Straddling the Brazos River, Waco served as a trading hub for the cotton farmers of central Texas. The town also claimed the title “The City of Churches,” as by the 1880s it was home of the Baptists' Baylor University and served as the headquarters of evangelical efforts to save Texan souls.Footnote ² Today, the abundance of church spires, Christian academies, and Bible stores might suggest to a visitor something of Waco's evangelical past. But what they may not be aware of is that in the late nineteenth century, Waco was also the center of a religious conflict that descended into murderous violence.

At five o'clock in the afternoon, on November 19, 1897, the brothers James and William Harris, Baptist loyalists and supporters of Baylor University, engaged in a shootout with a McLennan County judge, George Bruce Gerald. The gunfight took place on Waco's busiest street corner in the midst of hundreds of townspeople going about their business. Exactly what transpired was lost in the ensuing mayhem, but conflicting reports agreed on a few essentials. The Baptists fired first, shooting at the judge's back. One of the bullets lodged in their target's left arm and another bounced off the metal button of his suspenders, giving the judge time to draw his Colt revolver, turn, and kill his two assailants. A dozen more shots were fired and blows exchanged, but the only other casualty was a bullet wound to the leg of W. S. Jasper, an African-American man caught in the crossfire.

The blood that was shed that day flowed from a controversy between the Waco Baptists and their freethinking and skeptical critics. Judge Gerald had long been a thorn in the side of the Baptist officialdom. He believed in free thought and criticized organized religion. In the early 1880s, he turned his courtroom over to the weekly meetings of an association of secular rationalists. But the judge's greatest affront was his outspoken defense of his friend William Cowper Brann, the editor and publisher of the Iconoclast magazine. Known for its scathing satire, Brann's Iconoclast devoted its pages to debunking the myths and exposing the hypocrisies of the Protestant churches. Members of the Baptist community kidnapped, horsewhipped, and threatened to kill Brann if he continued with his irreverent critiques of Baylor University and the Baptist leadership.

The argument that led to the gunfight between the Harris brothers and Judge Gerald was over the judge's public defense of the Iconoclast's editor. Afterwards, in the face of mounting death threats against Brann, Judge Gerald gave him his Colt revolver and taught him how to use it. Brann had a need for it soon enough. On April 1, 1898, a gunman opened fire on Brann as he walked along Waco's main street. Tom Davis, a Baylor partisan motivated by the belief that the Baptist community would reward him for a good deed, laid in wait for Brann and shot him in the back as he passed. Fatally wounded, Brann returned fire. Both the editor and his assassin died the next day.Footnote ³

In later decades, these violent events would be remembered as an episode in the town's Wild West past. This, however, was a special type of Wild West violence. Waco's Baptist-Iconoclast controversy was part of a religious conflict that played out across the cotton districts of central Texas. At the time, Texans described the clash as a trial of strength between the “orthodox” and the “liberals.” It would evolve into what would be known by a later generation as the struggle between “fundamentalists” and “modernists”—a struggle in which conservative preachers fashioned an especially militant and politically aggressive “Texas theology.” At the start of the twenty-first century, George W. Bush rode this “rough country” religion right into the White House, as his co-religionists tightened their grip on Texas politics and beyond.Footnote ⁴ But the gunfire in Waco suggests the need to rethink some of the prevailing assumptions about religion in the Gilded Age and especially about evangelical belief in the rural South, which was more diverse, contested, and rife with conflict than is usually understood. It also suggests that Texas “rough country” religion was more than the product of a rough country environment; conservative Texas religiosity honed its sharp combative edge in the heat of battle against unorthodoxy and unbelief.

Judge George Bruce Gerald (Texas Collection, Baylor University Library)

Significantly, these battles of faith raged across the same rural districts that were at the epicenter of the Populist revolt. In the 1880s, the dirt farmers of central Texas launched the Farmers' Alliance that provided the catalyst for the national People's Party (or Populist Party) of the 1890s. The Populists challenged corporate power and fought for farm and labor reform. Because their support often came from mainly Protestant rural areas, journalists, scholars, and other observers have connected Populism to traditional evangelical faith. But the controversies that broke out into gunfire on the streets of Waco suggest a more complex religious context for the Populist movement. They also put into question enduring myths about America's rural/urban divide, and challenge the usual understanding of faith and politics in the Populist revolt.

The usual understanding rests on two broad misconceptions. The first of these is the notion that Populism represented a traditionalist response to modernity and large-scale institutions. Historians have contributed to this misconception with a narrative that the Populists were custom-bound folk taking a stand to defend their small-scale world of family, community, and church. Populism, in this telling, represented the rural Gemeinshcaft of local, mutualistic, and self-sufficient yeomanry pushing back against the urban Gesellschaft of centralized, bureaucratic, commercial, and progress-driven society—a yeomanry that clung to the evangelical faith of their ancestors.Footnote ⁵

This narrative rests on the assumption that rural people tend toward a static traditionalism. But if we challenge this assumption, a different Populism comes into view. This was a Populism of mass education and science, and that mobilized hundreds of thousands of women seeking improvement, professional employment, and freedom from traditional restraints. Far from rejecting large-scale institutions, this Populism pioneered centralized and large-scale cooperative marketing systems, and demanded public ownership of the railroads and banks on the model of the U.S. Post Office, the nation's most far-reaching centralized bureaucracy. This was a Populism that sought to make use of technological and organizational innovations—telecommunications and steam power, and incorporation and economies of scale—to build a more just and equitable society.Footnote ⁶

The second misconception, related to the first, is that Populist culture can best be understood through the lens of the Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925. John Scopes faced charges in the town of Dayton, Tennessee, for teaching evolution in his high school science class. The participation of two towering figures in the culture wars of the 1920s turned the case into “the trial of the century” and drew the lines of battle. For the prosecution, it was William Jennings Bryan, a former Nebraska congressman and three times the Democratic nominee for president. For a generation, Bryan's name had been connected with farm and labor reform, but in the 1920s he made defending anti-evolution laws his last campaign.Footnote ⁷ For the defense, it was the Chicago attorney Clarence Darrow, the urbane, cosmopolitan champion of the unpopular and the damned.Footnote ⁸

The journalist H. L. Mencken framed the trial as an effort of the rural “Homo Neanderthalensis,” with their “anthropomorphic religion of an elder day,” to silence their enlightened urban foes. History textbooks would later mark the trial as “nineteenth-century America's last stand.” Despite the evidence that rural voters in Tennessee were as divided over the anti-evolution law as urban voters, and despite the fact that the leadership of the anti-evolution campaign was mainly in Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities, the Scopes Trial forged the link in historical memory between fundamentalist religion and rural people.Footnote ⁹

The Scopes Trial also linked fundamentalism to Populism. As a reform Democrat, Bryan had made political alliances with the Populists, and the People's Party had endorsed Bryan's 1896 bid for the presidency. Hence, if Bryan at the Scopes Trial represented the “shabbiness of the Evangelical mind,” as Richard Hofstadter put it, Populism by default represented much the same.Footnote ¹⁰ Ever since, Bryan's role in the Scopes Trial has been connected in memory to the culture of Populism. This is despite the fact that Bryan was never a fundamentalist. Nor was he ever a Populist.

More tellingly, the bona fide former Populist at the Scopes Trial was Clarence Darrow, who had rallied the farmers and workers of Illinois to the Populist cause in the 1890s.Footnote ¹¹ With its tolerant attitudes on spiritual matters Populism provided a home for skeptics and free thinkers such as Darrow. Populist religiosity tended toward a liberal social gospel or social Christianity.Footnote ¹² But the movement also embraced reformers seeking spiritual renewal in unorthodox and non-Christian beliefs, as well as those who spurned religion altogether. This was as true in central Texas as it was in Darrow's Chicago.

Across the national landscape, Populist politics and religious faith mixed in myriad ways. In California, the Populists breathed an environment of indifference to religion, and when spiritual belief mixed with Populist politics, it was just as likely to be Spiritualism or the Eastern metaphysical system of Theosophy as it was Christianity. In Kansas, the Populists gave voice to bitter popular resentments against the churches and “churchianity.” In North Carolina, evangelicals had a stronger institutional structure and tended to have more influence within the Populist movement. The religious setting of Texas Populism, meanwhile, contained all of the above, spread across a broad spectrum of belief and unbelief. The religious conflict that led to murder on the streets of Waco provides a window into this Populist context.Footnote ¹³

* * *

The Reverend H. S. Thrall, in charge of Methodist missionary work in Texas, described the state in the late 1880s as “unoccupied territory,” where a mobile population had “children as ignorant of Christianity as though they had been born heathens.”Footnote ¹⁴ The 1890 Census seemed to confirm Thrall's assessment. Out of a population of 2,235,53, less than 30 percent claimed a religious affiliation. The level of church membership rose in the cities and towns. It was higher as well among Mexican Catholics in the southern districts. Despite the defeat of Reconstruction and the dismantling of black political organizations, African-American farmers in eastern Texas enjoyed relative success in maintaining church networks. But connections to organized religion stretched thin among the white settlers of central Texas where the Populist movement had its greatest strength. Many of them had been born in Protestant households in Virginia or Georgia, but had lost their ties to church and creed in making their move to Texas.Footnote ¹⁵

Earlier generations of rural people in Virginia and Georgia had similarly lacked much interest in the evangelical enterprise until the “conquest” of the South by missionaries from New England and Britain in the antebellum years.Footnote ¹⁶ This cycle of religious conquest continued in the West on the heels of the U.S. military conquests. Under Mexican rule, Anglo-American settlers were discouraged from bringing Protestantism into Texas. Stephen Austin, himself a deist, considered that “one Methodist preacher” would cause more damage to American settlement “than a dozen horsethieves.”Footnote ¹⁷ After annexation by the United States, Texas, as with much of the frontier West, proved a trying and difficult challenge to missionaries. But they made determined efforts.

Evangelical missionaries traveled to central Texas in search of converts. Their ranks included George Washington Baines, the maternal great-grandfather of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Baines worked for the Baptist New York Home Mission Society, and in the 1860s served as the president of Baylor University.Footnote ¹⁸ One of Baines's pupils at Baylor, Henry Renfro, took up farming and missionary work in the Cross Timbers district, which was also the birthplace of the Farmers' Alliance. Renfro wrote to “Brother Baines” about the lack of water for Baptisms, the lack of a single minister in the county, and a situation where an itinerant minister “comes sixty miles to preach at this church.”Footnote ¹⁹ The Presbyterian missionary William B. Bloys of Illinois discovered a similarly difficult terrain. Bloys had hoped “to serve the Lord in India,” but because of his poor health his church had sent him to Texas. Reporting on his first camp meeting, he noted that of forty-six participants, only one adult man and five women were “professing Christians.”Footnote ²⁰ As another missionary put it, his potential fold was “almost an entire blank, so far as vital Godliness and spirituality are concerned.”Footnote ²¹

The task was made even more challenging by the presence in the field of Swedenborgians, Unitarians, Spiritualists, Freethinkers, and advocates of other unorthodox creeds. They, too, viewed Texas as “unoccupied territory.” Albert Francisco served as a missionary for the Swedenborgian New Church, a group inspired by the metaphysical and rationalist philosophy of the Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg. After touring the state, Francisco reported that Texas offered the greatest opportunity for missions in the country, because “there is a great revolution going on here.”Footnote ²²

In her study of religion in mid-nineteenth century California, Laurie Maffly-Kipp observes that given the extent of irreligion and the “wide range of spiritual persuasion” among settlers, “Evangelical religion was seen as an option in California—but only one among many.”Footnote ²³ Much the same was true in Texas. Revival encampments in which missionaries preached under big tents were one of the means by which evangelicals had conquered the South in a previous generation. But camp meetings in late nineteenth-century Texas offered multiple options.Footnote ²⁴ Under a tent, farmers might listen to evangelical preachers or to a variety of unorthodox competitors. Spiritualist camp meetings, for example, attracted large crowds eager to listen to male and female mediums explaining the science of communicating with the dead.Footnote ²⁵

In their mission to conquer Texas, the Protestant churches faced no greater obstacle than the crisis within their own ranks. Internal conflicts threatened the foundations of the evangelical project. In 1891, Thomas De Witt Talmage, a nationally prominent minister from New York, noted that “this is a time of resounding ecclesiastical quarrel. Never within your memory or mine has the air been so full of missiles.”Footnote ²⁶ Churches across the country had their usual interdenominational disputes over the usual issues such as the techniques and timing of baptism, and whether it was a pre or postmillennial age. But the “ecclesiastical quarrel” that Talmage referenced involved ominous changes in intellectual, social, and political life.

The nature of the threat can be seen in the instructions the Texas Methodists gave to their Sunday school teachers. Much of the danger came from “the so-called modern scientific and critical objections to the book of Genesis.” Discoveries in biology and physics had given new moral power to science and empirical inquiry. The Methodists conceded that their teachers lacked answers for how to reconcile this scientific authority with religious faith. They also confronted the fact that the Bible itself was being subjected to scientific scrutiny, with the growing resonance of Higher Criticism and the archeological studies of the Bible's origins. How were Christian educators to teach the Gospel when “skeptical critics have attempted to prove the Mosaic books to be the product of the priestly age”? Or how were they to answer questions about the place of their deity in an expanding spiritual universe? “Infidelity is fond of comparing Christianity with other religions,” the Methodists cautioned, as global interconnections spread knowledge of Buddha, Zoroaster, Confucius, and Mohammed.Footnote ²⁷

Moreover, the social and political crises of the Gilded Age further exacerbated the “ecclesiastical quarrel.” The widening gap between rich and poor threatened to split society in two. And the powerful rise of farmer and labor movements posed the dilemma: Were the churches about the future afterlife or saving humanity in the here and now? Was Jesus the savior of individual souls or was he the wandering carpenter who sought social justice for the poor?

The conflicts over how to adapt to this new intellectual and social environment played out within elite seminaries in Chicago, New York, and Princeton. Lines were drawn between conservatives and liberal theorists of the “New Theology.”Footnote ²⁸ The same forces were at work within the evangelical movements in Texas, stimulating sharp polemics, heresy trials, and schisms within the churches, and alienation and indifference among the unaffiliated. This alarmed the Rev. H. S. Thrall, who understood religious indifference as the dangerous corollary to agrarian and labor unrest. “Such crimes as boycotting, fence cutting and strikes,” Thrall noted, “are new phases in Texas society. This is not all. There is a constantly increasing class of people indifferent to the gospel.” “Indifference,” Thrall observed, “was the enemy to be conquered.”Footnote ²⁹

Evangelical Texans, like evangelicals everywhere, adopted a wide variety of attitudes toward these dilemmas of faith. But leading Texas theologians—those in key positions of religious authority—took a hard line. The clergy at Baylor held that the crisis in the churches was the result of the “ruinous teaching” of “grave and dangerous heretics.” As for the drift from religion among the young, this was because the public schools were “being manipulated by Infidels & Godless men for the ruin of our Children & Texas.”Footnote ³⁰ In this spirit, the Baylor theorists developed a language of culture war that would become a hallmark of “rough country” religion.

The Rev. Benajah H. Carroll taught at Baylor, ministered the First Baptist Church in Waco, and was the most powerful theologian in the state. Carroll had been a “committed infidel” prior to a camp meeting conversion. As a late convert he was a fierce partisan, wading into religious controversy to “raise the standard” of orthodoxy.Footnote ³¹ In 1884, Carroll delivered a much-publicized sermon titled “The Agnostic.” His congregants handed out free copies of the sermon on Waco street corners. Linking the agnostic danger to the spread of the “evolution hypothesis,” the sermon warned against the fashionable views of Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, Buckle, and Mill, and the “infidel tide which pushes its chilling waves over the earth.”Footnote ³²

Rev. Benajah H. Carroll (Texas Collection, Baylor University Library)

Carroll's sermon identified “the agnostic” as a special threat to the existence of religion in Texas. He overstated his case as in any such jeremiad. But Carroll lived in Waco, where agnostics were indeed making their mark. In the months prior to this sermon, freethinkers had set up a newspaper and meeting house. Over the next years the liberal ideals of freethought would gain publicity and a sizable following in the state. In this regard, Texas was in step with the times as during the 1880s and ‘90s freethought would emerge as an influential movement in the nation's intellectual and cultural life.Footnote ³³

At the center of this movement stood Robert G. Ingersoll. Known as “the Great Agnostic,” he filled theaters and opera halls across the country with his lectures exposing the mistakes and fallacies of a “superstitious” Christianity. Andrew Carnegie, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Clarence Darrow, and many other influential Americans counted themselves among his supporters. Margaret Sanger observed that the hundred-year battle for religious liberty in the United States “came to a climax in the career of Robert G. Ingersoll.” Eugene V. Debs described Ingersoll as having done more to improve the human condition than any person in any age, and as “the most talked about man in America.” Ingersoll translated Voltaire's Enlightenment rationalism into a message of human solidarity that resonated within the ranks of rural and labor reform, a message that Debs summed up as “love and service and consecration of humanity.”Footnote ³⁴

Ingersoll had a Texas audience eager to hear his message. That he would receive an enthusiastic welcome in the Lone Star state is something of a paradox given his association with Yankee causes that were highly unpopular among white Texans. He had been an abolitionist and when the war came served as a colonel in the Union Army. After the war, Ingersoll befriended Frederick Douglass and continued to speak out in favor of black civil rights long after many of his fellow Republicans had fallen silent. What is more, he was a New York lawyer who worked for some of the most hated railroad corporations.Footnote ³⁵ Yet Ingersoll had his Texas admirers. Settlers of Ingersoll, Texas, named their small Bowie County town in his honor. This proved a red flag to Protestant missionaries, who successfully targeted Ingersoll for a revival in the wake of which the town was rechristened Redwater in 1894.Footnote ³⁶ But the Ingersoll phenomenon continued to attract attention.

Ingersoll went on the Texas lecture circuit in the winter of 1896. Texans slogged through the mud from distant farms to hear his views on “Liberty of Man, Woman and Child,” and his sharp-tongued refutations of the Bible. An observer noted that “the people are willing to pay more than double the old price to hear him,” adding that “Ingersoll is the only lecturer in the world who can draw packed houses without the aid of local societies.”Footnote ³⁷ This observer may not have been aware that local societies of freethinkers had in fact spread across Texas, inspired by surprising events in Waco.

James D. Shaw (Texas Collection, Baylor University Library)

In September of 1882, the Rev. James D. Shaw, the minister of Waco's Fifth Street Church, the most prominent Methodist congregation in central Texas, gave a sermon that provoked a storm of controversy. Newspapers across the state reported that Shaw “rejects the absolute inspiration of the scripture, the atonement, the saving power of faith, etc., and accepts the teachings of Christ as a higher human philosophy.” In an interview explaining his position, Shaw noted the fallacy of “the belief … that all who do not subscribe to what is commonly called orthodoxy doctrine will be damned.” His example was the Jews, who as humans were no better or worse than the Methodists. So why should they face eternal damnation just because they did not accept a certain orthodoxy? As it turned out, the “infidel tide” pulled Waco's leading Methodist minister deep into agnostic waters. In November, the supervising Methodist conference put Shaw on trial for advocating views “detrimental to religion and injurious to the church,” and proceeded to strip him of his church positions.Footnote ³⁸

James Shaw's expulsion from the ministry put him much in demand as a public speaker. In June 1883, the convicted infidel gave “A Lecture on God” in the Texas statehouse in Austin. The lecture took two days to deliver, covering everything from the theory of evolution to Krishna of the Hindus and the “robust” theism of the Muslims. As Shaw proceeded to dismantle the Christian God in the chambers of the Texas senate, the Austin Weekly Statesman reported that he “never uttered a harsh word towards any church or orthodox creed, and was earnest in his every word, and very eloquent.”Footnote ³⁹

By this time Shaw had organized an association of fellow skeptics and freethinkers. Shaw's Religion and Benevolent Association, known by the Baptist theologians as the “Hell and Damnation Society,” met twice every Sunday in the courtroom of Judge George Gerald. Soon the meetings grew to one of the largest congregations in town attended by a cross-section of Waco's citizens. To make more room, in 1884 Shaw built Liberal Hall, which sponsored lectures on history, philosophy, and science. Its guests included Spiritualist mediums, women suffragists, and rabbis.Footnote ⁴⁰ Shaw also published the Independent Pulpit, a journal of secular rationalist thought with over three thousand subscribers. Shaw's reputation grew and in 1885 he would share the stage with Robert Ingersoll at the national convention of the American Secular Union. In what the Waco Baptists described as the clash between the “Calvinists” and the “Ingersollites,” the town's freethinkers were a rising force.Footnote ⁴¹

Shaw worked the rural districts. He met with the Association of Free Thinkers of Bell County, the first agnostic organization in Texas. In its early days, the president of the association had been kidnapped, stripped, and savagely whipped by a group of righteous Christians. With his lecturing, Shaw hoped to encourage and raise the profile of his rural comrades.Footnote ⁴² On a visit to Polk County, “the Sunday morning crowd was too large for the school house,” so the freethinkers were allowed to use the Baptist church. On that trip, Shaw visited the home of “a sturdy farmer who evoluted into Liberalism from Primitive Baptist Faith.”Footnote ⁴³ The Independent Pulpit filled its pages with such conversion stories. An eighty-four-year-old man from Lamar County wrote, “I found the Methodist church when I was fifteen…. I thought that it was my duty to rely on the blood of Jesus. I am now, ashamed of such a doctrine.”Footnote ⁴⁴ A farmer from Bastrop County wrote to Shaw, “whilst I have ever respected the earnestness of your convictions, I have been too religious to cast my nickels in your missionary box. But it is a progressive age—times change and we change…. Here is a dollar.”Footnote ⁴⁵

One of the most striking conversion testimonies came from Henry Renfro, the former Baylor student of George Washington Baines. Renfro worked hard as both a minister and a farmer, yet the conflict between “orthodoxy and heterodoxy” left his mind “still more burdened than [his] body.” He watched with dismay the violence against freethinkers and the church trials against infidels. He searched for answers in the works of Spinoza, Paine, and Ingersoll. “I have learned this fact,” Renfro concluded, “to read is to think, to think is to investigate, to investigate is to doubt, and to doubt is to be damned by orthodox churches.” In 1884, when Renfro himself was tried and expelled from the Baptist Church, farmers in the district packed into the Alvarado opera house in “the largest audience ever gathered there” to hear what he had to say.Footnote ⁴⁶

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William Cowper Brann (Texas Collection, Baylor University Library)

Shaw and Renfro toppled orthodoxies, but they always did so with due respect to those with religious sensibilities. The young journalist William Cowper Brann, by contrast, attacked the orthodox by way of frontal assault. Raised on an Illinois farm, Brann worked as a fireman on Texas freight trains and as a pitcher on a semiprofessional baseball team. He dabbled in politics, promoting a quasi-Populist system for financial reform. It was rumored that he wagered and lost $27,000 when Bryan was defeated in the 1896 presidential election. But his real passion and talent was literary and religious criticism. Lacking formal education, he plunged into the world of McCauley, Carlisle, and Paine.Footnote ⁴⁷

In 1895, from his Waco office, Brann started the Iconoclast magazine with the aim of attracting readers interested in literature, philosophy, and religion. Much of its religious coverage involved fierce critiques of the “pharisaical plutocrats” of the Protestant churches. Its pages described the great divine Thomas De Witt Talmage, for example, as “a monstrous bag of fetid wind,” observing that “the man who can find intellectual food in Talmage's sermons could acquire a case of delirium tremens by drinking the froth out of a pop bottle.” The magazine directed its most brutal invective at the “theocrats” at Baylor University. For irreverent satire, the Iconoclast was the Charlie Hebdo of its day, except with more words and with a larger circulation than the Paris magazine. Brann would claim the Iconoclast was “the only American magazine that secured 100,000 readers in a single year.” Some subscriptions were mailed to addresses across the country and around the globe, and tens of thousands of copies of the Iconoclast arrived in hundreds of post offices in rural Texas districts.Footnote ⁴⁸

The Baptists regularly attacked Brann as a nonbeliever. When a Waco preacher told his congregation that Ingersoll, Shaw, and Brann were the “three men on earth who are damned to be damned,” Brann took it as a point of pride. After all, his closest allies were in the agnostic camp.Footnote ⁴⁹ But Brann thought of himself as an “independent worshiper,” even as a Christian of a skeptical and liberal type. In a public letter to Robert Ingersoll, Brann rejected as a “foolish falsehood” that “because Almighty God has not seen proper to reveal himself … to Messrs. Hume and Voltaire, Paine and Ingersoll the world has no good reason for belief in his existence.” At the same time, he added that Ingersoll had “done more to intellectualize and humanize man's conception of Almighty God, than any reformer since the days of Christ.”Footnote ⁵⁰ For his own spiritual guidance Brann referred to the “Sacred Books of all centuries [which] are essentially the same … I gather them together,—the Old Testament and the New, the Koran and the sacred Vedas, the northern Sagas and the southern Mythologies … I sit with Siddhartha under the Bodhi tree and follow the prophet of Islam in all his pilgrimages; I stand with Moses on Sinai's flaming crest and listen to the prayer of Christ in the Garden of Gehtsemane.”Footnote ⁵¹

In that liberal spirit, Brann greatly admired the Baptist theologian Thomas Dixon Jr. of North Carolina. In the early 1890s, Dixon was at the zenith of his career as a reform-minded evangelical. Fame landed Dixon in the ministry of the Dudley Street Church in Boston and then the 23rd Street Baptist Church in Manhattan. From these high-profile venues he sought to recast religion in “the language of modern life, grateful for all of the light of science, philosophy, and criticism.”Footnote ⁵²

Dixon defined his progressive faith as being “in life and death struggle with tradition and bigotry.” Here it must be stressed that when Dixon attacked bigotry, he meant religious intolerance, because he was a racial bigot. This was the same Dixon who later authored The Clansman and The Leopard's Spots, the white supremacist novels on which D. W. Griffith would base the film Birth of a Nation. Dixon justified his racial views as the dictate of civilization and progress. Brann did the same, writing drivel about the “Negro rape-fiend.” For Brann, as with Dixon, African Americans were the roadblock to progress, “the Bete Noire of the South, a millstone about her neck.”Footnote ⁵³

In Dixon, Brann believed he had found a Baptist theologian who dispensed with superstition and embraced a liberal spirituality. But by this time Dixon was already moving away from the Baptist Church and organized religion. His crisis of faith grew along with the increasing pull of social reform. He had taken part in the 1891 Populist convention in Cincinnati, and admired the Populists as much as many Populists admired him. By 1895, Dixon's heterodoxy led him to abandon all creeds and to found a social Christian “People's Temple.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Back in Texas, the white Baptist hierarchy purged the liberal theologians of the Dixon type, a purge that would help to shape the conservative “Texas Theology.” But not all Texas Baptists were on board. Significantly, the black Baptist leadership did their best to reassure their white counterparts of their reliability, even while taking a different route. The Rev. Lee Lewis Campbell navigated this treacherous course. Born in Milam County, Campbell attended Bishop College before studying for the ministry in Chicago. On his return to Texas, he became the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Austin, a post he held for thirty-five years, and he served as the president of the General Baptist State Convention of African-American churches. Campbell led the St. John's Encampment Colored Association, which brought ten thousand black Texans to Austin to discuss race relations. He was also the moderator of the St. John's Association, a self-help movement that claimed 230,000 members in the state.Footnote ⁵⁵

Campbell received his training at the University of Chicago, a school that his white Baptist counterparts in Waco viewed as a place of “baptized infidelity,” where teachers “echoed the weird doctrines of Voltaire and Ingersoll.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Campbell's views were carefully measured, but he argued that if religion were to deal with the needs of the people, it needed to be aligned with the latest in human thought, and that meant taking into account Darwin and Agassiz. Campbell's Austin Herald reflected his interest in comparative religion and reported on the 1893 World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago as “like an awakening.” It debated the pros and cons of Populism for the black farmer. But mainly, Campbell emphasized “social service” over “saving souls.” Given that most black Baptists in Texas were only a generation out of slavery, toiling in poverty as laborers and sharecroppers, it was the task of the church to “save men's bodies and brighten and enrich their lives.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Campbell stood at the helm of black Baptist institutions in the state, yet that does not provide an adequate measure of his influence. His views reflected the efforts of professional black clergy across the South to standardize church methods and tame the vernacular spirituality that prevailed among the semiautonomous networks of black Baptist churches. It may have been the case that Campbell's progressive Christianity derived mainly from his University of Chicago training, and was a step removed from a distinct African-American religiosity that flourished in segregated and marginalized communities.Footnote ⁵⁸ Nonetheless, the winds of intellectual and religious strife and change blew on black Texans as on white Texans, on the presidents of evangelical conventions, and on the poverty-wracked farmers and laborers in the rural districts. Such was the religious context of the Populist movement.

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Waco Cotton Yard, Waco Texas (circa 1910)]

During those same years of religious conflict, the same rural districts were hotbeds of the Populist revolt against corporate power. The efforts of the struggling cotton farmers of central Texas launched the Farmers' Alliance movement that provided much of the organizational and ideological foundation for the national Populist Party. Abundant evidence points to the connections between the religious innovations and controversies and the politics of Populist reform. Although the Farmers' Alliance banned the discussion of religious matters within the organization, many farm reformers understood spiritual innovation and renewal to be one of a piece with economic and political innovation and renewal. This is reflected in county mapping, for example, that shows a correspondence between Populist voting and the presence of members of liberal or heterodox religious societies. The high profile of the unorthodox within the Populist leadership attests to the same correlation.

Supporters of the rationalist philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg held a prominent place among Texas Populists. This included Thomas King who led the movement in Erath County and his friend Albert Francisco, who was both a rural Populist and a rural missionary for the Swedenborgian New Church. Thomas Nugent, the Populist candidate for governor in 1892 and 1894, was perhaps the most admired of all Texas Populists. Nugent waged an open struggle against the “thumb screw” tyranny of the Protestant religion. And although his own humanist views aligned with much of Swedenborg's philosophy, Nugent wanted no part of any church or creed.Footnote ⁵⁹

The pages of the Southern Mercury, the newspaper of the Texas Farmers' Alliance, carried protests against church ostracism of the religiously heterodox. This included a defense of the Spiritualists, a considerable number of whom were Texas Populists. The Mercury took to task “certain religious fanatics” that persecuted Spiritualists and “forget that it was the persecutions of the handful of early Christians which gave such an impetus” to their religion.Footnote ⁶⁰ Eben LaFayette Dohoney, the People's Party candidate for state chief justice, was the Populists' most well-known Spiritualist. At the same time, the census reported that 100 percent of all listed members of Spiritualist organizations in Texas lived in Populist strongholds. That included the backwoods of Grimes County, where the local Spiritualist organization had twenty-nine members.Footnote ⁶¹ This was the same county in which John W. H. Davis, a poor cotton farmer, ran in 1894 as the Populist candidate for tax collector. Davis rejected religion with its focus on “your dead carcass after death,” and took up “mental science” in “the light of a more scientific day.”Footnote ⁶²

Agnostics also joined the ranks of Texas Populists. J. N Colwick and T. Theo Colwick, the president and secretary of the Norse Farmers Alliance, were proud supporters of James Shaw and the Waco freethinkers. In 1896, the Dallas Freethinkers' Association marched with the People's Party contingent in that city's Labor Day parade.Footnote ⁶³ Tom Watson, the celebrated Populist leader from Georgia, led the parade with the agnostics marching right behind him. Watson himself showed little interest in religious matters, but one of his closest comrades back in Georgia, Charles C. Post, the state leader of the People's Party, was known as an atheist. In fact, Post and his wife wrote the “mental science” literature studied by the Grimes County Populist J. W. H. Davis.Footnote ⁶⁴

The high profile of Nugent, King, Francisco, Dohoney, and other iconoclasts brought down attacks on Texas Populism as the party of “infidels” and “cranks.” At the same time, it was well known that a number of Populist lecturers had once been evangelical preachers. This included the Methodist circuit rider Harrison “Stump” Ashby. When asked why he quit the church, Ashby explained that he could do more for the human race working for the Populist Party, “preaching the gospel of universal emancipation,” and “trying to liberate the minds and bodies of men.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Similarly, the African-American Populist John B. Rayner left the Baptist ministry soon before he took to the stump as a celebrated Populist lecturer in the cotton districts of eastern Texas. Preaching had allowed Rayner to supplement his earnings as a schoolteacher. But he bridled at Protestant dogmas and what he decried as “emotionalism in the pews.” Rayner adopted what he understood as the true religion of service for the good of the people.Footnote ⁶⁶

Bettie Gay, who managed a cotton plantation near Columbus, Texas, was unusual among the Populist leaders in that she maintained her standing in the Baptist Church. But her relations with the church cooled with her Populist activism and her discontent with church policies that barred her from the ministry because of her sex. As women gained their voice within the Farmers' Alliance, they subjected the churches to criticism for denying them their rights. “If politics are corrupt,” an Alliance woman demanded, “what is the matter with our churches that our great Methodist conference refused to seat the lady delegates sent? Is it, too, too corrupt for women?” The answer to this question, she explained, lay in the efforts of men to keep women in their place. Populist women also resented the attitude that members of town churches expressed toward farmers, criticizing those who “profess to be Christians, but they do not inhabit this world to help lift up the fallen.” As one Farmers' Alliance woman put it: “If there is anything we hate with a most cordial hatred it is a ‘holier than thou’ spirit.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Not all Protestant churches in Texas had as strained relations with the Populists as the Baptists and Methodists did. The liberal wing of the Disciples of Christ, for example, had a more accepting attitude toward Populist activism. The Disciples and other “Restorationist” Christian movements had less church rules, disparaged social hierarchies, and encouraged members to pursue their own understandings of scripture. The Disciples preacher J. W. Biard of Paris, Texas, reconciled his church and his Populist politics. A member of the People's Party National Committee, Biard had originally joined the Farmers' Alliance to “serve his people better.” His preaching embraced the ideas of Agassiz and Darwin because “It does not dishonor God to think he works through the laws of nature in all possible ways.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Sam Ealy Johnson Sr., the fraternal grandfather of the thirty-sixth president, was a spiritual seeker as he made his way as a rancher and farmer in central Texas. He first left the Baptists for the Disciples only to later join the Christadelphians, another “Restorationist” movement that had no ordained ministry, did not believe in the Trinity, and whose churches had wide autonomy in terms of enforcing codes of personal conduct. This proved congenial for the gregarious Johnson. With a passionate interest in the intellectual questions of the day, Johnson argued with friends and strangers about philosophy and theology, and took the stump for the Populist cause, including a bruising campaign as a People's Party candidate for the legislature in 1892.Footnote ⁶⁹

Populism and faith converged in Texas in a myriad of combinations. Many Populists, like Biard and Johnson, embraced an expansive social Christianity. Others sought spiritual reform through unorthodox, including non-Christian, spiritual avenues, at times outside of any organized faith. Still others had drifted away from religious concerns and had joined the host of the “indifferent” that so be-deviled the evangelical missionaries. Not surprisingly, then, the relationship between the Populists and the orthodox Baptist and Methodist churches ran the gamut from open hostility to distant lack of interest. Populist religiosity therefore makes for a poor fit with the usual stereotypes about the rural evangelical mind. But any conclusions about what rural people believed must take into account rural Democrats and political conservatives, who often aligned as defenders of orthodox religion. What is certain is that rural Texas politics were intertwined with the religious controversies of the day.

Meanwhile, Waco was just one of the Texas cities and towns that served as a stronghold for the type of conservative religious orthodoxy that would give rise to the fundamentalist campaigns in the next generation. At the same time, all of Texas fell under the urban shadows of Chicago, New York, and St. Louis. Big city institutions, such as Dwight Moody's Chicago Bible Institute, provided valuable support to the orthodox side in Texas's religious conflicts. Through the New York Home Mission Society, John D. Rockefeller sent checks from his Manhattan corporate office to his embattled Baptist brethren at Baylor. This included fifteen thousand dollars in June of 1892, sent in “strict confidence” to hide the role of Yankee dollars in the building up of the Texas church.Footnote ⁷⁰ The power and influence of the big city evangelical organizations reveal a flaw in the clichéd narrative of the rural folk clinging to their traditions only to be left in the dust by the liberalizing and secularizing city.

Neither James Shaw nor William Cowper Brann had a benefactor at Standard Oil. Their great resource was the dynamic intellectual energy of the politically restive people of central Texas. This suggests the need to rethink the usual approach to the study of the religious politics of rural and working people. Following the lead of E. P. Thompson, historians of the 1970s and'80s discovered the religiosity of the common folk of field and factory. Just as Thompson wrote of Methodism as the traditional religion of the London worker, it was widely accepted that the toiler in the American heartland was bound to evangelical piety.Footnote ⁷¹ But in doing so, ideas about popular religion tended to be reduced to a static traditionalism, failing to take into account the conflictive, innovative, rapid developments and intellectual storms sweeping across rural and working-class communities.Footnote ⁷²

The historical treatment of Populist religiosity is a case in point, and an illustration is the Populist search for a presidential candidate in the 1896 election. The Populists eventually endorsed William Jennings Bryan. At the time, there was nothing on the horizon that would suggest Bryan's later role in the Scopes Trial, or anything remarkable about Bryan's faith apart from his playing a minor role on the side of the moderates in the conflicts gripping his Presbyterian church. But for many Populists, Bryan was not the preferred candidate. The “middle of the road” Populists hoped that Eugene V. Debs, “the most broadminded statesman and patriot of the century,” would lead the Populist ticket. Debs declined, but the boom for his candidacy reflected that he was a widely respected national leader within the Populist coalition. Debs was also an outspoken freethinker. Both friend and foe described Debs as an “infidel.”Footnote ⁷³ That the Populists would look to Debs as their favored presidential candidate indicates something important about how Populists thought about religion and politics, and suggests that phrases about evangelical traditions have failed to dig deep enough in our historical treatments of Debs and other Populists.

What we do know from these histories is that Debs used biblical expressions in his speeches and referred to Jesus as a martyred reformer.Footnote ⁷⁴ However, as David Burns argues, for a late nineteenth-century activist to invoke the “radical historical Jesus” tells us little about the nature of their religiosity or whether they were religious at all.Footnote ⁷⁵ By way of contemporary example, in the 2008 elections, when Alaska governor Sarah Palin mocked Barack Obama as a “community organizer,” bumper stickers appeared invoking a biblical story. They read: “Jesus Was a Community Organizer, Pontius Pilate Was a Governor.” The message was clear enough, but provided no clue as to whether the people who put this sticker on their cars were Christians, Buddhists, or atheists. In the same way, much of our Populist scholarship has identified that Populists employed biblical language. But that tells us little about the turbulent intellectual and religious currents in which they swam.

Recent scholarship has painted a more complex picture of Populist religiosity. Joseph Creech, for example, has done an admirable job of placing Populists within the evangelical experience. His premise is that a shared “evangelical mind” shaped the structures of the Populist revolt. But in this telling, Populist thinking tends to be a universal “evangelical” type; irreverent iconoclasts, heterodox seekers, and freethinkers do not appear in this story. His study is based in North Carolina, where the churches were stronger and the heterodox less prominent than in Texas or Kansas, much less California. Nonetheless, North Carolina Populism was hardly immune from the intellectual dynamics at work in the less-churched Populist country.Footnote ⁷⁶

The Populist press in North Carolina covered religious news, and no one made more religious news than Thomas Dixon Jr., the Tar Heel state's most popular preacher. Creech describes Dixon's views as “fairly liberal theologically,” but he does not explore the intense religious controversies that wracked Dixon's intellectual world.Footnote ⁷⁷ Dixon's sermons, often reproduced in full in the Populist press, expressed sufficient skepticism about Baptist doctrine to win the admiration of Waco's Iconoclast, while Dixon's own crisis of belief eventually led him out of the Baptist Church or any church. Meanwhile, Dixon's brother Amzi Clarence Dixon would soon emerge as a leader in the Fundamentalist movement. The two paths taken by the Dixon brothers serve as a warning, as Paul Harvey explains, that “[o]verly simple and static use of the concept of Evangelicalism hides the diversity of southern religious life.”Footnote ⁷⁸

While still in the ministry, Dixon made Ingersoll's agnosticism a regular topic of his pulpit oratory. In 1892 he published Dixon on Ingersoll, a two hundred-page volume of his sermons about “The Great Agnostic.” Eugene Debs wrote at the time: “I introduce the testimony of Rev. Thomas Dixon … who declares that Mr. Ingersoll ‘has done much to rid the world of the superstitions, lies, shams, humbugs, traditions, and pretenses that used to pass current as orthodox truth.’ Such is the admission of an orthodox clergyman, who has published a book … to arrest the conquering mission of Mr. Ingersoll.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Here another key insight of E. P. Thompson's comes into play. Evangelicals were “highly politically conscious,” and with the rise of Chartism and lower-class politics, they made a “drastic reorientation of hatred,” away from “Sin and the Pope” and toward unbelief, freethought, and Tom Paine. Methodism in England, Thompson demonstrated, evolved in tension with this pole.Footnote ⁸⁰ Of course, Populism was not Chartism, and Ingersoll was no Tom Paine. Yet the “ecclesiastical quarrel” of the late nineteenth century evolved in a similar tension. And on the streets of Waco, the hatred was palpable and lethal.

* * *

William Cowper Brann Lying in State (Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin)

A keen journalist, William Cowper Brann tapped into popular resentments against conservative “plutocratic preachers.” His aggressive coverage of Baptist misdeeds and intrigue also sold magazines. Brann's most salacious story involved the pregnancy of Antonia Teixiera, “a mere child” of fourteen years, who had been brought to Waco from Brazil by Baylor missionaries. She was placed in the home of the university's president, where she worked in the kitchen, and where, according to Antonia's testimony in a high-profile trial, she was raped by one of the president's relatives. Brann rubbed this scandal in the face of the Baptist leadership. In the eyes of the Baptists this went too far; the irreverent editor had crossed the line.Footnote ⁸¹

On October 2, 1897, an angry mob of Baylor students kidnapped Brann with plans to tar and feather him. But when an observer absconded with the supply of hot tar, the students decided to hang Brann from a tree on university grounds. A Baylor professor happened by and thwarted the on-campus lynching. Soon afterwards, a pair of Baylor stalwarts severely horsewhipped Brann and swore to kill him if he continued his journalistic jabs at the Baptists. In response to the assaults on his friend, Judge Gerald sent a letter of protest to the Waco Times-Herald. But the newspaper's editor, James Harris, was a Baptist ally and refused to print the letter or to return it to the judge. The confrontation over this letter led to the shootout on November 19 in which Judge Gerald lost an arm and the Harris brothers lost their lives. A grand jury indicted Judge Gerald for double murder, but the charges did not stick either in court or in the minds of McLennan County voters, who would reelect Gerald to another term as a county judge.Footnote ⁸²

After the failed attempt on Judge Gerald, the threats mounted against the editor of the Iconoclast. “Predictions are made,” one newspaper happily reported, “that it will not be very long before Brann comes to a tragic end.”Footnote ⁸³ Tom Davis, a Baylor partisan, made plans for such an end. He apparently plotted alone, but he did so with the conviction that by assassinating Brann he would earn the gratitude of the Baptist community. Davis put his plan into action on April 1, 1898, and it proved a success apart from the fact that Brann was able to draw the revolver that he had borrowed from the judge, and to mortally wound his assassin. After Brann's murder, Judge Gerald tried to keep the publication of the Iconoclast going. Earlier in his career Gerald had proven himself an able newspaper editor. However, he could not reproduce Brann's intellectual audacity and flair and the magazine soon folded.Footnote ⁸⁴

The murder of Brann and the silencing of the Iconoclast was a sign of change. The year before Texas Populism had received a fatal blow. The endorsement of the Democrat Bryan as the People's Party candidate in 1896 split Texas Populism into warring factions. Bryan's defeat in that election added to Populist despair. In the new century, some of the former Populists in Texas followed Eugene Debs into socialism, but much of the energy of the earlier revolt had dissipated. Many ex-Populists reconciled with the Democratic Party; some did the same with the churches.

Meanwhile, Sam Jones and other evangelical entrepreneurs employed new commercial techniques in their steady efforts to conquer Texas. By the 1920s, J. Frank Norris and other Fundamentalists accused the Baylor establishment of betraying militant orthodoxy and pushed Texas churches to adopt ever more conservative theological views and to make ever more aggressive political claims. The efforts to curtail the teaching of evolution in the schools provided a test of the emerging evangelical power in state politics. In the fall of 1925, Governor Miriam Ferguson ordered the state's textbook commission to purge mention of evolution from high school textbooks. Her order was inspired by the apparent martyrdom of Bryan as a result of the Scopes Trial. Five days after the verdict that found John Scopes guilty of teaching evolution, Bryan collapsed and died.Footnote ⁸⁵

Change was in the winds. The political push to remove evolution from public education would have baffled the central Texas farmers of the previous generation. The Farmers' Alliance had served as the base of support for public education, and like other Populist groups the Alliance looked to evolutionary science to light the way for reform. “No farmhouse in America,” as they put it, should be without literature explaining “a plain account of evolution” and the ideas of Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer.Footnote ⁸⁶ Criminalizing the teaching of these ideas was nowhere on the political horizon prior to the defeat of the Populist movement. And even then, it took years for the state's besieged conservative theologians to build up their “rough country” religion with sufficient militancy and ambition to grab for the reins of political power.

By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the white evangelical churches had conquered Texas. This is not to say that they cornered a monopoly on belief—far from it. There are almost as many Hispanic Catholics in Texas (18 percent) as white evangelicals (19 percent). The ranks of Texans who claim no religious affiliation (18 percent) include a proud array of irreverent iconoclasts. And then there are the Texan Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Jews.Footnote ⁸⁷ Rather the conquest has been a political one, measured by the outsized role that “Texas theology” plays in state politics. The days are long gone when the Texas senate would open its chambers for two days of earnest lectures about the fallacies of the Christian religion. Or when the citizens of McLennan County would elect a judge who believed religion was a blight and invited the agnostic society to hold camp in his courtroom, much less re-elect that judge after he had killed two loyal Baptists in a gunfight.

Today, the heirs of the Waco theologians call the political shots because no one else has matched their resources, perseverance, militancy, and will to power. But they have also gained by political circumstance. Most important, the weakening of the public sphere has provided an opening. This includes the crisis in public education, as the spread of racially separate private and religious schools and educational institutions has given the churches a new institutional role. Meanwhile, the national political transition from the public ideals that inspired Populism, the New Deal, and the Great Society in favor of the market and private corporations has opened new economic and political vistas for the evangelical entrepreneur.

From that perspective, it is either coincidence or divine intervention that Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush both had close ties to the farm country of central Texas. In the Populist stronghold of Gillespie County, Johnson's father Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr., son of the former Populist Samuel Ealy Johnson Sr., taught in the public schools, grew a little cotton, and shaped the liberal worldview of a future president whose “war on poverty” created Headstart, Medicare, and other Great Society reforms. Thirty-five years later, George W. Bush, scion of the East Coast financial and political elite, product of Yale and Harvard, made Crawford, twenty miles outside of Waco, the site of the Western White House. That is where he found a congenial environment for his twin beliefs of “rough country” religion and the magic of private markets. Such is history's caprice.