Whats in a name? For TCU, a shrinking connection to its religious roots

June 29, 2024

By Sam Fortier

In the television ads that Texas Christian runs during games, including the ones that will run during this weekend’s Big 12 Championship game, the school never calls itself “Texas Christian.” There are aerial panoramas of the school’s Fort Worth campus and clips of athletic competitions and shots of students and teachers engrossed in conversation. There are voiceovers about leadership and students’ contributions to society. There are — in this very orchestrated presentation of the school to the public — images of TCU-apparel-clad students and employees at dance studios and community outreach events and science labs. But in the entire 30-second spot, the school’s full name is never uttered, never shown on screen. The school is presented only as “TCU.”

The school was founded by preachers in 1873 and affiliated with Disciples of Christ, a Protestant denomination, yet there is not a single image of a church service or another religions activity, not a close-up of the school’s Robert Carr Chapel, with its distinct salmon-colored brinks. Going just by that commercial, one might assume TCU had no religious affiliation at all.

Nadia Lahutsky, who has taught at TCU since 1981, saw this coming. The associate professor and chair of the religion department, she first heard rumors that the university wanted to change its image in the early 1990s. Back then, a member of the school’s marketing department told her that outside a 500-mile radius from campus, people assumed “(TCU) must be a Jerry Falwell kind of place,” a reference to the late Southern Baptist preacher and televangelist and the divisive founder of the Moral Majority political organization. As a result, she said, “There has been a campaign to shift away from the full name of the university … . The word ‘Christian’ should mean a whole bunch of different (things), but, over the last 30 years, it has gotten compressed into this narrower worldview which never, ever applied to TCU.”

One of TCU’s largest vehicles for rebranding became football, and not just because of the sport’s prominence in Texas. Since promoting Gary Patterson to head coach in 2000, the program has had a ballooning national profile, with the nation’s fifth-best winning percentage and a slew of victories on the biggest stages in college football. High-profile wins have a “massive” marketing impact, said Thilo Kunkel, a branding expert and professor of sport management at Temple University, as the increased exposure allows a brand to reinforce its new strategy. Patterson and others affiliated with the school have called football the university’s “front porch.”

In 2011, TCU closed out an undefeated season by beating traditional power Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl, the biggest win in the program’s history. As the game neared its end, as the on-field camera took in the scene, Frogs linebacker Tank Carder yelled, “Let’s go, TCU!” to the roughly 20.6 million people watching on TV. In the broadcast booth, sportscasters Brent Musburger and Kirk Herbstreit did as the football’s team’s media guide asked and only called the school “TCU.”

“It’s a private school, outstanding school of business,” Musburger said in the final seconds of TCU’s victory. “If you’re interested in TCU, the annual cost, including, housing, books and fees, is $41,100. That’s a bargain, folks. If you like to go to a school with a good football team, it’s a place to go.”

Seven months later, a New York Times story credited the football team’s success with enabling $172 million in campus renovations, as well as the 20,000 applications the school received that year, quadruple the total from six years prior.

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Billy Joe Gabriel is fifth-generation Fort Worth on his mom’s side and third-generation on his dad’s. He went to grade school within a mile of TCU’s football field, and he first went to Amon G. Carter Stadium when he was five, for a game against Arkansas. He believes the rebrand helps grow the school and increase visibility, which helps football recruiting, which helps win games and enables TCU to hold its own against big state schools like Texas, Oklahoma and Texas A&M. TCU also gives Fort Worth pride, Gabriel said, in escaping from the shadow of the Dallas metroplex.

“The main reason to (rebrand) is because the Texas part will alienate half your crowd, and the Christian part will alienate the other half,” Gabriel said, laughing. “They’re not ashamed of being a Christian university. They’ll always be (Christian people).”

He added: “It’s also easier to not say, like, 20 syllables.”

Making the name of a brand less of a mouthful is common, said Marvin Ryder, a marketing professor at McMaster University in Ontario, in part because people were probably already using the more concise name. He wondered how many high school students know that UCLA really means University of California Los Angeles or that MIT stands for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “These short forms can take on a life of their own, and, in the extreme, replace the original name of the university,” Ryder wrote in an email.

In Ontario, students and alumni used to refer to the University of Western Ontario simply as “Western.” Four years ago, rather than fight the common abbreviation, the 134-year-old university rebranded itself as “Western.”

That’s one reason TCU’s rebrand was accepted by locals; they already call the school TCU, said Gabriel’s mother, 93-year-old Betty Claire, who has also lived in Fort Worth all her life. “It’s just like SMU and UT (the University of Texas),” she said. “That’s just what we call ’em.”

Though the veneer has changed, many of Texas Christian’s original principles remain. Ted Kitchens, a senior pastor at local Christ Chapel Bible Church, said he has noticed no philosophical changes while the university has rebranded.

“We’ve always had (a relationship with TCU),” Kitchens said of Christ Chapel. “I would say it’s grown (recently) since more Christian coaches are on the staff there, especially in baseball and football. I know that a lot of the athletes are participating in community churches, quite a few participate in our church. I never once heard any official at the school say: ‘We’re intentionally trying to take the Christian part out of TCU.’ I have never heard that.”

As part of a trend in athletic departments nationwide, TCU downplays the religious ties of its top on-campus Fellowship of Christian Athletes employee, Chauncey Franks. The school calls Franks a “character coach,” a move that softens the Christian connection without completely eliminating it, Ryder said. In its May/June 2017 issue, the FCA magazine reported that TCU’s program reaches about 300 Horned Frog athletes, and the feature story included a banner photo of a dozen football players holding up copies of FCA’s book, “Athlete’s Bible: Rise.”

Despite shifting away from its religious affiliation publicly, the school still receives funding from the Disciples of Christ, and the school’s web site states that it has “the full support of the Disciples.” Still, TCU has angered some groups as it attempts to toe the line.

In spring 2013, an atheist and agnostic group, the “Freethinking Frogs,” applied to become an official on-campus student organization. TCU officially recognized the Freethinking Frogs, and the backlash was swift. “I thought TCU was a Christian-based university,” alumnus Larry Morton wrote to The TCU Magazine. “The second word in TCU is still ‘Christian’ I do believe. The sad truth is that most schools of higher learning have caved to the secular model of ‘fairness’ and ‘relativism.’ ”

The Christian News Network wondered how the Student Organization Handbook — which states that TCU will deny recognition to a group “if the policies and practices of the organization are in conflict with the University” — didn’t disqualify the Freethinking Frogs, because its Facebook page called intelligent design “non-science” and called the concept of eternal life a “powerful albeit deceitful idea.” World magazine published a column titled, “Why not change the name to Texas Whatever You Believe or Not Believe University?”

A TCU spokesperson told the network that the university “should not be considered a solely Christian school,” and a TCU minister, Angela Kaufman, agreed, saying TCU should be seen as “a reflection of the larger society around us.” Mark Cohen, the director of athletics media relations, said in an email that TCU’s approach mirrors that of Southern Methodist and Brigham Young, two schools “with Christian heritage who use initials versus their full name, especially for athletics.”

“Most of those people (who were outraged) have probably never, ever, step foot on campus,” Lahutsky said. “But because the word ‘Christian’ is in our name, they feel invested in who we are and what we do. People imbued something to the place because of the word.”

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To Lahutsky, the association based solely on the word “Christian” displays a fundamental misunderstanding of TCU’s history. Members of the Disciples of Christ had considered “Disciple” as a middle word in the school’s name, Lahutsky said. “If we had named this place Texas Disciple University, no one would care at all (about the university’s relationship with Christianity),” she added.

The Disciples of Christ, Lahutsky said, have always stood for “open-mindedness.” There are Jewish and Muslim groups active on campus. Since about 1936, the school hasn’t had mandatory chapel. TCU requires that all students take one course that meets a “religious traditions” credit in which they learn about some of the major religions of the world, think critically about the Bible or examine the relationship between religion and society. (Until 1975-76, TCU required two religion classes, one of which had to be about the Bible.)

“Those of us who come out of the Church of Disciples, we’re a little resentful (of the rebrand),” Lahutsky said, “because this body you associate with in your personal life is, in a major way, responsible for something like TCU getting started, and then it looks like TCU is turning its back. I’ll admit that was my initial response 25 years ago. (But) the more I thought about it, the more the move made sense.”

Thirty-six years ago, when Lahutsky started at TCU, most of her students came to class with their own religious convictions and, if not, they still had some idea about organized faith. Now, she finds more come with no convictions and many say they have no religious background at all, which she chalks up to the increasing percentage of TCU students who come from outside Texas — this year it’s almost half — as well as college kids wanting to shape themselves.

“(The rebrand) represents part of a transition in American culture,” she said, because a lot of religious communities have lost the moral authority for one reason or another. This shift is bigger than a name change at TCU.

Added Kunkel: “Universities cutting some (religious) ties are basically them just updating their brand. (It’s) making their brand more acceptable to a 21st-century audience.”

(Top Photo: Matthew Pearce/Getty Images)

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