One great change in post Civil War Texas was the emergence of the churches. All historians seem to agree that they were the single most important cultural and social force behind the Texas frontier.... Baptists and Methodists carried over the old Anglo-Celtic Puritan ethic almost intact. Baptists recognized only the authority of the local congregation in matters of religion; they supported no other; and they could organize a church without authority or ordination. They were slow to erect church buildings, but by 1860 they already had 500 congregations in Texas. The Methodists were still a majority in 1870, but losing ground fast. These, and other evangelical bodies, enjoyed a rapid growth in Texas. By 1870, there were 843 churches, with some 200,000 members.
These fundamentalist congregations were evolved by the frontier; they met its conditions most perfectly; and they were saturated with the American frontier ethos. All were puritanical, sectarian, and enormously democratic; they were brotherhoods rather than institutionalized organizations. They bore very little resemblance to the urban Presbyterian, Anglican, or other churches. They filled a much larger void in rural life. The evangelical assemblies provided the frontier with its social cohesion; they were the only cultural and socializing agencies Anglo-Texas had.
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Church meetings were as much social as ideological. They were held in open groves or brush arbors. Here families came from miles around, dressed in Sunday best. They included suppers, bazaars, and basket parties; they lasted all day, with religious services in the morning and at night. There were two-hour sermons, delivered by circuit riders or local laymen; men and women listened from separate benches. Here women and girls, starved for companionship of their own kind, could grasp at news and gossip, and men discussed crops, common problems, and politics. This meeting was the only place large numbers of people ever assembled regularly on the harsh frontier. The enormous, socializing, tribal effect on thought and custom is easily understood. What was discussed, and thundered from the crude pulpits, set the moral standards and much of the thinking of farming Texans across the whole frontier.
Some of the preachers were cultivated men . The great majority were men of God called from the people, well-meaning but unlettered, who understood their people and the essential evils to which all flesh was heir. This was a cruel, hard, atomistic place, where great wrongs were done and received. The preachers tried to battle the world and the devil; they thundered against sins of every kind. They did not regularly prevail; nor was it possible for any clergy, in this or any other time or place, to alter the facts of human nature or be substantially different from their own people in thought and deed. The preachers were sometimes harsh, stubborn, intemperate, intolerant, like their flocks; but they made the pulpit the center of their world, and they probably left the world a bit better than they found it.
The frontiersman were Old Testament-oriented. The land they lived in had many parallels with the land of Canaan, and they themselves with the children of Israel. They were beset with dangerous heathen enemies. The land was scourged by ravaging insects and burning drought; the imagery of the Israelite deserts struck home in the Texan heat. The farmer endured plagues of grasshoppers; he lost sheep and cows to cats and wolves; he saw green crops die and wells run dry. The Old Testament had a relevance it would have for no later American generations.
The lives of the farmers hung on acts of God, who made rain fall from the heavens and the rivers swell. Their best-loved hymns, with which they made the arbors shake, sang of cool and beautiful rivers they would someday cross, and of glorious showers of blessing upon the land. These people, especially near the 98th meridian, were locked in gigantic battle against Nature's God and their own weaknesses; like Israelites, They chose this soil; like Israelites they had to fight for it, with faith. They developed an Israelite chauvinism and intolerance, which sometimes gave them callous cruelty, but with it, a Hebrew strength.Lone Star: a History of Texas and the Texans by TR Fehrenbach, pp599-601
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