"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:
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.
In my youth, in rural interior New England (if one draws a line from New York to Portland, Maine, that pretty well defines interior vs. coastal New England), I went through a phase of reading a lot of Lewis Grizzard books. I recall in one of them it being noted that White Southerners have the largely unique experience in America of Losing a War, and so much of what's left of that culture is residual resentment if not shame for that fact. I remember mentioning that to my stepfather, who is a Vietnam veteran, and him saying that anybody who fought in Nam also Lost a War.
The existence of a Lost Cause mythology that rationalizes Losing a War is appealing to those who view themselves as losing a war, even if they don't agree with the particular Cause.
How about this? Successful political movements are seductive. The Republicans COURTED rural whites with flattery ("You're the patriotic, God-fearing, hard-working Salt of the Earth - unlike those liberal elites and welfare cheats...") while Democrats ignored, ridiculed or denounced them as "racist." Guess who scored?
This is really interesting commentary on the homogenization of the rural. In recent years there's been a lot of talk of the homogenization of the urban (for instance, see everything about the "airspace" aesthetic: https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification). I've usually reacted to this talk by noting that this maybe concerns 0.5% of the land area, and 5% of the population (though the majority of the media commentariat), and that in any case, there's still a huge divide between the urban areas and the rural areas around any city, on top of the thought, "how homogeneous can it really be if it's about Japanese-Scandinavian fusion coffee bars next to Korean taco trucks?"
But now you point out there is this parallel trend of homogenization of the rural, and for many decades people have commented on the homogenization of the suburban. It seems that one major trend over the past several decades is that, while there used to be variance between regions driven by physical distance, the variance between "regions" is now entirely driven by distance from the air travel or media nexuses of the cities.
I think southernization of the rural is probably one part of what's going on, but I think it might be worth looking into whether there are other rural regionalisms that have spread as well. Just as the contemporary urban is now an amalgam of foods and musics and arts from Japan, Scandinavia, Mexico, USA, India, etc., so that Austin, Portland, Berlin, Tokyo have blocks with the same set of aesthetics, it would be interesting if the contemporary rural is also a continental (or global?) mishmash. It just so happens that the south had the biggest rural populations, and the most distinctive rural symbols, of the different regions of the country, so it may have the biggest influence on the resulting amalgam. But at least the pickup truck strikes me as historically more western than southern, and maybe a more detailed cultural observer than I might notice some other bits.
Boy, I'm excited to read this Ted Turner hypothesis. Of course, ironically enough Ted Turner himself is very much not conservative but I guess that is not very consequential to this thesis.
However Will -- I think I have even an earlier case study that I think you should earnestly consider -- "Southern Rock" including specifically Lynyrd Skynyrd of course but also Charlie Daniels and whatnot. Decades before the the 90's Braves dynasty, Lynyrd Skynyrd were hitting notes of the proto culture war, and of course their concerts may be some of the earliest places you could spot the stars and bars in less southerly states. I'm not sure exactly how this all fits into your thesis, particularly without reading it yet, but it seems not insignificant to me.
I wonder how much the evolution has been the top-down result of hardcore and influential "true believers" versus a more grassroots bottom-up movement that politicians increasingly had to pander to.
To the extent that it was the former, after 9/11 I know there were various anti-Muslim groups that actively campaigned around the country, lecturing at community centers and town halls. Some of these folks ran for office, while others infiltrated and transformed conservative think tanks into nakedly ideology-driven political organizations.
On the grassroots side, this is a fairly tired take, but I am acquainted with plenty of white people, ostensibly Christians, who have become increasingly uncomfortable with the growth of multicultural America. In short, they hold beliefs that have become taboo. Trump made them feel "seen" for exactly this, as persecuted victims, which was clearly a catalyst for them to coalesce.
And then of course there were plenty of forces that added fuel and also transcend regions by their very nature and drive homogeneity. The Kochs and their ilk exploited these currents politically, and right wing media exploited them commercially.
Much of modern pop country is just lionizing the South, and then listing things we like to do and consume here. Makes it easier for somebody in rural Iowa to pretend they're *really* more like us. How many middle class teens dyed their hair black after they listened to The Downward Spiral ? (I did!)
Just as an aside, I remember in 2007 meeting a guy from Arkansas who was attending the same (Minnesotan) law school as I, and he commented that he couldn't believe how people up here not only listened to southern-style C&W but also even spoke with a slight Southern twang. He was kind of outraged at how artificial this apparent identification with Southern culture was.
All of which is to say that the trend has been going on for a while.
"Whuppin’ his siblings might have been a natural prelude to Confederate sympathies and noose-collecting if Allen had grown up in, say, a shack in Alabama. But what is most puzzling about Allen’s interest in the old Confederacy is that he didn’t grow up in the South. Like a military brat, Allen hopscotched around the country on a route set by his father’s coaching career. The son was born in Whittier, California, in 1952 (Whittier College Poets), moved to the suburbs of Chicago for eight years (the Bears), and arrived in Southern California as a teenager (the Rams). In Palos Verdes, an exclusive cliffside community, he lived in a palatial home with sweeping views of downtown Los Angeles and the Santa Monica basin."
Great piece. I’m sure there’s a lot to it. However, though I don’t have a philosophy degree, I’m pretty sure that the statement, “Rural Iowans and Minnesotans sound more like rural Missourians than the reverse,” is logically impossible. 😆
Great column, but the plural of Dollar General is Dollars General, and you can't tell me otherwise.
"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.
In my youth, in rural interior New England (if one draws a line from New York to Portland, Maine, that pretty well defines interior vs. coastal New England), I went through a phase of reading a lot of Lewis Grizzard books. I recall in one of them it being noted that White Southerners have the largely unique experience in America of Losing a War, and so much of what's left of that culture is residual resentment if not shame for that fact. I remember mentioning that to my stepfather, who is a Vietnam veteran, and him saying that anybody who fought in Nam also Lost a War.
The existence of a Lost Cause mythology that rationalizes Losing a War is appealing to those who view themselves as losing a war, even if they don't agree with the particular Cause.
How about this? Successful political movements are seductive. The Republicans COURTED rural whites with flattery ("You're the patriotic, God-fearing, hard-working Salt of the Earth - unlike those liberal elites and welfare cheats...") while Democrats ignored, ridiculed or denounced them as "racist." Guess who scored?
This is really interesting commentary on the homogenization of the rural. In recent years there's been a lot of talk of the homogenization of the urban (for instance, see everything about the "airspace" aesthetic: https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification). I've usually reacted to this talk by noting that this maybe concerns 0.5% of the land area, and 5% of the population (though the majority of the media commentariat), and that in any case, there's still a huge divide between the urban areas and the rural areas around any city, on top of the thought, "how homogeneous can it really be if it's about Japanese-Scandinavian fusion coffee bars next to Korean taco trucks?"
But now you point out there is this parallel trend of homogenization of the rural, and for many decades people have commented on the homogenization of the suburban. It seems that one major trend over the past several decades is that, while there used to be variance between regions driven by physical distance, the variance between "regions" is now entirely driven by distance from the air travel or media nexuses of the cities.
I think southernization of the rural is probably one part of what's going on, but I think it might be worth looking into whether there are other rural regionalisms that have spread as well. Just as the contemporary urban is now an amalgam of foods and musics and arts from Japan, Scandinavia, Mexico, USA, India, etc., so that Austin, Portland, Berlin, Tokyo have blocks with the same set of aesthetics, it would be interesting if the contemporary rural is also a continental (or global?) mishmash. It just so happens that the south had the biggest rural populations, and the most distinctive rural symbols, of the different regions of the country, so it may have the biggest influence on the resulting amalgam. But at least the pickup truck strikes me as historically more western than southern, and maybe a more detailed cultural observer than I might notice some other bits.
Boy, I'm excited to read this Ted Turner hypothesis. Of course, ironically enough Ted Turner himself is very much not conservative but I guess that is not very consequential to this thesis.
However Will -- I think I have even an earlier case study that I think you should earnestly consider -- "Southern Rock" including specifically Lynyrd Skynyrd of course but also Charlie Daniels and whatnot. Decades before the the 90's Braves dynasty, Lynyrd Skynyrd were hitting notes of the proto culture war, and of course their concerts may be some of the earliest places you could spot the stars and bars in less southerly states. I'm not sure exactly how this all fits into your thesis, particularly without reading it yet, but it seems not insignificant to me.
I wonder how much the evolution has been the top-down result of hardcore and influential "true believers" versus a more grassroots bottom-up movement that politicians increasingly had to pander to.
To the extent that it was the former, after 9/11 I know there were various anti-Muslim groups that actively campaigned around the country, lecturing at community centers and town halls. Some of these folks ran for office, while others infiltrated and transformed conservative think tanks into nakedly ideology-driven political organizations.
On the grassroots side, this is a fairly tired take, but I am acquainted with plenty of white people, ostensibly Christians, who have become increasingly uncomfortable with the growth of multicultural America. In short, they hold beliefs that have become taboo. Trump made them feel "seen" for exactly this, as persecuted victims, which was clearly a catalyst for them to coalesce.
And then of course there were plenty of forces that added fuel and also transcend regions by their very nature and drive homogeneity. The Kochs and their ilk exploited these currents politically, and right wing media exploited them commercially.
It’s the country music culture. That culture has assimilated all of Rural America now.
Country and Western music?
Much of modern pop country is just lionizing the South, and then listing things we like to do and consume here. Makes it easier for somebody in rural Iowa to pretend they're *really* more like us. How many middle class teens dyed their hair black after they listened to The Downward Spiral ? (I did!)
Just as an aside, I remember in 2007 meeting a guy from Arkansas who was attending the same (Minnesotan) law school as I, and he commented that he couldn't believe how people up here not only listened to southern-style C&W but also even spoke with a slight Southern twang. He was kind of outraged at how artificial this apparent identification with Southern culture was.
All of which is to say that the trend has been going on for a while.
Dukes of Hazzard.
You might be interested in this take on "Southern White" as an ethnicity. The discussion thread includes some points about the way this has spread into rural areas well beyond the Old Confederacy https://crookedtimber.org/2012/11/16/southern-white-as-an-ethnicity/
I remember pondering some of these same questions back in 2006: https://newrepublic.com/article/65427/george-allens-race-problem
"Whuppin’ his siblings might have been a natural prelude to Confederate sympathies and noose-collecting if Allen had grown up in, say, a shack in Alabama. But what is most puzzling about Allen’s interest in the old Confederacy is that he didn’t grow up in the South. Like a military brat, Allen hopscotched around the country on a route set by his father’s coaching career. The son was born in Whittier, California, in 1952 (Whittier College Poets), moved to the suburbs of Chicago for eight years (the Bears), and arrived in Southern California as a teenager (the Rams). In Palos Verdes, an exclusive cliffside community, he lived in a palatial home with sweeping views of downtown Los Angeles and the Santa Monica basin."
MidgeAug 31
"What I’m still groping for is solid empirical confirmation that the Southernification of white rural America did happen ..."
Would foodways be a source of data to confirm? For example, the spread of fried chicken and biscuits and gravy ...
Great piece. I’m sure there’s a lot to it. However, though I don’t have a philosophy degree, I’m pretty sure that the statement, “Rural Iowans and Minnesotans sound more like rural Missourians than the reverse,” is logically impossible. 😆