AHC: US Bible Belt located in New England

Generally speaking, people favor or oppose abortion because of the influence of secularism or lack thereof. This is true in countries besides the US as well, including ones with few Catholics or Evangelicals or even that are mostly non-Christian. I think it's a perfectly legitimate way to point out how Evangelicalism in the South has really taken off in the last 30 years.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...s-complicated/2012/05/29/gJQAjj0qyU_blog.html

But such interpretations raise the question of whether these binary, politicized labels accurately capture Americans’ nuanced views on abortion. Last summer, a major national survey by Public Religion Research Institute uncovered a surprising but critical feature of the abortion debate: 7-in-10 Americans reported that the term “pro-choice” described them somewhat well (32 percent) or very well (38 percent), and nearly two-thirds simultaneously said that the term “pro-life” described them somewhat well (31 percent) or very well (35 percent). In other words: when they were not forced to choose between one label and the other, over 4-in-10 (43 percent) Americans said that they were both “pro-choice” and “pro-life.”
These overlapping identities are present in virtually every demographic group. For example, it is true of Democrats (56 percent “pro-life”; 81 percent “pro-choice”), Independents (66 percent “pro-life”; 73 percent “pro-choice”), and Republicans (79 percent “pro-life”; 52 percent “pro-choice”).

Among religious groups, with the exception of white evangelical Protestants, solid majorities of every major religious group say both terms describe them at least somewhat well. And even in the case of white evangelical Protestants, although two-thirds (67 percent) say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases and 8-in-10 (80 percent) say that the term “pro-life” describes them at least somewhat well, nearly half (48 percent) nonetheless identify as “pro-choice.”

That hardly sounds like something as neat and tidy as "the influence of secularism makes people pro-choice."

I'd be happy to accept that evangelism in the South has taken off in the last thirty years, but trying to tie attitudes on abortion to attitudes on secularism isn't very convincing.
 
That most people will agree with focus-grouped buzzwords doesn't really have any relevance to the very strong negative correlation between religiosity and support for legal abortion. Are you seriously denying such a correlation exists?
 
That most people will agree with focus-grouped buzzwords doesn't really have any relevance to the very strong negative correlation between religiosity and support for legal abortion. Are you seriously denying such a correlation exists?


http://www.gallup.com/poll/22222/religion-politics-inform-americans-views-abortion.aspx

So Republicans are more likely to opposite legal abortion than Democrats even when both have equally low religiosity, and even highly religious Democrats are more in favor of legal abortion than indifferent Republicans are.

That hardly suggests that you can rely on someone's religiosity on its own to determine their feelings on legal abortion, even if other factors being equal it exercises A role.

So I do seriously argue you cannot judge the religiosity of the South at the time of Roe vs. Wade simply by responses to the decision.

Not with the broad gap between Republican and Democratic attitudes of equal religiosity. If it was something we could simply judge by religiosity, they'd be a lot closer together.
 
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http://www.gallup.com/poll/22222/religion-politics-inform-americans-views-abortion.aspx

So Republicans are more likely to opposite legal abortion than Democrats even when both have equally low religiosity, and even highly religious Democrats are more in favor of legal abortion than indifferent Republicans are.

That hardly suggests that you can rely on someone's religiosity on its own to determine their feelings on legal abortion, even if other factors being equal it exercises A role.

So I do seriously argue you cannot judge the religiosity of the South at the time of Roe vs. Wade simply by responses to the decision.

Not with the broad gap between Republican and Democratic attitudes of equal religiosity. If it was something we could simply judge by religiosity, they'd be a lot closer together.

Do you understand the meaning of the word "correlation?" I am saying that there is a strong correlation between religiosity and attitudes towards abortion, which your link supports, by the way. Obviously, more than one factor can correlate with another. For example, both religiosity and party affiliation correlate with support for legal abortion. There are also correlations with religious fundamentalism and also racial groups, which I strongly suspect would almost entirely erase the party differential if taken into account.

Edit: This is also completely derailing this thread. If you want to continue this rather ridiculous line of dispute, I'd suggest you switch to PMs.
 
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Historically the South had actually been considerably more secular than the North, a trend which lasted a lot longer than many people know (for example, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution praising(!!!) the Roe v. Wade decision immediately following it, and most pro-lifers were Northeastern Catholics until the mid-80s or so).

I don't know if this is evidence of the South being secular in the 1970s. (The SBC is a church, after all.) The political alignment back then was simply different than it is now. The South was then only in the early stages of moving away from the Democratic Party - the vast majority of Southerners at that time still considered themselves Democrats, and the Democratic party leadership supported the Roe decision, so perhaps the SBC backed it out of habit. In any event the SBC did not stick to that position long.
 
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I don't know if this is evidence of the South being secular in the 1970s. (The SBC is a church, after all.) The political alignment back then was simply different than it is now. The South was then only in the early stages of moving away from the Democratic Party - the vast majority of Southerners at that time still considered themselves Democrats, and the Democratic party leadership supported the Roe decision, so perhaps the SBC backed it out of habit. In any event the SBC did not stick to that position long.
Also, though, there was a huge conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention during the '80's. Before then, its upper leadership was fairly theologically liberal even though most of the members were conservative; I'm not at all surprised to hear of them praising Roe, but that doesn't say anything about the members. (If you're interested, here's a short book by Paige Patterson, one of the conservatives instrumental in the resurgence.)
 

katchen

Banned
Getting back to the original challenge, the US's original Bible Belt wasn't very far from New England. It was in western New York State, concentrated between Lake Erie and the Finger Lakeshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burned-over_district. In fact, looking at the map you gave us, we can still see echoes of that religiousity in terms of religious participation in some of upper New York State (why there is so much religious participation in the Adairondack counties of New York up against Vermont, I don't know). It might not be that difficult to keep New England religious if that religious fervor can be made to spread back east.
 
Historically the South had actually been considerably more secular than the North, a trend which lasted a lot longer than many people know (for example, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution praising(!!!) the Roe v. Wade decision immediately following it, and most pro-lifers were Northeastern Catholics until the mid-80s or so).

I'm not so sure about that. Sure, the SBC may have happened to have been run by moderates at that point in history, I can't argue with that.

But this trend you speak of ended a lot earlier than you seem to suggest: Certainly, by 1920, at the latest(and this could have ended far, far earlier as well, with the right PODs: how about the 1840s or thereabouts?), the South was the definitely more religious of the two, on top of the more socially conservative region.....which usually went hand-in-hand down there, at least as far as whites were concerned.

The two factors which broke the back of the "great moral enterprise" of WAS Protestantism/neo-Puritanism were mass Catholic (and Jewish) immigration in the 19th century, which meant that WASPs were soon a minority in the major cities and later even in the states they founded, while the other was Prohibition, the bridge too far which convinced many of the folly of letting religious beliefs guide government principles. Stop the former a few decades prior to 1924 and you probably also get rid of the latter, since Prohibition was essentially a thinly-veiled nativist/anti-Catholic measure.

True, and it also probably helped seal in the already changing milieu as well.
 
That beg the question and a possible way... Afro-americans.

With all the history of afro-americans and all they suffered from, maybe they instead become quite NOT religious. The religious excuses for slavery and all, perhaps, could be one factor. So, have whites be more religious.

Maybe, since they are mostly in southern states, it changes where the 'bible belt' is.
 
That beg the question and a possible way... Afro-americans.

With all the history of afro-americans and all they suffered from, maybe they instead become quite NOT religious. The religious excuses for slavery and all, perhaps, could be one factor. So, have whites be more religious.

Maybe, since they are mostly in southern states, it changes where the 'bible belt' is.

That's one idea, but it would seem hard for that to happen, as downtrodden ethnic groups are often very religious (consider the Irish, and the Québécois before the 1960s).
 
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