By RUSSELL ARBEN FOX
Insight Kansas
This Easter week, I’ve been thinking about the 70% of Kansans who identify as Christians (one of whom is me), and how their—that is, our—influence on this state has changed.
When most people think about the impact of Christian voters, they imagine a whole range of specific political causes, from right to left. Traditionalist Christians are supposedly preoccupied with abortion, homosexuality, or pornography, while progressive Christians supposedly focus on the death penalty, LGBTQ rights, or health care.
That picture isn’t inaccurate. Still, it is worth recognizing that, aside from those hot-button issues, most Christians today (myself definitely included) rarely think much about using their influence to democratically shape the routines of ordinary life. It is as if certain daily norms have come to be seen as automatic, completely separate from any collective action or preferences.
Consider a recently proposed amendment to an education bill in the Kansas state senate. The amendment would have changed the law to mandate that Kansas schools never schedule games around holidays or on Wednesdays. While the ideas behind the proposal were grounded in serious arguments over time demands piling up on students, its practical implications were immediately obvious: it would primarily serve the interests of churches and parents that want their children and students attending religious activities on Wednesday nights.
I’m familiar with that want—one of my first teaching jobs was at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, AR, and I quickly learned there that keeping Wednesday evenings free for Bible study (including cutting back on mid-week homework assignments) was a local imperative.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Jonesboro was also a dry community; alcoholic beverages were illegal throughout the city (as of 2019, they started to allow alcohol to be served in restaurants, but retail sales are still banned). Such social structuring around broadly shared religious principles is obviously not unknown in Kansas; we maintained Prohibition longer than any other state, and Sunday liquor sales only became legal in Kansas in 2005. The devout impact of Christian believers like Carrie Nation on Kansas’s collective, daily identity was long-lasting.
Given all that, I was surprised at how quickly the legislature abandoned this Wednesday restriction proposal. But then came another proposal, one even more revealing.
Overriding a veto by Governor Kelly, Republican majorities in the Kansas legislature guaranteed income tax breaks to those who join “health care sharing ministries.” These are private health care cost-sharing pools, ones usually organized by churches and not legally obliged to cover the conditions which publicly supported and regulated insurers must (this was the main reason for Kelly’s veto). They often restrict participation on the basis of one’s religious behavior as well.
This law follows other GOP-led legislation, such as the guarantee that students at religious schools will have access to publicly funded school resources, that mostly aim to enable those living in accordance with what they understand their faith to require to escape the costs and complications of doing so in the religiously diverse and nominally secular America of today.
Put it this way: once, Christians like myself would regularly vote in ways that took seriously the shaping (and perhaps the “improving”) of the daily routines of our shared social life. But now, it’s more typical to vote so as to make certain that believers can be included in all the benefits of that social life, while still maintaining some separateness from it. Call it a shift from collective aspiration to individual protection, perhaps.
Has that been a reasonable change? In many ways, yes. But still, this Easter, I’m not sure Carrie Nation would be entirely pleased.
Dr. Russell Arben Fox teaches politics at Friends University in Wichita.