Batir We Go

 

“You don’t have to go to heathen lands today to find false gods. 
America is full of them. 
Whatever you love more than God is your idol.” 

D. L. Moody 

“If you wanna see heaven, brother, here’s your chance. I’ve been sent to spread the message. God blessed Texas.” [1] These song lyrics capture the heart of the Texan ethos. Though these lyrics may seem innocuous, a song sung at a bar on a Saturday night, it is a cultural artifact capturing the Texan belief in divine Providence: the idea that God favors the 28th state. This cultural mindset is foundational for Christian nationalism, a growing movement in the United States that effortlessly blends politics with the Christian faith. [2] With nearly 40% of Texans adhering to or sympathizing with Christian nationalist ideology, it begs the question: how did we get here? [3] In Caleb E. Campbell’s book Disarming Leviathan: Loving Your Christian Nationalist Neighbor, he explains that the best way to understand this movement, and the people who embrace it, is to study their culture. By seeking to understand their values, founding myths, and rituals we can trace the origin of the Christian nationalist worldview. [4] However, for those currently submerged in this culture, it can be difficult to see. In cities with deeply ingrained political idolatry like Dallas, Texas, “the line between our political beliefs, our moral beliefs, and our theological beliefs is blurry, if not entirely invented.”[5] Dallas is steeped in a culture of politicalized religiosity that blurs the lines between political identity and religious identity, functioning as a hub for the Christian nationalist movement across the country. By tracing the founding myths and values of the city of Dallas, one can see how this Texan city became a theological and cultural powerhouse. In the pages that follow, I will show how Dallas became a cultural hub for conservative politics by looking at its deeply Southern heritage, its history as a city of culture makers, and how Dallas continues to influence the Christian nationalist movement today. 

A Deeply Southern Culture

Dallas desires the rest of the country to see it as a modern city of business. It tries hard to differentiate itself from its cowboy neighbor, Fort Worth, and other stereotypical “Texan” cities. However, at the heart of Dallas is a deeply southern history. Set into motion generations ago, this history fuels a culture where politics and religion are fused, creating the very foundation of the modern Christian nationalist movement. Fundamentally, Texas is a state that sees itself as “God’s Country.”[6] This belief is rooted in the Confederacy where “populist rhetoric, peppered with appeals to the Bible and the language of persecution/victory, was common.”[7] “The belief that “Providence” (e.g., God) was on the side of the Southern slaveholders led to an increasingly defensive, self-righteous tone among many politicians and preachers.”[8] The Confederacy’s defeat was apocalyptic to Southerners, ultimately creating the “Lost Cause”, a mythical view of American history that situates the South on God’s side, representing conservative leaders as “almost Christ-like in Southern iconography.”[9] This victim mentality is obsessed with reclaiming political power and relies on religious leaders to promote the myth. In the 160 years since the Civil War, the Lost Cause has continued to shape culture, political movements, and theology in the South. In 1979, after marinating in this myth for generations, “roughly sixteen thousand conservative evangelical pastors and lay leaders filled Reunion Arena in Dallas” and the Moral Majority was born. [10] In the words of Pat Robertson, one of its founders, the Moral Majority’s chief aim was to “mobilize Christians one precinct at a time, one community at a time, one state at a time, until once again we are the head and not the tail and at the top rather than at the bottom of our political system.”[11] The Moral Majority didn’t create Christian nationalism. It capitalized on a culture that was already there, “channel[ing it] into a new and powerful religious identity, an identity harnessed for political ends.”[12] As Kaitlyn Scheiss explains: 

“Evangelicals forged an attachment to a political party that knows it is the beneficiary of a lopsided bargain. Over the course of about twenty years, white American evangelicals solidified a particular approach to political engagement largely based in a partnership with the Republican party. This partnership moved from a strategic alliance (we’ll support your favored policies if you support ours) to a single coherence: Christian = Republican. The idol demanded more and more of us until we abdicated our true identities for a false one.” [13] 

Ultimately, Evangelicals conformed their religious ideals into political idols in a way that is no longer distinguishable for those submerged within Southern Christian culture. In Dallas, it is the air you breathe and the primary way in which local Christians view their religious identity. 

Dallas as Culture Maker

“No other state has more evangelical Christians than Texas” and the Christian nationalist movement has always had deep roots in Dallas.[14] In 1922, Dallas was headquarters for the Ku Klux Klan which is well known for blending the Christian faith with white supremacist ideology. This racist ideology fueled the religious and economic establishment throughout most of Dallas’ history, creating America’s second most segregated city.[15] Throughout the 50’s and 60’s, local pastors like Carey Daniel, Ralph H. Langley, and the nationally influential W.A. Criswell (lead pastor of First Baptist Dallas) actively advocated for segregation and conservative politics from their pulpits.[16] This fusion came naturally and “to reconcile racial apartheid with the Christian faith, white segregationists developed a theological defense system”, cultivating conservative theology to shape the political landscape of Dallas. The religious elite in Dallas ultimately primed the community for the birth of the Moral Majority in 1979.[17]

With a culture forged over generations, as well as an industrial complex of celebrity pastors and their products, the still-existing theological defense system works like a well oiled machine, promoting a very specific (and very white) view of Christianity. This system is fueled by a deeply dispensational and fundamentalist view of the Bible. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest Evangelical denomination in America, has a heavy presence in the area with a number of influential megachurches like First Baptist Dallas.[18] Founded by segregationists in 1845, the SBC is a deeply conservative denomination with a history of political activism.[19] Dallas Theological Seminary, the largest dispensational seminary in the world, has significant influence on the theology in Dallas via the training of its pastors. According to Randall W. Reed, “modern-day dispensationalism, like fundamentalism, is thought to have been spawned by urbanization coupled with social and economic changes, which threaten traditional family structure and gender relations.”[20] It is an understanding of the Bible that takes a literal interpretive approach and views current events through an apocalyptic lens. This “interpretive lens is critical, with biblical literalism increasing support for conservative political and social attitudes.”[21] A strict literal interpretation and dispensational eschatology work together to create a culture that distrusts the mainstream media and is “more likely to adopt generalized conspiracy thinking.”[22] In this kind of politically charged theological environment, Christian nationalism thrives by creating an “us vs them” mentality: 

“The enemy represents a wholly sinful, destructive, and frequently subhuman other who must be defeated at all costs, using the “full armor of God.” And within this context, it can be difficult to determine whether the rhetoric comes from a genuinely apocalyptic perspective or indicates a blatant co-opting of language from the Bible to arouse fear of one’s opponents and loyalty to the preferred candidate, political party, or cause. In other words, it can be difficult to determine the sincerity of the appeals to Scripture.” [23]

Sculpted by this theological mindset, the Dallas religious elite uses the theological defense system to support conservative politics, proliferating the fusion of political and religious identities.  

Today, Dallas is the epicenter for Evangelical mega-pastors and mega-churches.[24] Celebrity pastors like Josh Howerton (Lakepointe Church), Robert Jeffress (First Baptist Church Dallas and protégé of Criswell), and Jack Graham (Prestonwood Baptist Church) use their respective platforms to reach hundreds of thousands of people every week. They regularly comment on elections, political candidates, and political platforms at the local, state, and national levels. Highly influential, these pastors have earned their way into President Trump’s inner circle, giving them clout to fuel their media empires as well as direct access to the most powerful man in the world.[25] They promote the narrative that to be Christian is to vote Republican, incorporating Lost Cause rhetoric and Christian nationalist values into their books, sermons, and podcasts. Other prominent Dallas voices such as conservative Christian activist, Allie Beth Stuckey, actively preach to their followers that no Christian can vote for a Democrat and that progressive policies are antithetical to the gospel.[26] These conservative pastors and pundits actively work together to shape the political and religious landscape of Dallas. As culture makers, they play an indispensable role in creating and keeping Dallas’ religious identity and set the standard for Evangelicalism across the country. As we will see in the next section, the theological defense system is still influencing culture today. The religious elite’s determination to keep cultural and political power causes them to twist and distort scripture for political gain. 

Dallas’ Continued Influence on Culture 

How the theological defense system plays out in real time can be hard to decipher. It takes time, patience, and wisdom to do cultural exegesis well. For the sake of brevity, we will focus on the weaponization of empathy to show how this system works today, highlighting the Dallas culture makers who helped facilitate this distortion. In 2019, Joe Rigney (who has connections with the SBC) posted an article titled The Enticing Sin of Empathy.[27] Immediately, Rigney received backlash from the Evangelical community shaming him for wrongly demonizing empathy, a biblical virtue. However, over the past few years there has been a significant shift in its reception. In 2024, Allie Beth Stuckey, Dallas native, released her book Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion, where she “argues that empathy has become a tool of manipulation by left-wing activists who bully people into believing that they must adopt progressive positions to be loving.”[28] What was a shunned concept in 2019 became a New York Times bestseller in just five years. 

Why the shift? How does the religious establishment go from rejecting “empathy is sin” to actively promoting it? The answer: empathy is politically inconvenient. Stuckey links her “anti-empathy awakening to the summer of 2020, when racial justice protests roiled the nation.”[29] She saw Evangelical women side with more progressive solutions to racial issues and felt they were “misguided.”[30] Texas conservatives were already seeing tension with conservative women due to Donald Trump’s misogyny during his first term. They knew that “any small shift among evangelical voters — long a stable base for Republicans — could be a significant loss” at the polls.[31] According to Tiffany Stanley, the “anti-empathy arguments gained traction in the early months of President Donald Trump’s second term, with his flurry of executive orders that critics denounced as lacking empathy.”[32] With Trump’s second term in full swing, many Evangelical women were not just leaving the political movement but also the pews.[33] When pressed on his view on sinful empathy, Rigney places the blame on feminism: “because women are the more empathetic sex […] they often take empathy too far.”[34] The religious elite saw that empathy was leading Evangelical women away from the Republican Party. As a culture maker, Stuckey capitalized on her primarily female fanbase, addressing the issue head on: “In the name of empathy we’ve convinced people – mostly white girls and women – to shut down the part of their brain that sounds the alarm for danger.”[35] The theological defense system took the Christian virtue of empathy and distorted it in order to deter white women from voting against the Republican party’s interests. When Christian virtues no longer align with the conservative political establishment, they must be systematically distorted to serve the gods of politics and power. The Evangelical industrial complex in Dallas chugs along, book tour after book tour, sermon after sermon, podcast after podcast, platforming the new “biblical” view of empathy.[36] In a culture primed with blind trust of pastors, distrust of the media, and a literal interpretative lens, theology is turned into a weapon to wield for political gain. Even more alarming, most Christians do not even notice the bait-and-switch. 

Conclusion

In Dallas, Christians live in a culture that is deeply rooted in a mythological war between good and evil. This myth is founded on Southern values wrapped in religious pageantry and has a significant influence on how Christians see the world around them. For Dallas Christians, they are unaware of this politically charged cultural landscape because it is woven into every fabric of their Christian identity: the books they read, the podcasts they listen to, and the sermons they anxiously take notes on every Sunday morning. The very way they have been taught to read the Bible is framed in this cultural mindset. Conservative politics, as cultural mores, become a reflex, reacting to any threat to the current power structures. The Dallas industrial complex of megapastors and political pundits package and distribute it to the rest of the country, influencing conservative Evangelicalism as a whole. With such a deeply rooted cultural system, the majority of Christians aren’t intentionally contributing to Christian nationalism. They truly believe they are following the ways of Jesus. As Campbell reminds us: “We cannot slay the great dragon of American Christian nationalism, but we can compassionately care for the souls of the people caught up in it and seek to restore them to a flourishing relationship with Jesus and his church.”[37] In this cultural environment, cultural exegesis becomes a lifeline to those who are unknowingly drowning and a way to open the eyes of those who are lost. By understanding how we got here, we are able to see through the culture of political idolatry and envision a future of healthy Christian political engagement. 

Footnotes

[1] Little Texas, “God Blessed Texas,” track 3 on Big Time, Warner Bros. Records, 1993, compact disc. 

[2] Defined as an “ideology that idealizes and advocates a fusion of American civic life with a particular type of Christian identity and culture,” See Samuel L. Perry et al., “Fill the Earth and Subdue It: Christian Nationalism, Ethno‐Religious Threat, and Nationalist Pronatalism,” Sociological Forum 37, no. 4 (2022): 1001. 

[3] Public Religion Research Institute, “Fact Sheet: A Closer Look at Christian Nationalism in Nine States,” PRRI, March 11, 2026, https://prri.org/spotlight/fact-sheet-a-closer-look-at-christian-nationalism-in-nine-states/. 

[4] Caleb E. Campbell, Disarming Leviathan: Loving Your Christian Nationalist Neighbor (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2024), 11. 

[5] Kaitlyn Schiess, The Liturgy of Politics: Spiritual Formation for the Sake of Our Neighbor, foreword by Michael Wear (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020), 23. 

[6] W. F. Strong, “Texas as ‘God’s Country,’” The Texas Standard, November 27, 2024, https://texasstandard.org/stories/texas-as-gods-country-hondo-dallas-cowboys-stadium-wf-strong/, paragraph 1. 

[7] Samuel L. Adams, “The Bible in Christian Nationalist Rhetoric,” Interpretation 78, no. 4 (2024): 299, 

[8] Adams, “The Bible in Christian Nationalist Rhetoric,” 300. 

[9] Brendan Wolfe, “The Lost Cause,” Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities, last modified March 24, 2021, https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lost-cause-the/. 

[10] Sidney M. Milkis and Daniel J. Tichenor, “Building a Movement Party,” Miller Center (website), accessed June 4, 2026, https://millercenter.org/rivalry-and-reform/building-movement-party. 

[11] Adams, “The Bible in Christian Nationalist Rhetoric,” 302, quoting Pat Robertson, “With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right,” Episode VI, “God’s Armies,” PBS, 28 November 1996. 

[12] Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2021), 28, as quoted in Adams, “The Bible in Christian Nationalist Rhetoric,” 301. 

[13] Schiess, The Liturgy of Politics, 7-8. 

[14] Lydia Bean and Danielle Ayers, “Reimagining the Bible Belt,” Sojourners, July 2015, https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2015/reimagining-bible-belt, paragraph 2. 

[15] Timmy Huynh and Lauren Kent, “In Greater Dallas Area, Segregation by Income and Race,” Pew Research Center, June 29, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/06/29/in-greater-dallas-area-segregation-by-income-and-race/. 

[16] Jim Schutze, The Accommodation: The Politics of Race in an American City (Dallas: Deep Vellum, 2021), Chapter 13. A.W. Criswell, then pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, was “one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century.” See Randall Balmer, “The Real Origins of the Religious Right,” Politico Magazine, May 27, 2014, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133 

[17] Bean and Ayers, “Reimagining the Bible Belt,” paragraph 8. It is important to note how significant white supremacy is to the social, economic, and religious landscape of Dallas, Texas. Dallas would not be fully integrated until three years after the 1979 rally. Having challenged Brown vs. Board for years, in 1983 the DISD school board ended its fight by accepting a court ordered desegregation plan. This plan would not be fully recognized until 2003, 49 years after Brown vs. Board of Education. For a comprehensive exploration of the history of desegregation in Dallas, see Ryan Holmes, “Desegregation of Schools in Dallas – Dallas ISD – A Long Road to Desegregation,” Human Rights Dallas Maps, Embrey Human Rights Program, Southern Methodist University, accessed June 7, 2026, https://humanrightsdallasmaps.com/items/show/3. 

[18] Pew Research Center, “Chapter 1: The Changing Religious Composition of the U.S.,” in America’s Changing Religious Landscape (Pew Research Center, May 12, 2015), https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/chapter-1-the-changing-religious-composition-of-the-u-s/. 

[19] The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Southern Baptist Convention,” Encyclopedia Britannica, last modified May 28, 2026, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Southern-Baptist-Convention. 

[20] Randall W. Reed, “Of Prophets and Propaganda: An Exploration of Modern Christian Dispensationalism Using the Work of Martin Riesebrodt,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 51, no. 3 (2012): 469 

[21] Brooklyn Walker and Abigail Vegter, “Christ, Country, and Conspiracies?: Christian Nationalism, Biblical Literalism, and Belief in Conspiracy Theories,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 62, no. 2 (2023): 282. 

[22] Walker and Vegter, “Christ, Country, and Conspiracies?,” 288. 

[23] Adams, “The Bible in Christian Nationalist Rhetoric,” 299. 

[24] David Fletcher, “Dallas: The New Capital of Evangelicalism,” XPastor (Multisites & Mergers Strategy), December 12, 2024, https://www.xpastor.org/strategy/multisites-mergers/dallas-the-new-capital-of-evangelicalism/. 

[25] Eric Killelea, “How North Texas Pastors’ White House Visits Signal a Growing Political Force,” Chron.com, March 6, 2026, https://www.chron.com/culture/religion/article/texas-pastors-white-house-visit -20305524.php. 

[26] Allie Beth Stuckey (@relatablewithabs), Instagram Reel, February 17, 2024, https://www.instagram.com/reels/C3eMsmoRCt0/. 

[27] Joe Rigney, “The Enticing Sin of Empathy: How Satan Corrupts Through Compassion,” Desiring God, May 31, 2019, https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-enticing-sin-of-empathy 

[28] Allie Beth Stuckey, Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion (New York: Sentinel, 2024), back cover. 

[29] Tiffany Stanley, “Is Empathy a Sin? Some Conservative Christians Argue It Can Be,” PBS NewsHour (Associated Press), August 21, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/is-empathy-a-sin-some-conservative -christians-argue-it-can-be, paragraph 28. 

[30] Stanley, “Is Empathy a Sin?,” paragraph 28. 

[31] Elizabeth Dias, “Beto O’Rourke May Benefit from an Unlikely Support Group: White Evangelical Women,” WRAL.com (New York Times), October 9, 2018, https://www.wral.com/story/beto-o-rourke-may-benefit from-an-unlikely-support-group-white-evangelical-women/17904271/. 

[32] Stanley, “Is Empathy a Sin?,” paragraph 6. 

[33] Researchers have begun to look into the exodus of women from conservative churches and religious life due to “a cultural misalignment between more traditional churches and places of worship and young women who have grown increasingly liberal.” See Daniel A. Cox and Kelsey Eyre Hammond, “Young Women Are Leaving Church in Unprecedented Numbers,” The Survey Center on American Life (newsletter), August 2024, https://www.americansurveycenter.org/newsletter/young-women-are-leaving-church-in-unprecedented-numbers/. 

[34] Stanley, “Is Empathy a Sin?,” paragraph 30. 

[35] Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen), “In the name of empathy we’ve convinced people,” X, June 13, 2024, https://x.com/conservmillen/status/1801303762809548970. 

[36] Stuckey was featured on Josh Howerton and Granger Smith’s respective podcasts (both local to the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex) as well as other prominent Christian and conservative media outlets. She is also a member of Prestonwood Baptist Church (SBC) where Jack Graham is lead pastor. 

[37] Campbell, Disarming Leviathan, 182.