Daniel K. Williams, a University of West Georgia historian, is gathering string for an eventual book about the scenario he described last week in a Patheos.com posting with this headline: “The Southernization of American Evangelicalism (and American Christianity.”
Well, make that Protestant Southernization. Catholicism is thin on the ground across most points South, although growing in some (Diocese of Charlotte, N.C., now has 500,000 members).
Though “mainline” Protestant churches do better down yonder than in other regions, as the title announces Williams focuses on a nationwide reconfiguration of the evangelical movement. Evangelicalism has become the largest and most dynamic sector in American religion, continually evolving, growing here and slumping there, and divided in various ways.
U.S. politics is always drenched in religious trends and in the case of evangelicalism the faith is thoroughly enmeshed with the Donald Trumpified Republican Party of 2015-2024.
Williams’ geographic picture is that while Christianity has sagged in the Northeast the Midwest, once the heartland of evangelical influence as long emphasized by Williams’ fellow historians, is also fading. The Sunbelt South now controls the center.
The importance of 11 core southern states and adjacent turf that shares the same culture will not exactly amaze writers and officials who closely watch American religion. But Williams’ research pulls together numbers of note, particularly from the University of Chicago’s important General Social Survey. Items:
* A half-century ago, Americans’ rates of churchgoing barely varied by geography. Now the South, and Utah, are the only areas where half the population attends worship at least once a month.
* Among all active U.S. Protestants, Catholics and Eastern Orthodox combined, and nationwide, half are now southerners.