American Religious Fervour Switch.

New England and Virginia were both settled with a decade of each other by very different groups. New England by extremely pious "Pilgrims" motivated by religion and Virginia by people more motivated by making some money. While the settlers of Virginia were obviously very pious by 21st century standards, everyone was in the 17th century, they were practically agnostics compared to the Puritans in New England. Now sometime between then and now there was a switch, the Southern states which can trace themselves back to Virginia are far more pious than the New England states. I'm not sure when this switch was but can it be prevented?

So the challenge is this, come up with a scenario where the area that is New England is generally regarded as much more pious than the South. The only restrictions is that the Southern states have to trace themselves back to Virginia and the New England states back to the Puritans. No wiping them out and replacing them with someone else.
 
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Have the various secular pieties of the day recognized as varieties of Unitarian Universalism and or Quakerism?

New England and Virginia were both settled with a decade of each other by very different groups. New England by extremely pious "Pilgrims" motivated by religion and Virginia by people more motivated by making some money. While the settlers of Virginia were obviously very pious by 21st century standards, everyone was in the 17th century they were practically agnostics compared to the Puritans in New England. Now sometime between then and now there was a switch, the Southern states which can trace themselves back to Virginia are far more pious than the New England states. I'm not sure when this switch was but can it be prevented?

So the challenge is this, come up with a scenario where the area that is New England is generally regarded as much more pious than the South. The only restrictions is that the Southern states have to trace themselves back to Virginia and the New England states back to the Puritans. No wiping them out and replacing them with someone else.
 
To answer your question, its all about the economics.

VA had, by a far margin, more economic worth than New England at the time of the early colonizations. Thusly, in order to harvest tobacco and make money, a joint-stock company got together a bunch of second and third sons and went to VA to make some money.

Contrast that with NE, a colony founded without any economic goals, founded by religious extremists fleeing their homeland. They had no economic motives, only cries of "New Jerusalem" and some other Puritan catchphrases.

It is also climactic. Roanoke failed in part because VA was a malarial swamp. It was far easier to settle up north than down south, and the Puritan population would have died of disease if they had tried settling in the Chesapeake.
 
I suspect it's because Virginia was largely settled by Anglicans, Massachusetts was largely settled by nonconformists who wanted to get away from England and the Netherlands, and Rhode Island, Providence, and Connecticut were largely settled by nonconformists who wanted to get out from under Massachusetts.

And, especially after that early history, most of these nonconformists found it better to limit the role of religion in politics than to establish too large a role for some other religion in politics.
 
Basically you want something like Maryland and New England switched. Maryland was in theory to be another religious colony, this time for Catholics. In reality the landowners were catholic, but the workers and majority of the population was protestant. It had a very merchant bent from the beginning. However, Puritans did immigrate enmass to Maryland, such that they revolted in 1689 and established a Purtian government that ruled for quite a long time.
 
To answer your question, its all about the economics.

VA had, by a far margin, more economic worth than New England at the time of the early colonizations. Thusly, in order to harvest tobacco and make money, a joint-stock company got together a bunch of second and third sons and went to VA to make some money.

Contrast that with NE, a colony founded without any economic goals, founded by religious extremists fleeing their homeland. They had no economic motives, only cries of "New Jerusalem" and some other Puritan catchphrases.

It is also climactic. Roanoke failed in part because VA was a malarial swamp. It was far easier to settle up north than down south, and the Puritan population would have died of disease if they had tried settling in the Chesapeake.

I fully understand why the initial settlers of New England were more religious than those of Virginia what I'm asking for is does anyone have any ideas how to keep them that way.
 
It seems to me that New England secularized because a merchantile, trade-and-fishing based economy arose, fairly early on. To quote a character from London, by Edward Rutherfurd, explaining one character's disillusionment with New England and why she returned to London, her nephew says "I came here to fish, woman, not pray". Meanwhile, in Virginia a plantation economy based on the oppression of the masses arose, not surprising seeing as all the First Families were aristocratic parasites. Therefore they used religion as a means to keep the masses in check, not unlike their ancestors had for generations back in Europe. In order to keep New England the home of religious nuts and Virginia a secular trade colony you have to change that.
 
It seems to me that New England secularized because a merchantile, trade-and-fishing based economy arose, fairly early on. To quote a character from London, by Edward Rutherfurd, explaining one character's disillusionment with New England and why she returned to London, her nephew says "I came here to fish, woman, not pray". Meanwhile, in Virginia a plantation economy based on the oppression of the masses arose, not surprising seeing as all the First Families were aristocratic parasites. Therefore they used religion as a means to keep the masses in check, not unlike their ancestors had for generations back in Europe. In order to keep New England the home of religious nuts and Virginia a secular trade colony you have to change that.

Are families with last names like Carter really "aristocratic parasites" prior to becoming planter pseudo-aristocracy?
 
I fully understand why the initial settlers of New England were more religious than those of Virginia what I'm asking for is does anyone have any ideas how to keep them that way.

I doubt either group is more or less religious than the other. It's just that one group's approach to religion is more visible than the other's. And one group's approach emphasizes personal conscience, so there is not as much room for community pressure, and there is more room for personal skepticism.
 
I doubt either group is more or less religious than the other.

No, simply wrong. The Puritans who settled in New England were more religious than the adventurers who settled in Virginia. Those who went to Virginia. while religious by our standards, were driven by material goals, the Puritans were religious fanatics who went out to establish a "Godly Commonwealth" and "New Jerusalem".
 
Rural areas with low migration are always going to be more conservative than urban areas with high migration.

It's difficult to switch the economics: you could get more immigration to the South if slavery never takes off, but not sure how you keep New England rural. The soil's just too poor for it to really be a farming society.
 
This is hard. As has been pointed out, New England just didn't have the climate or soil to really be a farming society-even thought it was founded by a bunch of hyper-religious Calvinists, its location pretty much ensured that it would become an urbanized, cosmopolitan trading area-a state not really compatible with maintaining religious fervor. Furthermore, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, New England had, culturally and intellectually, something of a backlash against Puritanism, and became the birthplace of the Unitarian and Transcendentalist movements, which would be considered religiously liberal even today. In the 19th century, New England's urban prosperity attracted a lot of foreign immigration-much of it Catholic-that pretty much put the final nail into the Puritan "City on a Hill".

The South, by contrast, was founded as a (compared to New England) relatively secular, socially stratified plantation society. However, the South's plantation economy was pretty much destroyed in the latter half of the 19th century-first by the Civil War, then by falling cotton prices. What was left was, poor, underdeveloped, underindustrialized, rural, and largely dominated by small-scale agriculture, of the kind that doesn't tend to produce that much of a long term profit. It was this environment-not before-in which the Bible Belt we all know and love came into existence.

And really, none of this is all that suprising. Economics change, regions change, cultures change. 300 years is more than enough time for cultural traits like popular religiousity to reverse themselves. Furthermore, I'm not sure if you can prevent the urbanization of New England or the collapse of the South's plantation economy-no Civil War would help for the latter, but even then, much of Latin America had similar economic systems, and their track record was not all that great. Economies that depend on exporting two or three agricultural products are at the mercy of the commodities market for those prices-if your whole economy depends on selling cotton to the world, and the cotton price halves, you're pretty much screwed. Sooner or later this would have caught up with the South and, Civil War or no, it wouldn't have been good.
 
No, simply wrong. The Puritans who settled in New England were more religious than the adventurers who settled in Virginia. Those who went to Virginia. while religious by our standards, were driven by material goals, the Puritans were religious fanatics who went out to establish a "Godly Commonwealth" and "New Jerusalem".

No, you misread me. Of course, one group was more religious then. Each group was largely self-selected then. Neither group is nearly so self-selected now. So I'm skeptical that either group is more religious now.
 
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