At Science and Religion Today, historian Randall Stephens attempts to explain the distinct and enduring religiosity of the American south:
In the early 19th century, the second great awakening of revivals and evangelical resurgence burned across the region. Baptist and Methodist churches won big rewards. They would claim the most adherents in the country and an unusually large share in the South. A century later, pentecostal and holiness churches also won scores of followers in Dixie. The movement’s chief denominations are still headquartered in the South.
But how did Southern evangelicalism, and all its offshoots, spread so far and wide? The American South never experienced the kind of massive immigration that the North did in the 1840s and later in the 1890s and the first years of the 20th century. (A glance at census records from the 19th century would reveal as much. While you’d find plenty of Tuckers, Smiths, Shaws, and Taylors in the South, you’d be hard pressed to locate De Lucas, Costas, Giordanos, Freiburgs, Kowalskis, Wiśniewskis, Wójciks and the like.) Andrew Jackson’s campaign of Indian removal cleared the way for white settlers and their black slaves. Owing to patterns of migration and settlement, the biracial South was profoundly homogeneous when compared with other sections. The slaveholding South was not fertile ground for political, social, or religious dissent. (Long ago, one historian thought the region had something like an intellectual blockade.) Though Judaism has long had a presence in the South, it never thrived as it did in the urban North. Catholicism, too, remained isolated to certain quarters. That homogeneity lent itself to the evangelical surge or the creation of the Bible Belt.
Continue reading “Why Is the South So Religious?” here [H/T Christopher McKnight Nichols].