Bible Belt Research Articles

Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion

Many people mistakenly believe the American South was always a hotbed of religious fervor. In his meticulously researched and artfully written Making the Bible Belt, Joseph L. Locke demonstrates how recent a development the Bible belt phenomenon is and traces it to determined opposition of church people to anticlericalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the time H. L. Mencken coined the expression “Bible Belt” in the 1920s, the South had become a region in thrall to religion, uncommonly heedful of preachers and increasingly likely to use political means to achieve religious ends, especially in the quest to ban the manufacture, sale, and consumption of liquor in the United States. Before that triumph could even be a dream, hyperreligious southerners needed to subdue anticlerical politicians and other public figures who decried the mixing of religion and politics. Locke picked Texas as the location of his case study because he believes that its previously understudied transformation from anticlerical hotbed to Bible belt powerhouse illuminates the rise of a form of Christian nationalism that put its stamp on the modern United States in many important ways. He says only a slim minority of the people of Texas belonged to churches for at least a generation after the Civil War, and large numbers of “liberals, agnostics, freethinkers, and atheists,” many with fervent followings, dominated religious discourse in the state (p. 29). The challenge to all of this wild heterodoxy coalesced around prohibition, beginning in 1885, with a failed Waco-based campaign that drew vehement anticlerical forces but convinced vast numbers of ministers to sign on for a political crusade against alcoholic spirits. The antiwet campaign persisted, not just as an end in itself but also as a vehicle to vanquish anticlericalism. The ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1919, represented, Locke says, the triumph of clericalism. Indeed, he says by 1926 that Texas had more churches than any other state, a remarkable transformation in only forty years that augured against any lasting downturn after the national embarrassment of the Scopes trial in 1925 and the ratification of the constitutional amendment that wiped out national prohibition.

From “the Red Belt” to “the Bible Belt”: Historical Roots of the Shift in Russian Political Geography

From “the Red Belt” to “the Bible Belt”: Historical Roots of the Shift in Russian Political Geography

Use of Prayer as Complementary Therapy by Christian Adults in the Bible Belt of the United States

Persons of all major religious groups use prayer as a spiritual discipline when dealing with sickness, and a majority of Christians report faith in healing prayer. The purpose of this research was to explore the use of prayer as complementary therapy for healing by Christian adults in the Bible Belt of the United States. A hermeneutic phenomenological approach was used in this qualitative study. This project was a secondary analysis of a larger study whose aim was to document stories of miraculous healings (n = 14). Open-ended questions focusing on participants’ use of prayer followed the initial telling of their stories. All participants used prayer as complementary to their traditional medical treatments, and emerging themes included prayers of the people, rituals and traditions associated with prayer, prayers of supplication, and experiences related to the act of praying. These findings support prior published studies regarding the prevalence of prayer and its use as complementary therapy. Participants commonly used prayer in times of illness and the effects of prayer included a sense of wellbeing, increased calmness, decreased anxiety, and positive healing experiences. Participants utilized self-prayer and prayer support from family, friends, clergy, and healthcare professionals.

“God wants me to be president”: O papel do cinturão bíblico na política contra o terror durante os governos de George W. Bush

Este artigo busca identificar aspectos da relação entre religião e política externa nos Estados Unidos. Afirma-se que tal relação é determinante para a compreensão da política internacional do governo de George W Bush (2001-2009). Isso se dá em grande medida devido o peso eleitoral do cinturão bíblico (bible belt). Esta região compreende a área do extremo sul dos Estados Unidos, predominantemente conservadora e cristã. Dessa maneira, afirmamos que a religião é decisiva no contexto político estadunidense. Sendo assim, verifica-se que o “cinturão bíblico” exerce influência também na política externa, legitimando por meio do discurso parte dos posicionamentos norte-americanos no cenário internacional e nas estruturas da governança global (2001-2009).

APA Program Aims to Build Minority Pipeline for Psychiatry

APA Program Aims to Build Minority Pipeline for Psychiatry

Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion, by Joseph L. Locke

Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion, by Joseph L. Locke

“I never felt like there was a place for me:” Experiences of Bisexual and Pansexual Individuals with a Christian Upbringing

ABSTRACTPopular and scholarly literature describes the conflicts experienced by some gay and lesbian Christians, but less is known about the unique experiences of bisexual and pansexual populations. The purpose of this study was to understand the process by which bisexual and pansexual individuals with a Christian upbringing resolved conflict between sexual identity and religious beliefs. Grounded theory analysis of 17 interviews revealed a fluid and multidimensional process of resolution, which was influenced by community and relationships as well as experiences of isolation, secrecy, and shame. This study took place in the Bible Belt and was the first of its kind to explore the experiences of bisexual and pansexual individuals who continue to identify as Christian as well as those who have left their religion. It has implications not only for bisexual and pansexual individuals experiencing faith conflicts, but also for the faith leaders and helping professionals who support them.

Anticipating Needs at End of Life in Narratives Related by People Living With HIV/AIDS in Appalachia.

As part of a mixed methods study determining end-of-life and advanced care planning needs in southern Appalachia, a narrative analysis was done of stories told in interviews of 8 selected participants using transcript data. Narratives were fraught with contradiction and paradox. Tensions were evident about living in Appalachia, the Bible Belt, and an area wherein distances are long and community rejection can occur as news travels quickly. The primary finding was that stigma, from several sources, and shrinking circles of social support for people living with HIV/AIDS, all of whom were in treatment, combined to create a sense of solitariness. Narratives were fraught with tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes. Living in Appalachia, the Bible Belt, and an area wherein distances are long and community rejection can occur as news travels quickly. The rejection-based religiously based stigma was often predicated on stereotypes about sexual behavior and illicit drug use. Diagnosis was a key turning point after which many spiraled downward financially and socially. Implications for research and advanced care planning are included.

Christianity and Race in the American South: A History by Paul Harvey

Reviewed by: Christianity and Race in the American South: A History by Paul Harvey Matthew Harper (bio) Christianity and Race in the American South: A History. By Paul Harvey. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. 260. Cloth, $40.00.) Readers will wonder how Paul Harvey fits so much into two hundred pages of text. Harvey calls his survey of four hundred years of southern racial and religious history “a deliberatively selective narrative” (2), but he does not reduce the South to one group of people or one period of time. Nor does he smooth out the region’s complexities. Early Spanish Catholics, Moravian missionaries, slave insurrectionists, proslavery theologians, labor organizers, blues musicians, skeptics, and prosperity gospel televangelists all appear in Harvey’s narrative. Few scholars could have written something so concise, comprehensive, and accessible. Paul Harvey calls this book the capstone of his writing career so far, a career that has led him to write ever broader surveys. In this volume, he does not offer anything surprising to specialists in southern religion, but he weaves decades of scholarship in the field into a concise and compelling story. Harvey frames the book around the region’s paradoxes. The central paradox is that a region of diverse “religious ideas and expressions result[ed] in a dominant establishment at once so productive of extraordinary cruelty and generative of explosively artistic forms” (3). The hegemony of conservative evangelical Protestantism masked, indeed existed because of, the region’s diversity of race, class, and creed. Sometimes Harvey’s description of racial hierarchy and revivalistic evangelicalism sounds like what an older generation of scholars bemoaned as the cultural captivity of southern Christianity. But that is not the impression one gets from reading the entire book. Harvey sees paradoxes everywhere, and he reminds us that southern religion was never as monolithic or parochial as it seemed. The first three chapters try to rescue the early South from our anachronistic stereotypes of the “Bible Belt.” Harvey reminds us of a time when the region was largely not Christian and lacked a regional identity. The early colonial South was a place of diverse Native American religions, Spanish Catholic and Anglican missions, Quakers and other dissenters. The Atlantic slave trade introduced diverse African religions, including Islam and Kongolese Catholicism. In early Virginia and Carolina, Harvey argues, race and Christianity mixed uneasily. “Christian” was a racial identity, and slave owners feared that Christian slaves threatened the racial order. Into that uneasy mix entered evangelical revivalists and American revolutionaries, both of whom introduced a dangerous egalitarianism. The tension between these egalitarian impulses and the region’s desire for social and [End Page 159] racial hierarchy, Harvey says, resolved in favor of the latter. The danger of evangelicalism and republicanism necessitated the creation of the white South’s conservatism, “with its emphasis on order and obedience” (34). Evangelical religion by 1830 became allied with white conquest, Indian removal, and the expansion of slavery. The dominance of proslavery white evangelical Protestantism was never as solid as it seemed, a point underscored when Harvey opens his chapter on the antebellum era with the evangelical preacher Nat Turner. Harvey traces the development of two related but contrasting theologies: proslavery thought and black liberation. Both of these theologies remain in play and in flux in Harvey’s fifth chapter, a quick survey of why theology mattered to white and black southerners’ experience of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Harvey argues that the way soldiers, preachers, and slaves looked for God’s hand in the war “probably lengthened and worsened the war once it came,” as religion “sacralized distrusts and hatreds” during the conflict and for decades later (99). Harvey also notes how proslavery theology morphed after emancipation into something more explicitly and “scientifically” racist. In Harvey’s telling, there was no wall of separation between churches and bloody conflicts over black political power. Harvey’s theme of paradox comes into clearest expression in his chapter on the Jim Crow era. In the early twentieth century, the South became “a problem”—think lynching, the Scopes trial, rural poverty—and “an idea”— think moonlight, magnolias, and Aunt Jemima. Intellectual critics derided the backwardness of white and black religion. Southern...

Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion by Joseph L. Locke

Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion by Joseph L. Locke

Campus Crusade "Explosions": Conversions and Conservatism from the US Bible Belt to Cold War South Korea, 1972–1974

Campus Crusade "Explosions": Conversions and Conservatism from the US Bible Belt to Cold War South Korea, 1972–1974

Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion by Joseph L. Locke

Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion by Joseph L. Locke

“Gay Equals White”? Racial, Ethnic, and Sexual Identities and Attitudes Toward LGBT Individuals Among College Students at a Bible Belt University

While past research has certainly explored a variety of correlates of attitudes toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals, the current study is among the first in an emerging line of inquiry that examines attitudes toward each of these groups separately utilizing an intersectional framework with special attention to racial, ethnic, and sexual identities. Using a college sample of students from the Bible Belt of the United States (N = 1,940), I investigated the roles of racial and ethnic identities (Caucasian/White, African American/Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American/Alaskan Native, other race, and Hispanic/Latinx), religiosity, patriarchal gender norms, parental perspectives, and the intersections among these identities and experiences as they relate to attitudes toward LGBT individuals among heterosexual (n = 1,551) and LGB respondents (n = 389). This moves beyond explorations of White heterosexual people’s attitudes about “homosexuals” (i.e., away from a focus only on gayness and Whiteness) and expands to include non-White LGB people’s LGBT attitudes. Overall, results indicate that racial, ethnic, and sexual identities play a significant role in southern college students’ LGBT attitudes, and these patterns are further complicated by interacting cultural experiences with religiosity, patriarchy, and family dynamics. Campus policy and program implications are provided.

Sardonic Atheists and Silly Evangelicals: the Relationship between Self-Concept and Humor Style

Humor is widely used as a means of supporting group solidarity, but what determines the direction that this humor takes (i.e. its quality and targets)? I suggest that the answer lies in an interaction between self-concept, perceptions of outgroups and micro group culture. Aspects of self-concept that are central for a group’s identity work, especially how the group imagines outsiders, open possibilities for certain types of humor while closing off others. Then micro-cultural processes, heavily dependent on the exact persons present in a given interaction, influence the humorous forms used. This process explains why groups in roughly similar structural positions often make use of humor to generate solidarity in strikingly different ways, as well as why styles of humor vary, within limits, within groups. I provide illustrations of this process in two religious minority groups with very different humorous styles: atheists in the Bible Belt and evangelical Christians in Chicago.

“XENOPHOBIC TIMES: MUSLIM SOMALI DIASPORA AND THE NATURE OF HUMAN RIGHTS, CULTURE, AND IDENTITY IN THE USA”

The current political climate in Washington DC signals an apparent shift to a more Xenophobia stance. The latest treatment of refugees appears regressive, negating the UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention and its subsequent 1967 Protocol, raising the question of what constitutes human rights for refugees and transnational persons. Subsequently, how does this impact USA Refugees, particularly Muslim Somali women and children, and the way in which their identities are constructed and scrutinized by a Xenophobic climate? Through personal interviews and video footage, I explore how Muslim refugee women, like Ishtar and Saharo, who are often hidden female faces in the Somali Diaspora, assimilate and adjust to a predominantly white, Christian Bible belt community, whilst still maintaining their culture and identity in their widening Diaspora. I observe how the evangelical element of protestant religions in the Bible Belt region of Kentucky (KY) appear to offer a surprising bridge to both Christian and Islamic refugees alike, with shared values and conservative social foundations providing common ground. This ultimately demonstrates an unexpected tolerance in this region and the possible “hybridity” of cultural values.

Christians’ Perceptions of Receiving Spiritual Care in the Bible Belt of the United States: A Qualitative Study of Care Provided in the Healthcare Setting

The need to include the spiritual dimension when assessing clients and planning their healthcare is evident from numerous studies conducted by various disciplines. Practitioners of holistic care agree that spiritual care must be included to address fully the needs of clients. The aim of this qualitative research was to explore and document the stories of clients regarding the role healthcare professionals provide in spiritual care. A hermeneutical phenomenological approach was used to interview, document, and analyze the stories of 15 participants (n = 15) regarding their perceptions of spiritual care received or given during times of illness. Initially, only one participant mentioned the role of doctors and nurses in providing spiritual care. After specifically asking about spiritual care, half of the participants shared that they had received spiritual care. Prayer as a mode of spiritual care emerged as a prominent theme. Lack of spiritual care received was documented. The hesitancy to provide spiritual care was evident in participants who were also healthcare providers. More research is needed to further define spiritual care. Education regarding spiritual assessments and spiritual care strategies is needed for both patients and healthcare providers.

“Becoming a Parent Changes Everything”: How Nonbeliever and Pagan Parents Manage Stigma in the U.S. Bible Belt

Despite the increasing visibility of secularism and alternative religions in the United States, few have paid attention to the relationship between family roles and religious identity outside of mainstream Christian denominations. Guided by insights from theories of identity work, I compare stigma management strategies by two religiously marginalized groups. Based on participant-observation, in-depth interviews, and textual analysis, I show how nonbeliever and Pagan parents in the Bible Belt respond to perceived threats to their moral identities as “good parents.” Nonbeliever and Pagan parents manage their spoiled identities by engaging in defensive othering amongst subordinates, a form of stigma management, to distance themselves from discrediting stereotypes—specifically the “militant atheist” and the “hedonistic Pagan.” I demonstrate that access to greater financial and cultural capital (nonbeliever parents) allows for reliance on defensive othering to massage interpersonal relations, whereas access to low levels of financial and cultural capital (Pagan parents), prompts the need to rely on defensive othering as a matter of survival. Becoming a parent changes the dynamic of stigma management for individuals; pushing individual parents away from social justice activism and ultimately undercutting broader social movements for equality.

Illuminating the Interconnections of Sexuality, Aging, and Spirituality in the Lives of Older Lesbian, Bisexual, and Queer Women in the Southern Bible Belt

Although a recent surge in the literature has begun to address the existence and needs of the growing population of lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) older women, there is little established research that has examined their contextualized lived experiences. This absence of information about what aging is like for LBQ women in the current socioreligious climate can lead to misperceptions being perpetuated about the possible interconnections/disconnections among sexual orientation, spirituality, and aging. Therefore, based on the need to deconstruct these misconceptions and present counternarratives to dominant discourses, the following composite ethno-screenplay scenes, restoried from life story interviews, contextualize and illuminate understandings of the experiences of aging, sexuality, and spirituality in the lives of LBQ-identified women in the Southern Bible belt.

Hidden Rainbows: Gay Bars as Safe Havens in a Socially Conservative Area Since the Pulse Nightclub Massacre

Gay and lesbian bars are considered a safe haven. Safe havens exist because of the larger cultural environment that makes safe places necessary. Some communities have noted reductions in the need for gay and lesbian bars due to growing acceptance within the community. However, many states and communities within the South and Bible Belt continue to propose and pass bills which target or restrict the freedoms of LGBT persons. These cultural overtones may support or encourage targeted violence, including the Pulse Nightclub Massacre which was the deadliest incidence of violence targeted at LGBT persons in the USA. This manuscript presents two studies: one at gay bars in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a socially conservative city/state, and the other examines four US communities following the Pulse Nightclub Massacre. Study 1 included interviews at entrance to the bar, exit from the bar, and within a week of leaving the bar in order to identify feelings of safety and comfort. Study 2 seeks to compare gay bar attendance and feelings of comfort and safety in gay bars in regions of the USA with varying structural stigma. Results of study 1 suggest that the participants felt safe (82.4%, n = 42) and comfortable (72.5%, n = 37). In study 2, individuals from Tulsa, Oklahoma were compared to individuals in New York and the DC metro area and were significantly less likely to attend gay bars after the Pulse shooting (t = 2.53 and 3.66, p ≤ 0.01 and p ≤ 0.001, respectively). Moreover, compared to individuals living in the DC metro area and Philadelphia, participants residing in the city in a conservative state felt significantly less safe attending gay bars (t = −2.03 and −2.30, respectively; p ≤ 0.05). No differences across the communities were noted by comfort within the gay bar space. In light of a changing political landscape, additional programming efforts may be necessary at gay bars in communities with high structural stigma. These efforts may include supporting the naturally occurring feelings of community connectedness and facilitating community building.

Unbuckling the Bible Belt: A State-Level Analysis of Religious Factors and Google Searches for Porn

While the link between individual religious characteristics and pornography consumption is well established, relatively little research has considered how the wider religious context may influence pornography use. Exceptions in the literature to date have relied on relatively broad, subjective measures of religious commitment, largely ignoring issues of religious belonging, belief, or practice. This study moves the conversation forward by examining how a variety of state-level religious factors predict Google searches for the term porn, net of relevant sociodemog raphic and ideological controls. Our multivariate findings indicate that higher percentages of Evangelical Protestants, theists, and biblical literalists in a state predict higher frequencies of searching for porn, as do higher church attendance rates. Conversely, higher percentages of religiously unaffiliated persons in a state predict lower frequencies of searching for porn. Higher percentages of total religious adherents, Catholics, or mainline Protestants in a state are unrelated to searching for porn with controls in place. Contrary to recent research, our analyses also show that higher percentages of political conservatives in a state predicted lower frequencies of porn searches. Our findings support theories that more salient, traditional religious influences in a state may influence residents—whether religious or not—toward more covert sexual experiences.