Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Dylan's avatar

Great column, but the plural of Dollar General is Dollars General, and you can't tell me otherwise.

Expand full comment
Midge's avatar

"What I’m still groping for is solid empirical confirmation that the Southernification of white rural America did happen and, if so, how it happened."

Religion couldn't be the only way, but how could it not be one of the ways? Many rural people aren't regular churchgoers, but they've got a church they're not going to. And Evangelical and megachurch culture (not exactly the same thing, but lots of overlap) is pretty Southern. Southern Baptists are *definitely* Southern — *and* thought of as more "orthodox" for being more conservative, *and* the denomination's "conservative" reputation seems to come, in part, from its segregationist past.

Yankee religion seemed to prize steadiness over revival: go to church regularly; you don't need to have a "born-again" story about how you got saved. Southern religion seems to have been less about regular attendance, more about sporadic revivals. It's less bougie, more suitable for people with unsteady lives. As churchgoing becomes less normal overall, perhaps it's easier for everyone, including those with otherwise-regular lives, to slip into sporadic attendance and an unchurched conflation of faith with other identity-oriented sentiments, like patriotism.

The South has a reputation for being "Christ-haunted" in a way that the North does not, and it's not all Flannery O'Connor's fault:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/443791-whenever-i-m-asked-why-southern-writers-particularly-have-a-penchant

My first sustained encounter with Evangelicals was on an Ivy-League campus. No surprise many of them *came* from the South. But I'm not sure where so many of them came from explains the shared unspoken sense that contemporary American Christianity becomes "more Christian" by becoming "more Southern". Immigrant students seemed to believe it, too.

Kate Bowler, associate professor of the history of Christianity in North America at Duke, has mapped out megachurch influence before. She might know something about its homogenizing effects. (She definitely knows about prosperity-gospel effects!) She might be a good (and good-humored) brain to pick on what role contemporary Christian culture plays in "Southernizing" all of rural America. I'm less familiar with Kristin Kobes Du Mez, and I haven't yet read her book, "Jesus and John Wayne", but her work might be another lead.

Expand full comment
31 more comments...

No posts