“There is no such thing as ‘separation of church and state’ in the U.S. Constitution,” the leader of the White House’s Religious Liberty Commission recently declared.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who sometimes preaches at Houston’s Second Baptist Church, made headlines when he made this pronouncement. It was a striking statement from a Baptist, given that Baptists have made a point of defending the fabled wall of separation since the earliest days of the American republic.
In fact, in 1960, when Roman Catholic John F. Kennedy was running for president, he delivered a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, reassuring the assembled Protestant clergy, “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”
Why is defense of this wall, once obligatory for a Catholic politician, now abandoned by a Baptist? Within the larger story of the rise of the Religious right, this reversal highlights remarkably different political strategies deployed by large religious minorities. Catholics, viewed with suspicion by American Protestants, presented themselves as able to blend in to the American mainstream, while today, the Christian right is puffing its feathers to seem bigger than it is to enact its political agenda.
Both Patrick’s and Kennedy’s positions have long pedigrees in American history, stretching back to the founders, who enshrined their divergent views in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” There is an equally long tradition of American politicians choosing political expediency when speaking about religion. American law privileges “sincerely held” religious beliefs, but American politics rewards strategically expressed religious beliefs.
The Religious Liberty Commission holds a hearing at the Museum of the Bible, Monday, April 13, 2026, in Washington, D.C. (Video screen grab)
While Patrick is technically correct that the phrase “separation of church and state” doesn’t appear in the Constitution, it very famously appeared in a document almost as old as the Bill of Rights, Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist association in Connecticut. Jefferson wrote that he beheld with “sovereign reverence” the two clauses of the First Amendment, which succeeded in “building a wall of separation between Church & State.” Baptists long considered the maintenance of this wall one of their signature contributions to American religion.
Conversely, the Roman Catholic Church resented the status to which it was relegated in the United States by the First Amendment. Pope Leo XIII wrote in an 1895 pastoral letter that “it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced.” Popes had no ability to annul that divorce, but American Protestants, steeped in generational anti-Catholicism, feared that a Catholic president might. Kennedy made it very clear that he had no such intention.
Patrick and Kennedy broke with their respective churches’ historic views on church-state relations in opposite directions, but they had a couple of key characteristics in common. Catholics in 1960, like the heavily Baptist-inflected evangelical tradition today, claimed the adherence of about 23 percent of the American population. (Numbers vary by survey, but the largest share within this group is nondenominational, followed by Southern Baptists.) And, importantly, both religious blocs were equally partisan—80 percent Democrat for 1960s Catholics, and 80 percent Republican for evangelicals in recent election cycles.
A bloc that big elicits a range of political responses. That’s a lot of voters for parties to court, with the potential to swing a lot of races. It’s a lot of power to yield, possibly through legislative or executive action but also through local campaigns such as book bans or “school choice.” And it’s a big enough bloc to provoke fear among the larger but disparate group of Americans who do not wish to live under the rules that might be imposed by the 23 percent.
Southern Baptists were among the most strident voices expressing that fear in 1960. Texas Baptists led the way among state Baptist conventions, passing a resolution in 1959 that declared the Roman Catholic Church “both a religion and an ambitious political system aspiring to be a state.” For Texas Baptists, one of the Catholic Church’s flaws was its rejection “‘as a shibboleth of doctrinaire secularism’ the American doctrine of separation of church and state,” the Tulsa Tribune reported in 1959. Three other state-level Baptist conventions, in Alabama, Arizona and Arkansas, followed suit, though other Baptist bodies demurred, not wanting to be so political as to call another church too political.
Sen. John F. Kennedy, Democratic candidate for president, addresses the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960, at the Rice Hotel in Houston, Texas. (Video screen grab)
Fervent support for the wall of separation between church and state put mid-20th-century Baptists at odds with Catholics then, and with their own descendants now. Baptists once staunchly opposed taxpayer funding for parochial schools; Dan Patrick has pushed relentlessly for vouchers in Texas that can be used at religiously affiliated schools. Bans on “dirty” books were once associated with Catholic overreach; this, too, became a legislative priority for Patrick. Even abortion was seen as a “Catholic issue” before Baptists adopted it as their own. Southern Baptists viewed Roe v. Wade as an appropriate protection of privacy, keeping church teachings separate from the realm of law, before those same Baptists became abortion abolitionists. Texas, naturally, has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country.
As Patrick’s words and actions show, Southern Baptists and their evangelical fellow-travelers have become everything they once feared American Catholics would be: imposers of their morality on the rest of the country, bulldozers through the First Amendment wall of separation, “both a religion and an ambitious political system aspiring to be a state.” Any Americans who would like to see the wall rebuilt will have to do that work without help from the stonemasons who tended the wall so carefully for so many years.
(Elesha Coffman is author of “Turning Points in American Church History” (Baker, 2024). The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service or the author’s employer.)