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A journalist coined ‘the Bible Belt’ 100 years ago – it’s been oversimplifying the South ever since
A journalist coined ‘the Bible Belt’ 100 years ago – it’s been oversimplifying the South ever since. Originally published by The Conversation.
By John Hayes, Associate Professor of History, Augusta University · 2026-09-09T13:33:56.798Z
Even when the phrase was coined, the 'Bible Belt' image depicted just a portion of the region's culture. John Hayes “Look No Further!” a billboard on the side of the highway beckons, drawing my gaze toward the red cover of a Bible. “You Are Worthy of Redemption!” Not far away, another sign urges me to “Keep Christ in Christmas.” Then farther down the road a third appears: “Jesus: COMING SOON” its bright colors announce. Signs like these are familiar to me: I’m a historian who studies the U.S. South https://www.augusta.edu/faculty/directory/view.php?id=JHAYES22 and lives in it. I know how easily they can evoke the South – or, I should say, a certain image of it. As that image pictures it, the South is “the Bible Belt”: a place where people are really religious, and, as a result, socially and politically conservative. Indeed, in this year of midterm elections, you’re almost certain to hear pundits invoke “the Bible Belt” as shorthand explanation for Southern political behavior. The phrase has been around for a century https://religionnews.com/2015/07/21/how the scopes trial created the bible belt/ . Its endurance, however – and the “evidence” behind it today – could use some serious scrutiny. I spotted those roadside signs, for example, in Ontario, Canada, a thousand miles from what anybody would think of as the South. Of the many things said about the South over the years, “Bible Belt” is the cliché that just won’t die. Skewering the South “Bible Belt” entered the lexicon in 1924, in the pages of The American Mercury https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015030748548&seq=306&q1=belt , a magazine co founded by H.L. Mencken. Based in Baltimore, at the upper edge of the South, Mencken was one of the nation’s most prominent journalists https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2014/novemberdecember/feature/h l mencken boy oh boy in the decades between the world wars. The acerbic satirist had skewered the South in his much discussed 1919 essay “ The Sahara of the Bozart https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/53467/pg53467 images.html Page 136 ,” depicting it as a vast cultural wasteland. In 1925, he closely covered the Dayton, Tennessee, trial of biology teacher John T. Scopes, who had been charged with violating the state’s law against teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution https://theconversation.com/1 in 4 americans reject evolution a century after the scopes monkey trial spotlighted the clash between science and religion 258163 . Mencken famously lampooned it as the Scopes “monkey trial https://famous trials.com/scopesmonkey/2132 menckenaccount .” He coined “Bible Belt” in his regular column of short news items, then employed the phrase routinely. By it he meant a place where two Protestant groups, the Baptists and the Methodists, dominated not just religious life https://southernspaces.org/2004/religion and us south/ , but also the mores of the whole society. The whole region, Mencken argued, was a Baptist Methodist stranglehold where fun and free thought were banished. Whose Christianity? It’s true that in the early 20th century, Baptists and Methodists dominated the South in a way that they didn’t anywhere else https://search.worldcat.org/title/515814 . To trace the bloc of states where over 50% of religious congregation members were Baptist or Methodist was to trace the region’s boundaries with uncanny precision. But beneath commonalities, religious life was divided by both race and class. Black Baptists and Methodists met in their own churches: autonomous institutions that came to be known, collectively, as “ the Black church https://theconversation.com/a brief history of the black churchs diversity and its vital role in american political history 197511 .” The region’s poor Christians drew on inherited traditions and their own hardships to craft a folk version of Baptist Methodist faith https://uncpress.org/9781469635323/hard hard religion/ – what I’ve written about as “hard, hard religion.”
Members of the Primitive Baptist Church in Morehead, Ky., attend a creek baptism in 1940. Marion Post Wolcott/Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons These religious divisions paralleled political ones. Through techniques like poll taxes and literacy tests, Southern states severely restricted the franchise, effectively stripping Black https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil rights history project/articles and essays/voting rights/ and poor white https://constitutioncenter.org/the constitution/amendments/amendment xxiv/interpretations/157 the twenty fourth amendment by deborah archer and derek muller Southerners of their voting rights. The social order that Mencken described as the Bible Belt, then, expressed the culture of elite and middle class white people, the ones with the political power to enforce it. “Bible Belt” joined other phrases that expressed how the early 20th century South differed from national patterns. Amid industrializing, urbanizing America, the South was “the Cotton Belt,” https://reader.library.cornell.edu/docviewer/digital?id=chla2829610 page/153/mode/1up/search/odum the world’s leading cotton producer, with a predominantly rural, agricultural population. Political contests marked the nation, but in the “Solid South,” the Democratic Party monopolized politics https://websites.umich.edu/%7Elawrace/votetour8.htm . With high poverty, low wages and limited capital, the South was the prosperous nation’s “ No. 1 economic problem https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/message the conference economic conditions the south ,” as President Franklin Roosevelt put it in 1938. And the violent racial oppression of the “Jim Crow South” https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/origins.htm was what many Black Southerners eagerly fled when doors of opportunity opened in other regions.
H.L. Mencken’s scathing description of Southern society cemented a hard to shake stereotype. John Hayes A new South A century later, so much has changed. Most Southerners, like most Americans, live in suburbs and work in a service economy https://statisticalatlas.com/region/South/Industries . Republicans hold a political majority in the region https://www.pewresearch.org/short reads/2021/02/11/u s senate has fewest split delegations since direct elections began/ , but they have to compete for it. Southern based corporations like Walmart, McKesson and Exxon Mobil are in the top 10 of the Fortune 500 https://fortune.com/ranking/fortune500/ . And what legal scholar Michelle Alexander https://www.nytimes.com/by/michelle alexander calls “ the New Jim Crow https://newjimcrow.com/ ” – the system of mass incarceration that disproportionately criminalizes people of color – is not confined to the South, but nationwide. Old lines of difference between the South and the rest of the nation have faded. So have the once common nicknames that described them – with the stubborn exception of “Bible Belt.” A quick glance at the news shows its persistence, with headlines discussing “ The Bible Belt’s Beliefs About Women https://www.forbes.com/sites/civicnation/2020/03/05/be careful little ears what you hear reflecting on the bible belts beliefs about women/ ,” or describing one Arkansas town as “ the Bible Belt’s LGBTQ Oasis https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/29/us/eureka springs lgbtq arkansas town cec .” The cultural issues reported in stories like these are no doubt real, but framing them as expressions of an enduring Southern Bible Belt seems to imagine religion as unchanging, timeless. In reality, both the region’s people and their religion are changing dramatically. More Black, Latino and biracial people live in the South than in any other part of the country. White people make up just 52.5% of the regional population https://censusreporter.org/profiles/02000US3 south region/ . The rapidly changing South is dynamic, second only to the West in demographic diversity. This shapes religion, too. As the 2023 2024 Pew Religious Landscape Study https://www.pewresearch.org/religious landscape study/racial and ethnic composition/hispanic/? gl=1 6gpwyu up MQ.. gs MQ..&gclid=CjwKCAjw rTUBhAiEiwADv8gBOSq2PH0AFbLjx60jl1nZp3NG IXpZTMJ4vQQ60o EML1PsEa123RoCN8EQAvD BwE&gbraid=0AAAAA ddO9EZ3uFThCgY51at2emqyCQSt showed, Black and Latino Americans are more likely than white Americans to identify as Christian. The faith of Black Southerners predominantly Baptist and Latino Southerners predominantly Catholic is a reminder that the South is not a religious monolith. Meanwhile, white Baptists and Methodists are not the force they used to be. Their main institutions, the Southern Baptist Convention and the United Methodist Church, have been declining in membership for decades https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the aftermath of the schism in the . The same Pew study showed that a mere 12% of Southerners identify with either denomination https://www.pewresearch.org/religious landscape study/region/south/? gl=1 1woexxd up MQ.. gs MQ..&gclid=CjwKCAjw rTUBhAiEiwADv8gBOSq2PH0AFbLjx60jl1nZp3NG IXpZTMJ4vQQ60o EML1PsEa123RoCN8EQAvD BwE&gbraid=0AAAAA ddO9EZ3uFThCgY51at2emqyCQSt . From ‘Bible Belt’ to ‘culture wars’ Internally, both denominations have had major splits on whether women can be leaders https://theconversation.com/southern baptists may have rejected a constitutional amendment opposing female pastors but that does not mean they are changing their views on womens leadership in church 232541 and whether to recognize LGBTQ identities https://www.bbc.com/news/world us canada 68939591 . Such splits reflect divides that sociologist James Davison Hunter https://sociology.as.virginia.edu/people/james hunter diagnosed in 1991 as “ Culture Wars https://search.worldcat.org/title/27357156 .” Consider his book’s subtitle, though: “The Struggle to Define America.” In these culture wars, the battlefield is the nation. The fighters are not regions, but political factions. What they’re fighting over is the legacy of the social movements of the 1960s https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/opinion/sunday/chicago protests 1968 culture war.html : civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, the environment. The fact that the culture wars for America can be found in the contemporary South is a testament to just how much the once distinct region participates in the dynamics of national life. Those wars may sound louder in the South than elsewhere, but that’s not the expression of a changeless Bible Belt; rather, it is the historical pattern that reactions are often strongest where change is most pronounced.
John Hayes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.