The Southern United States includes the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. Though in slight decline, according to Pew Research, the Christian proportion of the population of the South was 76% in 2014, still higher than that of any other US region. Its makeup is predominantly Evangelical Protestant, with the vast majority of the country's Baptist churches, including the country's second-largest denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention. Largely due to a burgeoning Hispanic population, the South has become home to 27% of the country's Catholics, more than any other region. Areas with a high concentration of Catholics include south-east Florida, southern Louisiana and throughout Texas, especially along its border with Mexico. However, the South is still overwhelmingly Protestant. Nearly 100 years ago the South (excluding areas in its south-west and the southern-most part of Florida) was given the epithet of the ‘Bible Belt’, a designation that remains relevant today. The Bible Belt denotes not only the preponderance of religious affiliation but also cultural-political affiliation with conservative Protestant Evangelicalism.

Historical Background

Landing in Florida in 1538, European explorers violently conquered Indigenous American peoples, invoking Catholicism to rationalise their cruelty. It was here that amassing land, wealth and power at the expense of Indigenous American and African peoples became intertwined with Christianity in the South. In the hands of land-hungry Europeans, Christianity was a tool for justifying land expropriation and the exploitation of labour for centuries. Although Southern Christian history has often been studied through white lenses, its multi-ethnicity and global impact are of increasing interest in academia. As European Christianity became the predominant religious expression in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its diversity influenced the US South profoundly. For instance, while Catholicism in the colonial South was influenced mostly by Spanish explorers, its lasting imprint is more Irish, due to the arrival of immigrants in the nineteenth century.

The Eighteenth Century

The brand of Christianity that would come to distinguish the Southern Church emerged with the First Great Awakening (1730s–1740s). This highly evangelical and individualistic expression of the faith developed amidst widespread isolation and chaos. It emphasised the weight of personal sin and consequent likelihood of hell, intending to inspire urgent interest in salvation and resultant confessions of faith.