaplain might remind him that suicide is an unforgiveable sin. A transgender child could come out to a school chaplain who responds by saying God wouldn’t have made a mistake with their sex at birth. A chaplain — again, intending only good — could subtly persuade a child to follow a religious path different from their parents’.

When it was her turn to speak, Reeves strode to the microphone and, with a disarming smile, introduced herself as a mom and classroom volunteer, as well as a board-certified chaplain, before laying out her case against the policy. Bringing untrained volunteers or clergy into schools would “embolden those who seek to misuse the authority of chaplains of any religion to evangelize among public school students and staff,” she told the board. Perhaps it was her imagination, but one trustee’s eyes seemed to widen at the words “of any religion,” as though he hadn’t considered a chaplain other than a Christian.

Nearly three hours into the meeting, the board voted against allowing chaplains to serve as mental health counselors. But the body affirmed its support for chaplains volunteering in schools generally — a position that Reeves worried left the district vulnerable. She headed home, exhausted and relieved but still uneasy. More and more frequently, she felt she had to explain she was “not that kind of Christian” — the kind who saw the world in black and white, who excluded people who were different, who thought that her own religion deserved special privileges in the halls of power. 

“Separation of church and state,” she said, “is good for both.”

• • •

Across the country, elected officials and some conservative Christian leaders are chipping away at that boundary. They instead share a vision of the United States as a country singled out for God’s favor, where an essential component of patriotism is Christian identity. The philosophy is predicated on a distortion of American history that posits the founders were Christians who based the United States government on religious principles. On these grounds, adherents seek to enshrine contemporary conservative Christian viewpoints in the law. The movement’s critics fear it ultimately would create a society where a particular type of Christian enjoys privileged status and the rights of those in minority religions — or professing no religion — are considered secondary.

Observers alarmed by this fusion of government and religion call the movement Christian nationalism. The ideology “suggests that to be a true American, one must be a Christian,” says Amanda Tyler, a native Texan and the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a Washington, D.C.-based organization dedicated to preserving religious freedom. “And not just any kind of Christian, but a Christian who holds fundamentalist religious beliefs that are in line with certain conservative political stances.” She describes Christian nationalism as a well-funded political movement that has been emboldened by leaders like Trump and the Supreme Court he shaped. “Those who are embracing it are in places of political power, and they’re using their political power to try to entrench Christian nationalism in law and policy,” Tyler says.

The movement has succeeded by reshaping the concept of “religious liberty” to protect actions taken in the name of religion, even when they infringe on the rights of those who follow other faiths or no faith. “The religion clauses of the First Amendment were designed to preserve government neutrality toward religion,” says Sarah Goetz, senior counsel at Democracy Forward, a national legal organization that defends democratic institutions and combats extremism. These are, first, the establishment clause, stating that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” historically understood as saying the government should not favor or disfavor any specific faith. The second, a continuation of that sentence, is the free exercise clause: “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” stating that government should not interfere with individuals’ rights to practice their faith.

Historically, the two clauses have operated in tandem, Goetz says. But in the past decade or so, “there’s been an absolute ascendance of free exercise rights for a narrow band of Christian beliefs and a concomitant demise of the establishment clause.” Recent Supreme Court rulings in favor of a high school coach who prayed with students at football games, a business owner who refused service to gay or lesbian patrons on religious grounds, and a for-profit company that did not cover contraception in its group health plans – again, on religious grounds – have emboldened lawmakers across the country to propose legislation that aggressively muddles the line between church and state.

Texas is fertile ground for this movement. In 2023, lawmakers proposed initiatives to mandate the posting of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom and to provide for a daily period of prayer and reading of the Bible “or other religious text.” During the same legislative session, they passed the bill requiring school districts to consider allowing chaplains to serve as counselors. The state senator who authored the former bill called the Ten Commandments part of American heritage and said the measure will “remind students all across Texas of the importance of the fundamental foundation of America.”

Governor Greg Abbott, a strong proponent of school voucher programs, in September 2023 held a virtual town hall meeting with Catholic, Baptist, and nondenominational Christian leaders in which he encouraged them and their congregations to advocate for “school choice” — redirecting public education dollars to private schools, presumably Christian ones, selected by parents. Abbott called on the clergy to speak about school choice from the pulpit. “You’re supporting a cause, a cause that aligns with what God expects of us,” he told them. In April, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick told a gathering of conservative pastors that they should run for office to defeat those who don’t believe in God. “If we get ready for battle in the election in 2024, I believe the victory will be the Lord's,” he told them. “But we have to stand up and fight.”

But significant numbers of Christians — including Tyler of the Baptist Joint Committee and Reeves, the chaplain — do not recognize their deeply held faith in this legislation. Where, they wonder, is the concern for the poor and marginalized that Jesus demonstrated? How can people seek power in the name of Christianity when Jesus said that his kingdom was not of this world? What happened to the idea of loving your neighbor as yourself?

“There is nothing Christian about Christian nationalism,” says James Talarico, a 35-year-old Democratic state representative from an Austin suburb and a lifelong Presbyterian. “It is the worship of power — political power, social power, economic power — in the name of Christ, and it is a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth.”

Talarico has become an outspoken opponent of legislation that would force religion into government. His voice has joined with that of Reeves and other Christians at committee hearings and press conferences, reminding the public that not all believers want to enshrine their faith into law. The Baptist Joint Committee in 2019 launched the campaign Christians Against Christian Nationalism and, last fall, chose North Texas for the campaign’s first field office. The effort is one of several by Christians in Texas aimed not just at safeguarding the separation of church and state but also at reclaiming the narrative about their faith.

“Christians need to push against Christian nationalism, because it jeopardizes an authentic witness of our faith,” says the BJC’s Tyler. “Christians need to stand against Christian nationalism because it's an urgent threat to religious freedom for all people, as well as to American democracy.”

• • •

In 1983, when Marcy Antiuk was 22, the birth control she and her partner were using failed. When she discovered she was pregnant, she immediately knew she wanted to have an abortion. Her relationship wasn’t suited for the long term, and she wasn’t financially or emotionally prepared to be a single parent, especially if her pregnancy led to her being fired from her job in a male-dominated field.

Seeking support from her Catholic church, she realized, would result in stigma and shame no matter what she did: If she became a parent, she would be “the woman with the illegitimate child”; if she placed the baby for adoption, she would be “the woman who gave up her child.” If she had an abortion, she would be a “baby killer.” She never returned to a Catholic church. Dealing with her local Planned Parenthood clinic, she found, was much more straightforward. She was able to schedule an abortion with no waiting period. No one pressured her to change her mind. She didn’t have to have an ultrasound. Insurance paid half the cost.

After years of avoiding church, with the help of therapy, Antiuk confronted the grief and shame she attributed to internalized stigma from her Catholic upbringing. Wanting to return to a church community, but one where she could bring her “whole self” — where she wouldn’t have to hide the fact that she’d had an abortion — she started attending services at an Episcopal congregation. The formal liturgy resembled that of her Catholic upbringing, but the denomination since 1967 had supported women’s right to access abortion. Antiuk became an active member at Trinity Episcopal Church in Houston, a congregation that embraced the LGBTQ+ community and supported the unhoused.

When, in June 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ended the constitutional right to abortion, Texas made performing an abortion a crime punishable by life in prison, except to prevent the pregnant person’s death or risk of “substantial impairment of a major bodily function.” Antiuk agonized over the plight of women with unwanted pregnancies who, four decades after her own abortion, had fewer options than she’d had. She sensed that Trinity should help women who — like her 22-year-old self — felt like their abortion severed them from their faith life. It would be so nice if someone knew there was a church they could go to that would embrace you even if you had an abortion, she thought.

Antiuk contacted her pastor, Hannah Atkins Romero, who, it turned out, had been discussing the fall of Roe v. Wade with a group of female clergy. To Atkins Romero, an Episcopal priest for nearly three decades and a former Planned Parenthood board member, abortion restrictions are a manifestation of Christian nationalism’s lust for power, antithetical to the message of Jesus.

“Controlling and othering and containing women is definitely a core tenet of Christian nationalism,” she says. “To take away women’s rights and reproductive rights is a way of controlling women, not trusting women, and perpetuating the lie that women aren’t capable of making decisions for themselves and thus leading in any way.” She points to instances in the Bible where Jesus stood up for women: stopping a crowd from killing a woman who had committed adultery by telling the one without sin to cast the first stone; defending the woman who made the seemingly wasteful choice to anoint him with expensive oil; violating social norms to speak to the Samaritan woman at the well.

“Christ’s whole message was about love and mercy and trust and dignity, not control and condemnation and hate and legal power,” Atkins Romero says. “The Bible is a profoundly liberating story that does not end with women being condemned and controlled.”

She reached out to the Texas Freedom Network, a nonprofit formed in 1995 to counter the rise of the Religious Right. From the start, TFN had partnered with like-minded clergy, both Christian and Jewish, who offered their perspectives on proposed legislation in testimony at committee hearings and press conferences. After then-state Senator Wendy Davis’ historic filibuster against abortion restrictions in 2013, TFN began a project called Just Texas to engage clergy outside the five-month, biennial Texas legislative session. In 2016 it launched the Reproductive Freedom Congregation initiative, through which religious communities can formally proclaim their support for access to abortion and promise not to judge or shame anyone’s reproductive decisions. By 2023, when Atkins Romero contacted Just Texas, 30 churches across the state had adopted the designation.

Just Texas faith strategist Shan Schaffer characterizes the Reproductive Freedom Congregation effort as countering Religious Right narratives about abortion while working to “repair the harm caused by those stigmatizing narratives.” On a chilly Saturday in early 2024, Schaffer led a workshop to introduce parishioners at Trinity and several other Episcopal churches to the Reproductive Freedom Congregation perspective. Such workshops invite participants to consider and share, in small groups, their “faith story” and their “reproductive health story.” Some participants, especially men, don’t think they have a reproductive health story, but Schaffer encourages them to consider how they feel about going to the doctor; whether they want children; and what their relationship is with their own body. The groups then reflect on how their faith and reproductive health stories intersect.

The event touched a nerve, Atkins Romero says. “People were crying — women and men — like, ‘This is amazing that a church is even holding this.’ I was like, ‘This isn’t the ’50s, people.’ But it kind of feels like it.” Once it became clear that the majority of Trinity’s members supported the church’s becoming a Reproductive Freedom Congregation, the church’s vestry, or leadership council, voted unanimously to adopt the designation.

Now Trinity has pamphlets around the building that explain what the designation means. “Just like we welcome immigrants or refugees, we welcome those who have had abortions,” Antiuk says. The pamphlets are a subtle way for visitors to see that, Oh, that’s the kind of church they are; that’s good to know, maybe I might fit here.

• • •

As Schaffer walked Trinity through the Reproductive Freedom Congregation process, colleagues in the Texas Freedom Network were busy fighting other bills that eroded the line between church and state. They helped defeat Governor Abbott’s school voucher plan in the regular 2023 legislative session and four special sessions the governor called specifically to pass the plan. They tracked a rise in bills targeting the queer community (nearly four times as many in 2023 as in 2019, according to TFN political director Rocío Fierro-Perez, restricting everything from gender-affirming care to drag performances). They mobilized people of faith to testify against the Ten Commandments bill (in addition to violating the First Amendment, Fierro-Perez said, the bill would put elementary school teachers in the awkward position of answering questions about adultery). And, along with interfaith groups and the Baptist Joint Committee, they spoke out against the bill to allow chaplains to serve as school counselors.

That measure, Senate Bill 763, required every public school district in the state to vote on whether to allow religious chaplains to offer mental health support to students. Such chaplains could serve on a paid or voluntary basis. They were not required to be certified educators; in fact, the bill didn’t establish any criteria for vetting them, leaving that up to individual districts to implement.

The bill’s sponsors argued that chaplains could fill the gaps in districts that struggled to hire licensed counselors. Such schools could lean on local pastors who often had years of experience counseling their congregants. After all, the argument went, the military and prisons, both secular institutions, relied on chaplains for mental and spiritual support — why not schools? The problem, Baptist chaplain Reeves says, is that professional chaplains have extensive training on how to keep their personal beliefs separate from the support they offer. The Texas bill required no training at all.

The measure was championed in part by the National School Chaplain Association, which told its supporters in an email that SB 763 would “pave the way for spiritual care, support, and Biblical guidance for children, teachers, and staff in public schools throughout many states.” But Reeves, who had given a lot of thought to her children’s religious education, didn’t want someone offering her kids “Biblical guidance” at their public school. Neither did the parents of the children she worked with at First Baptist.

“It just takes the parents’ rights away, really,” Reeves says. “It’s a violation of their rights to choose who influences their child’s faith and culture.”

Reeves grew up in a small North Carolina town and remembers pledging allegiance to the American flag, the Christian flag, and the Holy Bible at vacation Bible school. “There was a kind of allegiance and ownership of faith and country, hand in hand,” she says. But now she sees that fusing of religious and patriotic identities as a manifestation of a dangerous Christian nationalist mindset. 

“I wonder if any of the ministry of Jesus is really supported in the Christian nationalism movement,” she muses. “It seems like it's more of an American idea of, ‘Don’t let people come and take it from us, and this is ours.’ Everything that Jesus did was sharing and multiplying and feeding people and noticing the widow and caring for the orphans. … Until we actually read and learn from the teachings of Jesus and Jesus' ministry — the way that Jesus welcomed others — I'm not certain that any of us can truly be Christian, meaning we follow Jesus.”

• • •

On a hot Sunday in late June, the sanctuary at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in north Austin was more crowded than usual. The church’s beloved pastor was away, but a longtime member had volunteered to deliver a sermon. He was a student at the local Presbyterian seminary and hoped one day to pastor a congregation. He also happened to be the neighborhood's representative in the state Legislature. Church members had turned out en masse to hear him preach, as had other constituents who’d gotten word of the special appearance.

James Talarico, the lawmaker who had forcefully critiqued the bills promoting school chaplains, school vouchers, and the posting of the Ten Commandments, had spoken in many secular settings about the dangers of Christian nationalism. But it wasn’t enough to condemn the problem. Christians needed a positive alternative, a way to live their faith in the public sphere without codifying it into law: a theology of democracy, Talarico thought. He wanted to use this time with his home congregation to work out that idea.

Midway through the service, a lector read the day’s Scripture, the parable of the Good Samaritan. The story is a vehicle for Jesus to explain that the “neighbor” his followers are called to love is the stranger, the other, even the enemy. Then Talarico strode to the front of the sanctuary, a modern, windowless room where congregants sat in rows of chairs rather than pews. Behind him, a plain wooden cross was draped with ribbons of cloth that formed a rainbow, signaling the church’s embrace of the LGBTQ+ community.

“It’s the Sunday before the 4th of July, so I thought I’d talk about two things we’re not supposed to talk about in polite company: religion and politics.” A laugh rippled through the friendly crowd.

“Christianity is both spiritual and political, because politics is just another word for how we treat our neighbors,” he said. “Religion and politics are on a collision course in this state and this country. Now we are all asking the same urgent question: What is the relationship between religion and politics, between church and state? The future of Christianity, the future of democracy, depend on our answers.”

Christianity at its best exemplifies the love of neighbor in the public sphere, he said, by funding schools, helping people access medical care, ending mass incarceration, and caring for the planet. “The separation of church and state should never be understood as the separation of faith and politics,” he said. “We all bring our moralities and philosophies to our politics, and faith is no different. Christian activism is not Christian nationalism — Christian nationalism is elevating our religion over others, dominating our neighbors instead of loving them as ourselves.”

Talarico had said similar things on TikTok, where the response from young followers was overwhelmingly positive. “Our religion, our church, is going through a transformation because the Religious Right and Christian nationalism have pushed so many people, especially young people, away from Christianity,” he said in an interview. But his peers in seminary, and his online followers, were looking for a way to reclaim the faith, one that followed Jesus’ commandment to love God and their neighbor. On TikTok, he read comment after comment: If I heard this at church, I would still be attending. This is the kind of Christianity I can believe in.

Progressives have simply forgotten how to talk about faith, Talarico said. Or they think that faith and politics should never mix. “And I just think that's a fundamental mistake, because there are clear implications — political implications — of religion in democracy. … The two are always going to be in conversation, and they absolutely should be. How do you do that in a way that is healthy, that is small-d democratic, and inclusive of all of our neighbors?”

In his sermon, he tried to answer that question.

“Democracy is not just voting in an election,” he told the congregation. “It’s not just laws and institutions. Democracy is a spiritual practice, the practice of listening to each other, of serving one another, of working together, of resolving our conflicts. It requires a humility that [acknowledges] we don’t have all the right answers, and it requires a deep love of neighbor, especially those who are the most different from us.

“If democracy is a spiritual practice, then it requires a moral commitment. That is what healthy religion can help cultivate. That is the relationship between church and state. If the American experiment is going to continue, we need a Christian commitment to democracy. So on this Sunday before the 4th of July, let us recommit ourselves to the cause of democracy — on earth as it is in heaven.”

Robyn Ross is a writer in Austin whose work has been published in the Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, New York Times, Stranger's Guide and Washington Post. She writes about religion, politics, history and sites of public memory, particularly former prisons now open to tourists. A native Texan, she enjoys hiking with her dog in state and county parks.

Cristiana Couceiro is an illustrator and designer, living in Lisbon, Portugal. Her work has been published by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, Wired, Le Monde and has been recognized by American Illustration, The Society of Publication Designers and Association of Illustrators.