Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South

Chapter One: Moses, Jesus, Absalom, and the Trickster: Narratives of the Evangelical South

6 When, how, and why did the South become the Bible Belt? And why are the states considered the Bible Belt also so closely associated with high rates of violence, incarceration, divorce, alcoholism, obesity, and infant mortality? Grappling with these two questions together illuminates some basic paradoxes of southern history and something about the soul of man as well. Most especially, these questions compel us to confront the rise of evangelicalism as a dominant social force in the region simultaneous with persistent poverty and violence. Juxtaposing rates of religiosity and measurements of social ills helps frame an understanding of the religious archetypes explored through this book. They take in the precarious balance of piety and inhumanity, of Jesus and gin, and of evangelicalism and evil. Consider first a comparison of electoral maps from 1800 and 2000. Two hundred years ago, New England was the Bible Belt, and a solid bloc of support for John Adams in the 1800 election (view the electoral map linked at this book’s website, or at http:// www.270towin.com/, and select the election of 1800 in the dropdown box). The South was something else. It was nothing like a Bible Belt, not with its candidate, Thomas Jefferson, being accused of religious heterodoxy and atheism. He was not an atheist, but he was no orthodox Christian either, given his scornful dismissal of the supernatural happenings of the Bible. A chapter one B Moses, Jesus, Absalom, and the Trickster Narratives of the Evangelical South Moses, Jesus, Absalom, and Trickster 7 A dramatic contrast to the 1800 electoral map may be found in a breakdown of the concentration of Baptist churches by American counties as of 2000 based on data from the American Religious Identification Survey (aris) (Figure 1; this map, and others derived from the same data that also show dramatic regional variations in American patterns of religious expression and denominational concentrations , may better be viewed in color at http://www.valpo.edu /geomet/pics/geo200/religion/church_bodies.gif, and are also linked at this book’s website: http://paulharvey.org/moses). To the question, is the South still a Bible Belt, the map’s obvious answer would be yes. According to the aris data for 2001, the South at that time had the highest percentage of churchgoers who affiliated themselves with Baptist (23.5 percent), Presbyterian (3 percent), and black Protestant (14 percent, well over half of whom are Baptists) churches. The Evangelical Belt as defined here has been, in very many counties, effectively a Baptist Belt as well; compare the presence of Baptists in the region in these data from 2001 to the 5.7 percent of New Englanders who are Baptists and the national low of 3.8 percent in the Coastal Northwest. The 2001 data also highlighted the South as counting the highest regional percentage of white non-Hispanic Methodists (6.9 percent), together with a relatively high percentage of white non-Hispanic Pentecostal/ Charismatic adherents (3 percent). Moreover, in the aris data, the South counted the lowest numbers of respondents who answered “no religion” when asked generally about their religious beliefs and affiliations (10 percent), and nearly the lowest count for white Catholics (9.7 percent). It is little wonder that the volume of the Religion by Region series devoted to the Deep South states is titled Religion and Public Life in the South: In the Evangelical Mode.1 State-level data are equally informative. According to the North American Religion Atlas (compiled in 2000), evangelical Protestant members as a percentage of the total population by 2000 peaked in Alabama (32 percent, the highest in the region) and Mississippi (31 percent), followed closely by Tennessee (29.4 percent) and Kentucky (26.7 percent). Mainline Protestant members—a category that would include the substantial membership of United Digital map showing Baptists as percentage of residents by county, 2000. Courtesy of Jon T. Kilpinen, Department of Geography & Meteorology, Valparaiso University. Moses, Jesus, Absalom, and Trickster 9 Methodists, for example—count another 7 percent of the population of Alabama, with comparable numbers in other southern states. Of the total southern population, 19 percent were counted as Baptist adherents and 12.4 percent as historically African American Protestant. These figures compare to national counts in 2000 of Baptist members as 6.6 percent of the population, or 8.5 percent if measured in terms of adherents, and 7.4...