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.
* Currently, 60% of Protestant churchgoers who report a “born-again” experience and hold a high view of the Bible live in the South, or 55% if we exclude African-Americans.
* In 1977, 54% of Midwesterners were monthly (or more) worship attenders, compared with only 37% by 2018. Catholics and Mainline Protestants accounted for most of that loss while evangelicalism mostly held steady or grew. By comparison, the South’s decline in those years was a less ruinous 58% down to 49%.
* What type of “evangelicals”? The vastly expanded flock in independent, non-denominational congregations is now estimated at twice the membership of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
Numbers aside, Williams observes that the past generation’s evangelical leadership and culture reflected the somewhat more moderate and denominational style of the Midwest, with schools, agencies and publishers prominent in frostbelt areas around Chicago and Grand Rapids. Southern California moved up in importance and now movement offices are centered in such sunny metropolitan areas as Dallas, Nashville and Orlando.
The more recent trend, both religiously and politically, is the overwhelming concentration of White evangelicals and Republicans in small-town and rural areas of the Sunbelt — while suburban turf there becomes more pluralistic.
"Born-again Christianity can easily take on the political contours of whatever cultural group embraces it,” he writes. In today’s rural South that looks “very right-wing.” While a majority of U.S. born-again Christians who are active churchgoers now live in the South, evangelicals up north appear to be gradually forming a somewhat different style of faith and politics, fragmenting an evangelical coalition that “was always more culturally diverse than many assumed.”
Toward the end of the piece, Willliams shows his hand as an adherent of evangelical theology “but not White southern evangelical politics” of the sort that has emerged so powerfully — including in the county that hosts his own campus. He observes that in this unstable era more moderate White evangelicals (especially young adults?) can “pray for the Gospel to spread in politically progressive” areas and, if in the South, consider joining Black (or Hispanic?) churches that uphold evangelical beliefs.
At this point The Guy calls attention to his own September Memo about the damage to evangelicalism from a related phenomenon, the decline and fall of once-vibrant conservative minorities within the pluralistic “mainline” Protestant denominations.
The Guy also notes that Williams (a Brown University Ph.D.) belongs on journalistic source lists (dkwillia@westga.edu and 678–839-6034) for coverage of the eternally fascinating religion angle in contemporary U.S. politics. Click here to scan his publications over the past decade or so.