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States & Territories

Kansas

Midwest

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 Affiliation
Evangelical Protestant 2
Kansas: 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
Midwest 1
Law and State
Establishment Status
No Establishment 1
Kansas has had no established church since its admission as a state in 1861.
Identity
Jurisdiction Status
U.S. state 1
Origins
Origin of the Name
From 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.

Connections

Associated With

Baptist, Denominations

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."

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors
Christian Brotherhood Hour, Broadcast Work

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."

Source Christian Brotherhood Hour Archives (Church of God Ministries)
Dale W. Oldham (Church of God), Sources

This source names Kansas directly: "station KGGF in Coffeyville, Kansas, and the Church of God, Anderson pastorate."

Source Dale W. Oldham (Church of God)InterChurch Holiness Convention
Kenekuk, Historical Figures

This source names Kansas directly: "to negotiate continued landholding in Kansas even as neighboring nations were pushed further west."

Source Kenekuk, the Kickapoo Prophet (Herring)Joseph B. Herring
Kenekuk, the Kickapoo Prophet (Herring), Sources

This source names Kansas directly: "published by the University Press of Kansas in 1988, drawing on missionary, government agent and Kickapoo oral records."

Source Kenekuk, the Kickapoo Prophet (Herring)Joseph B. Herring
Kickapoo Peoples, Culture Groups

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."

Source Kenekuk, the Kickapoo Prophet (Herring)Joseph B. Herring
Mennonites, Denominations

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..."

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors
Russia, Countries

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."

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors
Turkey, Countries

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."

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

Regions Where This Is Principal

Evangelicalism, Denominations

Plurality religious identification among the state's adults per the source's survey.

Source Pew Research Center: 2023-24 Religious Landscape StudyPew Research Center
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
2. Pew Research Center: 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study
Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 2025View the Source
A Religious History of the American People
Sydney E. Ahlstrom, Yale University Press, 1972View the Source
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