Our Lady of Guadeloupe Visits the Confederate Memorial

Abstract

Truisms are sometimes true. And if anything has seemed self-evident to interpreters of South, it's religious homogeneity of Bible Belt. With exception of Mormon cultural area in Utah and adjoining states, no U.S. region seems less diverse. Fervent revivalism, civil war, and minimal immigration allowed a southern evangelical Protestant establishment--mostly Baptist and Methodist--to form by nineteenth century. Free of challenges from immigrants, that evangelical alliance has shaped religious landscape. Some observers have trumpeted South as last stronghold of faithful Christian witness; others, like Baltimore-born iconoclast H. L. Mencken, have dismissed it as the bunghole of United States, a cesspool of Baptists, a miasma of Methodism, snake-charmers, phony real-estate operators, and syphilitic evangelists. However assessments diverge--and they still do--almost all interpreters have agreed on one point: South looks more homogenous than rest of nation. (1) There is much truth to still standard interpretation: South seems more uniformly Protestant and more institutionally pious. Surveys indicate that southerners join churches and attend services more than Americans do in other regions. Even unchurched in South admit to a lingering piety: in one 1978 poll nearly three-fourths believed that Jesus was son of God and rose from dead, and another survey a decade later found that almost two-thirds of unaffiliated believed in life after death. Recent surveys reveal same pattern of attendance, membership, and belief. For example, spring 2000 Southern Focus Poll found that nearly a quarter of southerners (23 percent) attend services more than once a week, as compared to about 15 percent of nonsoutherners, and significantly more southerners than nonsoutherners (40 percent compared to 29 percent) say that religion is extremely important in their byes. According to fall 1999 Southern Focus Poll, more southerners than nonsoutherners claim Bible is their authority for daily life (31 percent compared with 19 percent), and more than six out of ten say they prefer biblical creation account to Darwinian evolutionary theory to explain universe's origins. And some geographers and sociologists have argued that this regional pattern of piety shows few signs of changing. (2) The South is not just more pious, either; it is also still predominantly Protestant. The 2000 Southern Focus Poll found that 65 percent of southerners claim Protestant affiliation, while rest of nation was only 43 percent Protestant. Two sociologists who have conducted most comprehensive telephone survey of last decade came to similar conclusions. Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman have found that Baptists, both black and white, are concentrated south of Mason-Dixon Line. They are largest religious group in fourteen states, nearly all of which are in South, and Baptists comprise more than half residents of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Furthermore, Kosmin and Lachman suggest, a relatively stable southern Protestantism, evangelical and Pentecostal, persisted into 1990s. (3) Truisms, however, need nuancing. We need to qualify claims about continuing evangelical Protestant dominance in several ways. First of all, diversity has a long history in South. Among earliest settlers, West African religious practices mixed with Christian piety to produce new creole spiritual forms, and even Christian faiths Europeans transplanted bore varied fruits. Roman Catholics built first permanent settlement in South (and in North America) at St. Augustine in 1565. They have a long history in Texas and Louisiana, and Catholics built churches in small towns and larger cities. Jews also found a place in some southern cities--Charleston, Wilmington, Savannah, and Miami Beach, for instance. …