Regional Homogeneity Amid National Diversity

While diversity and even pluralism are the hallmarks of the contemporary religious landscape viewed nationally, local and regional realities often appear very differently. That is to say, if the national story of American religion is diverse and pluralistic, local communities often look much more homogeneous. In American religious geography, locale and region matter. Environment matters too, perhaps most especially in the American West, where the sheer grandeur of the natural geography has always invited a religious language to describe it, as Lynn Ross-Bryant details in “Religion and the Environment.”
Atlases of American religion document this historic pattern of local and region- al homogeneity set amid national diversity. We emphasize the point about local- ism and regionalism in American religious geography precisely because it is too often forgotten in discussions of pluralism. America is a pluralist society, and yet historically most Americans have not lived in pluralist regions or towns, or even neighborhoods. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, but the exceptions high- light the rule. Not surprisingly, religious folk typically tend to overestimate the size and influence of their own particular religious group, precisely because that’s mostly who they encounter in religious settings. Even earlier historians of American religion, largely trained in New England colleges and universities, focused almost exclusively on New England Protestantism.
Regional homogeneity amid national diversity is a direct heritage from the pat- terns of colonial settlement, the practices of overland migration, and the recent trends of immigration. In other words, immigration and migration patterns through American history often have reinforced the predominance of one religious group or another on a street or in a neighborhood, in a particular city, in a state, or throughout a region. It is no accident that Utah in general and Salt Lake City and its environs in particular are called “Zion” by many Latter-day Saints, no more so than Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon is chock full of Lutherans and that “Southie” in Boston is as synonymous with Irish Catholicism as the North End of Boston is with Italian Catholicism; suburban Colorado Springs with conservative white evangelicals; Dearborn, Michigan, with Muslims; Amite County, Mississippi, with black Baptists; or blocks and blocks of Chicago with Polish Catholics. The list could go on indefinitely, but the point is clear: most Americans historically have not experienced religious pluralism in their everyday lives. Instead, they have tended mostly to live and worship with those who look, live, and worship like them.
In terms of regional patterns of religious identification, the South may serve as the best example. According to the American Religious Identification Survey

(ARIS), the South stands as having the highest percentage of churchgoers within the region who affiliate themselves with Baptists (23.5 percent), Presbyterian (3 percent), and black Protestant (14 percent, well over half of whom are Baptists). No other region comes close in terms of Baptist affiliation statistics. The Evangelical Belt of the South is, in very many counties, effectively a Baptist Belt as well. One may compare the presence of Baptists in the region with the figure of 5.7 percent of Baptists in the region of New England and a national low of 3.8 percent in the Coastal Northwest. Moreover, in the ARIS data, the South has the lowest count of those who responded “no religion” when asked generally about their religious beliefs and affiliations (10 percent in the region), and nearly the lowest count for white Catholics (9.7 percent of churchgoers in the region).
This is not to suggest that evangelical Protestantism has a uniform dominance across the South. On the contrary, evangelical Protestant adherents as a percent- age of the population are heavily concentrated in particular regions and counties, numbering especially heavily in a broad swath that cuts directly through the historic cotton country and some upcountry regions of the Old South. This is why the term “Evangelical Belt” is apt, for Evangelical Protestant dominance measured by county does look very much like a belt when mapped on a county-by-county basis (albeit with a considerable belly overhang in regions of the Upper South).
A contrast of two southern states in 2000 makes this point clearly. In Mississippi that year, Baptist adherents (excluding historically African American Protestants) numbered 34 percent of the total population, and historically African American Protestants accounted for another 29 percent of residents of the Magnolia State. Just over 16 percent of Mississippians were “unaffiliated” or “uncounted.” Jews existed in too small a number to form even a 1 percent slice on the pie chart. Some counties of Mississippi actually registered 0 percent reporting “unaffiliated” or “uncounted.” In Amite County, Mississippi, for example, 44 percent of the population described itself as Baptist, and 42 percent were adherents to historically black churches. With Methodists at 5 percent and Mormons racking up a surprisingly high 4 percent of the county’s population, Amite County stood as one of the most religious counties in the entire country, with virtually every individual recorded as being an adherent of some religious tradition.
In Virginia, by distinct contrast, almost 50 percent of the population surveyed in 2000 went into the “unaffiliated or uncounted” category—a larger percent- age than the country as a whole. Baptist adherents, excluding historically African American churches, counted for 12 percent of the state, a figure approximating the national average (in contrast to much of the rest of the South). The religiosity of Amite County, Mississippi, stood off against the relative indifference of Albermarle County, Virginia. The county that includes Charlottesville and the University of Virginia as its centerpiece ranked unusually high, by either regional or national standards, in the category of “unaffiliated or uncounted,” almost 64 percent of its population. Baptist adherents made up only 8 percent of the population, and black Protestants just 3 percent. On the whole, Albermarle County looked in 2000 more like the Pacific Northwest or other regions of high levels of indifference than it did most counties in the South.
In short, the South’s religiosity is relatively high, but varies considerably by region. There is a clear “historically black Protestant belt,” and one equally clear for an Evangelical Belt. Mapping the two together, one finds an almost exact parallel in the Deep South states to the historic region of southern staples: cotton and tobacco. The Evangelical and Black Protestant belts cut a wide swath through the Deep South and then, nearing the coastlines and reaching into the northern half of Virginia or the lower half of Florida, fade from view almost entirely.
Recent trends in immigration (explored further in Roberto R. Treviño’s “Reli- gion, Ethnicity, and the Immigrant Experience”) may spell a gradual diminishing of these historically homogeneous locales and neighborhoods. The flood of Latino migration to historically white and black Protestant towns in the South serves as one example. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees just north of the capitol in Oklahoma City, the influx of Middle Easterners seeking opportunity in Michigan towns, Hmong migrants fishing in the lakes of Minnesota, Cambodian refugees shucking oysters on the Gulf Coast, and Latino laborers staffing the car- pet factories in Dalton, Georgia, serve as examples.
The challenge for the American religious future is whether heightened diversity within particular communities, as opposed to pluralism when averaged out over a national scale, will lead to a peaceable kingdom or increase suspicion. The historic repression of minorities, and minority faiths, would not seem to augur well in that regard, nor does the racial profiling of Arabic- or Middle Eastern–looking peoples after September 11, 2001. For much of American his- tory, though, de facto diversity has been corrosive of the most extreme forms of intolerance. In this sense, perhaps America yet can live up to its pluralist promise. The final essay in this volume, Jane Smith’s “Islam in America,” provides reason for hope that the pluralist promise is capacious enough to extend even to the most recent immigrant groups, who practice a religious faith reviled and slandered by many Americans.

We hope this brief exploration focusing on the paradoxes and contradictions of the American religious experience will serve to introduce readers to the richness of study in this field. Americans historically have been, and remain today, among the most religious people of the Western world. Certainly, the religiosity of Americans stands in striking contrast to the relatively low rates of religious adherence (and interest) in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and most of Europe. But the point goes beyond measuring rates of religious adherence or church membership, for Americans use religious language in a casual way and live in a culture suffused with religious themes. The free market of religion in the United States, protected by the Constitution and practiced in the daily spiritual quests of Americans, means that groups use persuasion to attract and hold converts. Religious traditions in America coexist in an environment of toleration and competition, of entrepreneurial drive and theological innovation, of diversity and multiplicity.
We hope this book may be successful in introducing the reader to the broad contours of religion in American history, in providing resources and guides for students and others, and in paving the way for further inquiry.