The Bible belt is a state of mind that begins at the edge of town and extends either side of a line from Virginia Beach to Tulsa, encompassing the South, Texas and much of the Midwest. It contains a subset of characteristically American religious figures—not Quakers, Amish or other refugees; not emigrant establishmentarians like Catholics or Muslims; not even Elmer Gantry; but home-grown Calvinists. Its roots are the “second great awakening” on the Western frontier that ushered in the nineteenth century and the fundamentalist movement at the turn of the twentieth century Populating this state of mind are several generations of white and, more recently, African American southerners who use the Bible as a manual first for speech, then for thought and, ultimately, as a substitute for historical imagination.

It was this that H.L. Menken caricatured in the 1925 Scopes trial as America’s Bible belt. When not actively derisory, the term has always registered port-city condescension towards the interior upland of the South and Midwest, and particularly towards the centrality of the Bible to the people whose rapid settlement of America’s first West outran the educational and other institutions developed by the colonial bourgeoisie from Boston to Savannah. Unlike the religious utopianism that organized New England or the Episcopalianism of the tidewater, a religiosity of personal spirituality, Bible study and self-reliance carried early settlement beyond the colonial fringe. Such was the provincialism of Menken as to mis-recognize both its historical context and its social critique.

What arose as frontier religiosity developed as a critique of industrializing, Social Darwinist America. Mindful of community while profoundly skeptical about mass society its underlying Calvinism fostered individualism, striving, personal rather than social perfection and rejection of intermediaries that also took anti-immigrant and antiintellectual turns. Between the Scopes trial and the onset of desegregation, it became discredited on the left for social quietism and migrated to the political right, overcoming a century of suspicion of comfortable establishments and profound alienation from secular powers.

That transformation has accelerated with tensions over the modernization and increasing standardization of education since the Second World War. Turn-of-the-century battles over evolutionism have been rejoined over creationism, which is more Sunbelt than Bible belt in its embrace of the models and language of science. Political movements in Arkansas and Louisiana resulted in laws mandating “equal time” for teaching creationism alongside evolution in statefunded schools, which points to an underlying populism strong enough to overcome strong religious commitment to the separation of church and state. This migration to modernity at least as technique, is nowhere more evident than in the refinement of televangelism by Christian media preachers such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who both reach a national audience and founded alternative modern religiously based universities that bracket the historic Bible belt.