Bible Belt

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Image:Map of USA highlighting Bible Belt.png

A Bible Belt is an area in which Christian Evangelical Protestantism is a pervasive or dominant part of the culture. In particular it is the region where the Southern Baptist Convention denomination is strongest. It covers a number of southern Middle-West and Southern states in the United States; Bible belts can also be found in other countries, including Canada and some parts of Europe. The name is derived from the (perceived) overriding importance of the Christian Bible among Evangelical Christian thought and practice.

In the U.S., the stronghold of the Bible Belt is typically seen as the South, due to the colonial foundations of Protestantism in the culture of the region. The major forms were of Tidewater Anglicanism after the Church of England and Appalachia Presbyterianism after the Church of Scotland.

1 Geography
2 Geographical extent
3 Political, Cultural Context
4 Reference
5 See also
6 External links

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Geography

Although exact boundaries do not exist, it is generally considered to cover much of the area stretching from Texas in the southwest, northwest to Kansas, northeast to part of Virginia, and southeast to northern Florida.

Several locations are (sometimes humorously) occasionally referred to as the "Buckle of the Bible Belt." Nashville, Tennessee, headquarters for numerous church groups, is probably the place more frequently termed the "Buckle of the Bible Belt." Many other locations have been so termed, including Greenville, South Carolina (home of Bob Jones University); Tulsa, Oklahoma (home of Oral Roberts University); Dayton, Tennessee (site of the Scopes Monkey Trial); Abilene, Texas (home of Abilene Christian University); Dallas, Texas (home of the conservative Dallas Theological Seminary); Fort Worth, Texas (home of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary); Cleveland, Tennessee (home of Lee University and the Church of God International Offices); Springfield, Missouri (home of the Assemblies of God); Lynchburg, Virginia (home of Liberty University); Virginia Beach, Virginia (homes of Regent University and the 700 Club with Pat Robertson); Asheville, North Carolina (home of Billy Graham and his [Center]).

In Canada, the term is also sometimes used to describe several disparate regions which have a higher than average level of church attendance. These include the majority of rural southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, parts of southern Manitoba, the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia and the Saint John River Valley of New Brunswick.

In Australia, the term usually refers to tracts within individual cities, for example the north-western suburbs of Sydney focusing on Baulkham Hills and the north-eastern suburbs of Adelaide focusing on Paradise, Modbury and Golden Grove.

The Netherlands has a Bible Belt (Bijbelgordel) as well, stretching from Zeeland to Overijssel.

In Sweden, there is a Bible Belt covering the area around the city of Jönköping, with a particular high concentration of non-conformists (especially pentecostals and congregationalists).

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Geographical extent

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Tweedie (1978) defines the Bible belt in terms of the audience for religious television. He finds two belts, one more eastern that stretches from northern Florida through Alabama, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, and into Virginia, and another that is more western, moving from central Texas to the Dakotas, but concentrated in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Mississippi.

In terms of demographics, the belt may in fact be most accurately described as extending westward to include most of West Texas and Eastern New Mexico, and perhaps even farther into New Mexico. The accuracy of this expanded schema, however, rests on the question of whether demographic proportion of evangelical Christians (or "fundamentalist Christians") is sufficient to include an area as being part of the Belt, or whether other cultural characteristics are necessary. Even with the presently accepted boundaries (as indicated on the map in this article), it is possible to theorize that the Bible Belt could be divided into two or more sub-regions, at least one of which could include the westernmost section -- including Texas -- as being distinctive from the deep South and most of the Southeastern United States. It is possible that the extent of the Bible Belt has grown in recent decades, expanding northward and westward; indeed, evangelical Christianity has grown significantly in the United States in recent years. It is also possible, however, that populations in these areas more recently recognized as heavily evangelical have not substantially changed but were not previously acknowledged as forming part of the Belt.

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Political, Cultural Context

The term Bible Belt is used mainly, but not uniquely, by detractors of or negative anti-Protestant commentators about region that is very religious, and allows religion to spill over into what the commentators believe are inappropriate areas, such as politics, science and education. . The term was coined by H.L. Mencken. Reporting on the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee to the Baltimore Evening Sun on July 15, 1925, Mencken writes of the region as "this bright, shining, buckle of the Bible belt".The term is not strictly regional—like flyover country or the more positive heartland—but is often used to describe the middle of the country in a way that diminishes that region. Politically, the term is often a shorthand to describe cultural conservatives whose beliefs in part stem from the Christian Bible, or those associated (by fact or perception) with the political Religious Right.

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Reference

Randall Balmer; Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism Baylor University Press, 2004
Heatwole, C.A. "The Bible Belt; a problem of regional definition" Journal of Geography (1978) 77; 50-5
Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Knopf, 1997)
Chris C. Park; Sacred Worlds: An Introduction to Geography and Religion Routledge, 1994
Tweedie, S.W. (1978) Viewing the Bible Belt. Journal of Popular Culture 11; 865-76

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