Monday School: The Bible Belt

It’s Monday! Time once again for Monday School, what will always remain “The Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense They Tried To Teach You Yesterday!”

Today’s Lesson: What The Heck Is The Bible Belt And Will It Ever Be Replaced By A Good Set Of Secular Suspenders?

According to my American Heritage College Dictionary, the Bible Belt is defined as “Those sections of the U.S., especially in the South and Midwest, where Protestant fundamentalism is widely practiced.”

According to Wikipedia, “The term was coined by H.L. Mencken. Reporting on the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee to the Baltimore Evening Sun on July 15, 1925, Mencken wrote of the region as ‘this bright, shining, buckle of the Bible belt’…..

“[I]n the United States, it is the region where the Southern Baptist Convention denomination is strongest. It includes the entire South and nearby areas…. The name is derived from the heavy emphasis on literal intepretations of the Bible in Evangelical denominations.

“The… region is usually contrasted with the less devout Christians of the northeast and the relatively secular western United States, where the percentage of non-religious people are the highest in the nation, reaching its maximum in the northwestern state of Washington at 27%, compared to the Bible belt state of Alabama, at only 7%.

“Although exact boundaries do not exist, it is generally considered to cover much of the area stretching from Texas in the southwest, northwest to Kansas, northeast to part of Virginia, and southeast to northern Florida.”

Wikipedia goes on to list some of the locations that have been described as the “buckle” of the Bible Belt:

—– Nashville, Tennessee, home to the headquarters of many denominations, including the Southern Baptist Convention and the United Methodist Church’s Publishing House, is most frequently termed the “Buckle of the Bible Belt” (in addition, it is referred to as the “Protestant Vatican”).

—– Greenville, South Carolina, home of Bob Jones University

—– Tulsa, Oklahoma, home of Oral Roberts University and the ministries of Kenneth Hagin and the late Billy James Hargis

—– Dayton, Tennessee, site of the Scopes Monkey Trial and home of Bryan College

—– Abilene, Texas, home of Abilene Christian University

—– Dallas, Texas, home of the conservative Dallas Theological Seminary

—– Fort Worth, Texas, home of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and the ministry of Kenneth Copeland

—– Cleveland, Tennessee, home of Lee University and the Church of God International Offices

—– Springfield, Missouri, home of the Assemblies of God

—– Lynchburg, Virginia, home of Jerry Falwell’s ministry and Liberty University

—– Virginia Beach, Virginia, home of Regent University and the 700 Club with Pat Robertson

—– Charlotte, North Carolina, home of Billy Graham and his Center

—– Houston, Texas, home of Lakewood Church

Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia are all said to have Bible Belts of their own. “In Canada, the term is also sometimes used to describe several disparate regions which have a higher than average level of church attendance. These include the majority of rural southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, parts of southern Manitoba, the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia and the Saint John River Valley of New Brunswick.”

The following map reveals that the Bible Belt more or less corresponds to those counties in the US in which Baptists (red) predominate:

Answers.com reveals that the Bible Belt is by no means the first or only belt to snake its way across the American mindscape: “As transportation improved and the United States became more specialized by region in the later nineteenth century, we began to belt the country, labeling the different parts according to their products. There is a reference to a wheat belt (in northern Ohio) as early as 1863. The first oil belt, running from New York to Kentucky, was mentioned in 1865. We also spoke of the great cotton belt of the South in 1871, the fruit belt of the Michigan peninsula in 1874, a gold belt in northern Georgia in 1879, the Midwestern corn belt and the California redwood belt in 1882, the ‘grain-belt of the Pacific slope’ in 1886, the orange belt of Florida in 1889, the ‘Chautauqua grape-belt… about two or three miles wide lying upon Lake Erie’ in 1897, and an iron belt in Alabama in 1902.

“Following this pattern, when railroads standardized time across the continent, what we now call time zones were referred to as time belts (1894). And imaginative Americans remarked on other kinds of belts: the fever belt of the Southern states (1893), and the grim lynching belt of the South, where lynchings of African Americans were all too common around the turn of the century (1900)….

“New belts have emerged with Americans’ changing perceptions of themselves. The name sunbelt, used for the southern states from coast to coast, along with their growing populations, was a 1967 invention of political writer Kevin Phillips. Before long, a name was coined for its opposite, the older states of the East and upper Midwest where heavy industry, especially steel, was in decline: rust belt (1985).”

Here are a few more things to ponder about the Bible Belt…

1. The Bible Belt Has An Unusually High Divorce Rate:

As the New York Times pointed out a couple years ago, “If blue states care less about moral values, why are divorce rates so low in the bluest of the blue states?… Kentucky, Mississippi and Arkansas… had three of the highest divorce rates in 2003…. The lowest divorce rates are largely in the blue states: the Northeast and the upper Midwest. And the state with the lowest divorce rate was Massachusetts….”

According to another New York Times article that was quoted by Wendy Kaminer in an essay of her own, “The divorce rate in many parts of the Bible Belt is roughly 50% above the national average.” Kaminer goes on to add this: “According to the Times, the number of unmarried cohabitating couples in Oklahoma increased 97 percent in the past ten years. It increased 125 percent in Arkansas and 123 percent in Tennessee. The average national increase in unmarried couples for the same period was 72 percent.”

2. The Bible Belt Has An Unusually High Incarceration Rate:

According to a story in the issue of Sojourners Magazine, “If Louisiana and Mississippi were countries, they would have the highest incarceration rates in the world, according to the Justice Policy Institute’s new report documenting the growth in Southern U.S. prison and jail populations over the last two decades. In 2001, the region had incarceration rates more than three times higher than 63 percent of the countries in the world. JPI attributes these high rates to a system that designates prisons as a race- and class-biased solution to social, political, and economic problems.” (NOTE: According to the Christian Science Monitor and many other sources, our oh-so-religious “Christian nation” has the highest incarceration rate in the world.)

According to a Department of Justice report that was issued in May 2006, “Louisiana and Georgia led the nation in percentage of their state residents incarcerated (with more than 1 percent of their state residents in prison or jail at midyear 2005). Maine and Minnesota had the lowest rates of incarceration (with 0.3 percent or less of their state residents incarcerated)…. During the year that ended last June 30, the nation’s prison and jail population grew 2.6 percent, reaching 2,186,230 inmates behind bars…. Three state systems — Florida (up 2,812 inmates), Texas (up 2,228), and North Carolina (up 1,482) — accounted for more than 40 percent of the state growth.”

According to Mother Jones magazine, the seven states with the highest incarceration rates in 2000 were all located in the Bible Belt (Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia).

3. Bible Belt States Execute People Far More Often Than Other States:

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 1049 Ameircans have been executed since 1976. About 900 of those executions have occurred in Bible Belt states.

According to an Associated Press article by Amy Green, “NASHVILLE, TN.: In this town known as the buckle of the Bible Belt, Christians readily cite the ‘eye for an eye’ scripture rather than ‘thou shalt not kill’ in explaining their position on capital punishment.‘We believe that the state has a God-given responsibility to protect society, and that the Bible tells us that includes the ultimate penalty,’ said Barrett Duke, vice president of research for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission…. ‘I don’t think it’s any accident,’ said the Rev. Joe Ingle of Nashville, a death row minister since 1974 and a staunch opponent of the death penalty. ‘The Bible Belt is also the “Death Belt.”’”

According to an article from Religion News Service that’s posted at Beliefnet.com, “An overwhelming majority of Protestant pastors support the use of capital punishment…. The survey of 518 Protestant pastors, conducted by Phoenix-based Ellison Research, showed that pastors support the death penalty 72 percent to 28 percent. Only about 15 percent of pastors feel strongly that the death penalty should be abolished…. Pastors in churches affiliated with the National Council of Churches — the more liberal end of the spectrum — supported the end of the death penalty 56 percent to 44 percent. Those in churches affiliated with the more conservative National Association of Evangelicals supported the use of the death penalty 88 percent to 12 percent.”

4. The Bible Belt Continues To Embrace Corporal Punishment:

According to this article from of the New York Times, “Over most of the country and in all but a few major metropolitan areas, corporal punishment has been on a gradual but steady decline since the 1970’s, and 28 states have banned it. But the practice remains alive, particularly in rural parts of the South and the lower Midwest, where it is not only legal, but also widely practiced…. The most recent federal statistics show that during the 2002-3 school year, more than 300,000 American schoolchildren were disciplined with corporal punishment, usually one or more blows with a thick wooden paddle. Sometimes holes were cut in the paddle to make the beating more painful. Of those students, 70 percent were in five Southern states: Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas.”

According to an article entitled U.S. Students Still Getting the Paddle — Corporal Punishment Laws Often Reflect Regional Chasms that appeared in the Feb 21, 2004 edition of the Washington Post, “MERIDIAN, Miss.: A decision last month by the Canadian Supreme Court to outlaw the use of the strap by teachers has left the United States and a lone state in Australia as the only parts of the industrialized world to allow corporal punishment in schools, according to anti-paddling activists. While 28 U.S. states have outlawed paddling over the past three decades, the practice remains commonplace across much of the Bible Belt. Here in the nation’s top paddling state, nearly 10 percent of students are paddled every year, according to statistics collected by the federal Department of Education. In poorer parts of the state, where a higher proportion of children are from minority and single-parent families, the use of corporal punishment is even more frequent. Although child psychologists say corporal punishment risks reinforcing negative behavior, many Meridian teachers and parents consider it an effective form of discipline…. ‘Are we going to believe man’s report or God’s report?’ asked Cherry Moore, a special education teacher at Carver and co-pastor of a local church. She believes that Old Testament references to ‘spoiling the child by sparing the rod’ should outweigh the allegedly negative effects of corporal punishment cited by child development experts…. In some states, such as Pennsylvania and Wyoming, corporal punishment of students remains legal, though the institution has all but died out. The top paddling states after Mississippi are Arkansas (9.1 percent of students paddled in 2000), Alabama (5.4 percent) and Tennessee (4.2 percent.)…. Corporal punishment in schools is illegal in most of the rest of the world and has been banned in most of Europe for several decades. In the past few years, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Pakistan have all outlawed the practice.”

5. Bible Belt States Apparently Have A Lot Of Other Problems, Too:

According to a recent blog posting that confirms and extends much of what I’ve posted above, “In a study… published this month in Vanity Fair, James Wolcott laid out the statistics of these ‘Pharisee voter states’…. Using research from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Center for Health Statistics and the US Gaming Bulletin, Wolcott found that Red States led the nation in: incarceration rates; women’s incarceration; executions; suicide; death by firearms; gambling; divorce rates; illegitimate births; obesity. Other studies [by the Guttmacher Institute] have shown that the Red states have the highest incidence of teen pregnancy, and STD’s. Comparisons with church attendance statistics show that the Red states with the worst numbers are those with the highest church attendance.”

When looking back at the last few examples ofhow things in this area are actually go against what is preached and expected from the bible itself… it should lead anyone, especially non-believers to ask the obvious: how can anyone else really look to it for morality and/or to be a moral code if the die hards themselves have a difficult time following their own doctrine? It’s this kind of blatant hyprocisy that makes it easy for many to walk away from religion completely and without any remorse what so ever. You cannot preach to us non-believers how to be a ‘good Christian’ when most of those in the bible belt who claim to be good Christians are all doing it wrong to begin with.

I’ve had the pleasure (sarcasm) to visit parts of the bible belt as my parents live in the thick of it. I’ve seen a lot of this hypocrisy with my own eyes and ears and it’s downright shocking. Many of the ‘good folks’ seem completely ignorant of their own stance even though it goes against what they claim to be preaching. It’s mind numbing just to try to keep up when the ignorance is as thing as smog on a sunny city day. It’s that kind of ignorance that leads to a lot of problems in the bible belt, including the many examples listed above.

Will the Bible Belt ever be replaced by a good set of secular suspenders? We can hope but forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.