States & Territories
Kansas
Midwest
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Kansas entered the union through Bleeding Kansas, the 1850s violence between proslavery and free state settlers in which New England Congregationalist emigrant aid societies deliberately populated the territory to keep it free, giving towns like Lawrence a founding identity tied directly to abolitionist religion. Mennonite immigrants from Russia brought Turkey Red winter wheat and a plain communal faith to central Kansas in the 1870s. Topeka is also home to the Westboro Baptist Church, an independent congregation whose picketing campaigns have been condemned by nearly every other Baptist body in the country.
Facts
Religion
Leading Religious AffiliationKansas: Evangelical Protestant is 27% of adults, ahead of Nothing in particular at 21%. Margin of error plus or minus 7.4 points. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/state/kansas/ Geography
Census Region Law and State
Establishment StatusKansas has had no established church since its admission as a state in 1861. Identity
Jurisdiction Status Origins
Origin of the NameFrom the Kansa, or Kaw, a Siouan people whose name is often translated as people of the south wind. 1 Learn More
A Company Founded to Win a Vote by Founding Towns
Bleeding Kansas was not a spontaneous demographic drift, on the free state side it was substantially organized and financed. Eli Thayer founded the New England Emigrant Aid Company in 1854, explicitly to recruit and subsidize free state settlers, many of them Congregationalist by conviction, and send them into Kansas Territory before the popular sovereignty vote on slavery could be settled by whoever arrived first. Lawrence, the company's flagship settlement, was named for its treasurer Amos Lawrence and built from the start as a base for antislavery organizing rather than growing organically the way most frontier towns did, and its Congregationalist churches functioned as much as political meeting halls as houses of worship through the violent years that followed. Proslavery Missourians who crossed the border to vote illegally and later to raid free state towns treated Lawrence's religious and political identity as inseparable, and they were not wrong to.
Mennonite immigrants from Russia brought Turkey Red winter wheat and a plain communal faith to central Kansas in the 1870s, a very different religious settlement pattern from the deliberately partisan one that founded Lawrence two decades earlier, and Topeka's Westboro Baptist Church, an independent congregation condemned by nearly every other Baptist body in the country, is a recent and unrelated outlier. Evangelical Protestant identification leads Kansas today at twenty seven percent of adults, per Pew's 2023-24 study.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Baptist directly: "Topeka is also home to the Westboro Baptist Church, an independent congregation whose picketing campaigns have been condemned by nearly every other Baptist body in the country."
This source names Kansas directly: "radio station KGGF in Coffeyville, Kansas, the creation of Dale Oldham, pastor of Park Place Church of God in Anderson, Indiana."
This source names Kansas directly: "station KGGF in Coffeyville, Kansas, and the Church of God, Anderson pastorate."
This source names Kansas directly: "to negotiate continued landholding in Kansas even as neighboring nations were pushed further west."
This source names Kansas directly: "published by the University Press of Kansas in 1988, drawing on missionary, government agent and Kickapoo oral records."
This source names Kansas directly: "pressure before groups settled in Kansas, Oklahoma and, following a further migration, in Coahuila, Mexico, where the Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas maintains ties today."
This source names Mennonites directly: "Kansas entered the union through Bleeding Kansas, the 1850s violence between proslavery and free state settlers in which New England Congregationalist emigrant aid societies deliberately populated..."
This source names Russia directly: "Mennonite immigrants from Russia brought Turkey Red winter wheat and a plain communal faith to central Kansas in the 1870s."
This source names Turkey directly: "Mennonite immigrants from Russia brought Turkey Red winter wheat and a plain communal faith to central Kansas in the 1870s."
Principal Tradition Of
Plurality religious identification among the state's adults per the source's survey.
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