You can't talk about the South without
also talking about religion. The Protestant
faith in particular is huge down here. In
states in the deep south as much as 80%
of the population identifies as some
kind of Protestant. We call it the Bible
Belt for a reason. But why is the south
so Protestant? It comes down to a
combination of geographical necessity
and a new and controversial way to
understand God.
When the British settled in New England they
brought with them the Anglican faith
which was the Church of England and
would become the Episcopal Church in the
u.s. My name is Dr. Michael Altman
professor of religious studies at the
University of Alabama. Their plan is to
like we're an English colony so we need
English churches to maintain order and
so we'll just transplant The Church of
England. But the landscape was a lot
different than English countryside in
England you have like a small parish
with a church and a minister the
parishes like so if you look like
Virginia they're all settling like along
the rivers so the parishes would be
super long thin you know Geographic
spaces and you have one minister and he
could not really serve all that
area. Not to mention the church leaders
that came to the new world we're not the
best of the best.
Why am I gonna leave my cushy wonderful
job in the English countryside with my
small parish where I'm paid for to go to
what is basically like Mars like this
new world that we don't know what's
gonna happen. They're all fleeing debt or
bad marriages or bad reputation. So there
was a religious vacuum to be filled and
it was filled by people with radical
views on what a relationship with God
should be. By the time you get to the
1700s than the later just before the
Revolution, all of these other dissenting
groups there's this message that's being
picked up by Methodists and Baptists of
it's not about this being a good person
fulfilling your role in society
it's about this interior experience. The
notion of being saved was revolutionary.
So the like the go-to example is a guy
an Anglican minister named George
Whitefield preaching that you have to be...
this is where we get the language of "born-again" you
have to have this new birth experience.
This is like a new thing because the
Church of England is like, "No you get baptized,
stay with the church, do what you're
supposed to." Right. And he's saying you know
you need this experience. And it caused a
lot of problems for Anglican preachers
across the frontier. So Whitfield comes
down to the south he's making this call
for this sort of heart religion. He had
like a PR team that went ahead of him he
had these big
revival meetings with lots of people he
only had to have like one or two good
sermons so he would come into town give
this big sermon about the new birth and
then leave and then everyone look over
at the local parish pastor
and they would say "Well have
you had this experience?" and he's like
"What are you talking about this not how
it works?" so the Methodists which
dominate the early 19th century they
grow because they have circuit riders
which are these single dudes on
horseback who ride around a circuit of
churches and towns so the problem that the
Anglican Church had where they couldn't
get through the whole parish was solved
by will give him a horse and send him
out there. So the Baptist's and the
Methodists had a new kind of religion
and a new way of spreading it that the
Anglicans just couldn't compete with.
Baptists and Methodists are these
traditions that are built for rural
areas that don't require the kind of
institutional support that like
Anglicanism or the Roman Catholic Church
does. You can become a Baptist minister
in 1805 just by putting down your shovel
and declaring yourself a Baptist
minister. There's no boundaries. The
south is Protestant today because of its
rural setting at a crucial moment in the
development of a new Protestant
evangelical religion and the impact of
that shift on contemporary culture and
politics cannot be overstated. For Reckon,
I'm Ian Hoppe.
