Bible Belt

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bible Belt is a region of the American South, parts of the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic states of Virginia and West Virginia, where evangelical Protestantism shapes daily life, politics, and culture more than almost anywhere else in the country. In South Carolina, only 16 percent of residents report having no religious affiliation. In Vermont, that number is 46 percent. That gap tells the whole story. How did a specific swath of American geography become this distinct? And what does it mean to live, vote, and build a city inside a place defined by faith? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

  The term itself began as a journalistic jab. In 1924, the American journalist and social commentator H. L. Mencken used the phrase "Bible Belt" in the Chicago Daily Tribune, writing that "the old game, I suspect, is beginning to play out in the Bible Belt." Three years later, Mencken claimed he had invented it. From that single sardonic line, an entire cultural geography took shape.

• 2. Drawing the Map

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  Wilbur Zelinsky was the first scholar to draw a formal boundary around the Bible Belt, in a 1961 study that defined the region as the area where Protestant denominations, especially Southern Baptist, Methodist, and evangelical, were the predominant religious affiliations. That definition held for decades. A 1978 study by Charles Heatwole refined the picture, identifying the Belt as the domain of 24 fundamentalist Protestant denominations, arriving at essentially the same territory.

  Stephen W. Tweedie, an Associate Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography at Oklahoma State University, took a different approach when he published research in 1995. He measured the Bible Belt not by church membership rolls but by the numerical concentration of audiences for religious television. What he found were two distinct belts, not one. The eastern belt stretched from North Florida through Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Southside Virginia, and the Carolinas. The western belt concentrated on Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana (excluding New Orleans and Acadiana), Oklahoma, Missouri (excluding Kansas City and St. Louis), and Mississippi. Within those two belts, Tweedie identified two core zones: a western core running from Little Rock, Arkansas, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and an eastern core anchored in the major population centers of Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee.

  The boundaries have always had meaningful exceptions. Heavily Catholic Southern Louisiana sits within the geographic South but outside the Protestant Belt. Religiously diverse Central and South Florida, overwhelmingly Hispanic South Texas and the Trans-Pecos region, and Northern Virginia in the Washington metropolitan area are likewise excluded. A 2016 study by the Pew Research Center found that the ten most religious states were Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Carolina, West Virginia, Georgia, Oklahoma, and North Carolina, a list that closely tracks both Zelinsky and Heatwole.

• 3. Baptist Roots

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  In 1707, five Baptist churches in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware assembled and established the Philadelphia Baptist Association, one of the oldest Baptist regional associations in America. From that body, missionary work radiated outward with unusual intensity. By 1760 the Philadelphia Baptist Association included churches in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, and West Virginia. By 1767 two subsidiary regional associations had to be formed to manage further growth: the Warren Baptist Association in New England and the Ketochton Baptist Association in Virginia. The Philadelphia Association also organized the Charleston Baptist Association in the Carolinas in 1751.

  The figure who gave the South its Baptist character more than any other was Shubal Stearns, a New England Separate Baptist who migrated to Sandy Creek, North Carolina, in 1755 and launched a revival that penetrated the entire Piedmont region. The churches he organized were gathered in 1758 into the Sandy Creek Association. Stearns was brother-in-law to Daniel Marshall, born in Windsor, Connecticut, who is generally considered the first great Baptist leader in Georgia. Marshall founded Kiokee Baptist Church, which remains the oldest continuing Baptist congregation in the state.

  Thomas P. Kidd has noted that as early as 1758, Sandy Creek missionaries helped organize a slave congregation called the Bluestone Church, on the plantation of William Byrd III. It may have been the first independently functioning African American church in North America. Wait Palmer, from Toland, Connecticut, who had baptized Stearns in 1751, arrived at Silver Bluff, South Carolina, in 1775 and constituted a Black church there. That Silver Bluff plantation, owned by George Galphin and located about twelve miles from Augusta, Georgia, brought David George into the Afro-Baptist faith. The influence of New England preachers like Jonathan Edwards, carried south by figures such as Stearns and Palmer, reached enslaved people through the missionary networks of the Separate Baptists.

• 4. The Buckle Cities

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  Nashville, Tennessee, is sometimes called "the Protestant Vatican," a nickname that arrives with some statistical weight behind it. The city has over 700 churches, several seminaries, and a roster of Christian institutions including Belmont University, Trevecca Nazarene University, Lipscomb University, Welch College, and American Baptist College. Nashville is the seat of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., the headquarters of the Southern Baptist Convention, the National Association of Free Will Baptists, the Gideons International, and the Gospel Music Association. Thomas Nelson, described as the world's largest producer of Bibles, operates out of Nashville as well.

  Charlotte, North Carolina, is the birthplace of Billy Graham. The city hosts the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the Wycliffe Bible Translators' JAARS Center, SIM Missions Organization, and The Christian Research Institute. Both Reformed Theological Seminary and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary have campuses there, and the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America is headquartered in the city.

  A study commissioned by the American Bible Society, based on 42,855 interviews conducted between 2005 and 2012, determined the ten most "Bible-minded" cities in the country. Knoxville, Tennessee, ranked first. The list also included Shreveport, Louisiana; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Birmingham, Alabama; Jackson, Mississippi; Springfield, Missouri; Charlotte, North Carolina; Lynchburg, Virginia; Huntsville-Decatur, Alabama; and Charleston, West Virginia.

  Tulsa, Oklahoma, earned its spot on this list in part through institutions like Oral Roberts University, Phillips Theological Seminary, and RHEMA Bible Training College, located in the suburb of Broken Arrow. Several prominent figures in evangelical Christianity studied or lived in Tulsa, including Joel Osteen, Kenneth E. Hagin, Carlton Pearson, and Kenneth Copeland. Abilene, Texas, a city of 117,000, is home to three Protestant universities: the Baptist-affiliated Hardin-Simmons University, the Church of Christ's Abilene Christian University, and the Methodist-founded McMurry University.

• 5. Politics and the Belt

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  In 1950, President Harry S. Truman told Catholic leaders he wanted to send an ambassador to the Vatican. The leading Democrats in Congress told him they approved in principle but warned him plainly: it would cost Democratic senators and congressmen their seats in the Bible Belt. Truman's encounter illustrates how much political weight the region carried even in the mid-twentieth century.

  The pattern since has sharpened considerably. Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas have voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every election since 1980. Oklahoma has supported the Republican presidential candidate in every election since 1968, with Republicans carrying every county in the state in all presidential elections since 2004. Kentucky, Louisiana, West Virginia, Arkansas, Missouri, and Tennessee have voted Republican in every election since 1996.

  Historical geographer Barry Vann found that within the region, counties in the upland areas of the Appalachians and the Ozarks tend toward even more conservative voting patterns than the coastal plain counties, with the exception of Mississippi. During Republican presidential primaries, the region often decides which social conservative carries the field. In the 2008 primaries, Mike Huckabee won most Bible Belt states. In 2012, Rick Santorum did the same. In the 2016 primaries, Donald Trump won most states while Ted Cruz took few. Arkansas, notably, has the highest proportion of evangelical Protestants of any state in the union, at 50 percent, and a 2014 Pew Research Center study found that Mississippi leads all states in the share of residents who believe the Bible is the literal word of God, at 56 percent.

• 6. Bible Belts Beyond America

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  H. L. Mencken coined the term for the American South, but the label has spread to every continent. The Bible Belt of the Netherlands, known in Dutch as the Bijbelgordel, stretches from Zeeland through the West-Betuwe and Veluwe to the northern parts of Overijssel province, where orthodox Calvinists form the dominant religious community. In Denmark, rural western Jutland is considered the local Bible Belt, home to conservative Lutheran organizations with a historically strong resistance to abortion and LGBT rights. Today that movement is strongest around Hedensted, Losning, Korning, and Oster Snede.

  In Australia the term operates differently, attaching to neighborhoods rather than regions. The northwestern suburbs of Sydney around The Hills District were long known as the Bible Belt because Hillsong Church is located there, though between 2011 and 2016 the Christian population of that district fell by 18.5 percent while those reporting no religion grew from one in eight in 2006 to one in five in 2016. In Sweden, the Bible Belt centers on Jonkoping in southern Sweden and the free churches concentrated there.

  Mexico has its own parallel concept. The journalist and writer Carlos Monsivas coined the term Rosario Belt, or Cinturon del Rosario, in 1999, to describe the states of Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Queretaro, and Zacatecas, where 90 percent of the population identifies as Roman Catholic. Guanajuato is one of the strongest electoral strongholds of the National Action Party, which draws on Christian democratic tradition. It was in this same region that the first uprisings of the Cristero War began, demanding an end to the restrictions on Catholic worship imposed by the Calles Law. Before Ukrainian independence, Soviet Ukraine was described as the Bible Belt of the Soviet Union, with a significant Baptist population. In Northern Ireland, Ballymena is called the buckle of a local Bible Belt in County Antrim; from 1970 to 2010, the Member of Parliament for North Antrim was Ian Paisley, a Free Presbyterian minister known for his theological fundamentalism.