Dispatch Faith: Why American Christianity Became Southern, by Daniel K. Williams (Ashland University; Author, Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship (2021)):
In the Deep South, more than half of adults regularly attend church, but in the Northeast, more than half never attend. The two regions seem to be mirror opposites of each other when it comes to church.
But this is a recent phenomenon. For most of American history, the Northeast—the land of the Puritans and the center of many of the revivals of the First and Second Great Awakenings—was a heavily churched region. According to Gallup polls, 69 percent of those in the northeast corridor (a region extending from Maryland to Maine) identified as church members in 1998-2000, compared to 74 percent of those in the South. But 20 years later, Gallup polls showed a 14 percentage-point difference between the regions. Only 44 percent of respondents in the Northeast claimed to be church members, compared to 58 percent of those in the South.
In other words, as hard as it may be to believe, in the late 1990s, northeastern states such as Massachusetts and New York had higher rates of church affiliation than Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee do today.
The rapid decline in church membership across the nation, along with the concomitant rise of the “nones,” has been the subject of numerous news articles, along with anxious handwringing in Christian circles. But far less attention has been paid either to the causes or effects of the recent southernization of American religion. Why has the South remained mostly religious while the Northeast has seen a huge decline in church affiliation—and what does this mean for the future of American politics and American Christianity? …
Evangelicals are the one group that has avoided the massive numerical declines that have affected mainline Protestantism and Catholicism. But evangelicalism has shifted. Over the last few years, the Pew Religious Landscape Study has shown that evangelicalism has become more strongly southern and more racially diverse. Its numbers have been sustained by an influx of Hispanics and non-whites, but it has lost ground among whites in the Midwest. …
If evangelicalism today champions a politics that is indistinguishable from that of white southern Republicans, it’s not because traditionally Midwestern evangelical institutions such as Wheaton College or Christianity Today have embraced MAGA politics (they have not). It’s rather because a majority of evangelicals now come from the South, where whites (and increasingly Hispanics) have become MAGA-supporting Republicans.
If there were a larger group of politically moderate or liberal churchgoers in the North, Christianity’s public image would be less identified with the Republican Party. But it’s now hard to find devout white Christians who are not Republicans. Today, 75 percent of white Christians who attend church services at least once a week are Republican—up from only 55 percent in 1998. …
It’s common for many people to blame white evangelicals for this, but that’s only partly correct. White evangelicals have long been disproportionately Republican—and that was almost as true in 1998 (when many Christian right leaders were leading the charge for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment) as it is today.
What has changed in the last 25 or 30 years is not primarily that a bunch of white evangelical Democrats who supported Bill Clinton and Al Gore joined the Christian right and began voting Republican. What has changed is that southern white evangelicals and their allies—who were not a majority among American Christians in the late 20th century—have now become almost the only churchgoing white Christians in America. The regional diversity that once characterized American Christianity has disappeared.
Apart from southern evangelicalism and conservative Catholicism, there are not many signs of growth for Christianity in the United States, especially among whites—which means that white Christians in the United States disproportionately hold the prevailing political beliefs of the white South and have merged those political views with their theology.
Those of us who would like to preserve a Christianity in the United States that is not allied with a particular political faction face more than an ideological battle; we face a regional challenge. If American Christianity is now disproportionately identified with only a single region and its politics, Christians who don’t want to identify with that particular regional political view will have to resolve to follow a countercultural path that may not perfectly align with either the politics of a secularized North or the Christian nationalism of a more deeply religious South.
But to those who follow Jesus Christ, that countercultural path should not surprise us. After all, the message of the gospel does not belong to a single region, even if American Christians increasingly do.
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