page_title: Kansas
section_title: Religion
hierarchical_section_title: Kansas / Demographics / Religion
caption_attribution_description: Charles Sheldon, the Christian author
context_page_description: Kansas is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. Its capital is Topeka and its largest city is Wichita. Kansas is bordered by Nebraska to the north; Missouri to the east; Oklahoma to the south; and Colorado to the west. Kansas is named after the Kansas River, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native Americans who lived along its banks. The tribe's name is often said to mean "people of the wind" although this was probably not the term's original meaning. For thousands of years, what is now Kansas was home to numerous and diverse Native American tribes. Tribes in the eastern part of the state generally lived in villages along the river valleys. Tribes in the western part of the state were semi-nomadic and hunted large herds of bison.
  Kansas was first settled by Americans in 1827 with the establishment of Fort Leavenworth. The pace of settlement accelerated in the 1850s, in the midst of political wars over the slavery debate.
context_section_description: The 2014 Pew Religious Landscape Survey showed the religious makeup of adults in Kansas was as follows:
  Christian 76%
  Protestant 57%
  Evangelical Protestant 31%
  Mainline Protestant 24 %
  Black Protestant 2%
  Catholic 18%
  Mormon 1%
  Jehovah's Witness 1%
  Non-Christian faiths 4%
  Jewish < 1%
  Muslim 1%
  Buddhist 1%
  Hindu < 1%
  Other World Religions < 1%
  Other Faiths 2%
  Unaffiliated 20%
  Atheist 2%
  Agnostic 3%
  Nothing in particular 14%
  Don't know < 1%
  As of 2010, the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) reported that the Catholic Church has the highest number of adherents in Kansas (at 426,611), followed by the United Methodist Church with 202,989 members, and the Southern Baptist Convention, reporting 99,329 adherents.
  Kansas's capital Topeka is sometimes cited as the home of Pentecostalism as it was the site of Charles Fox Parham's Bethel Bible College, where glossolalia was first claimed as the evidence of a spiritual experience referred to as the baptism of the Holy Spirit in 1901. It is also the home of Reverend Charles Sheldon, author of In His Steps, and was the site where the question "What would Jesus do?" originated in a sermon of Sheldon's at Central Congregational Church.
  Topeka is also home of the Westboro Baptist Church, a hate group according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. The church has garnered worldwide media attention for picketing the funerals of U.S. servicemen and women for what church members claim as "necessary to combat the fight for equality for gays and lesbians". They have sometimes successfully raised lawsuits against the city of Topeka.
caption: Reverend Charles Sheldon, Topeka resident and coiner of the phrase "What would Jesus do?"
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