Oh irony...

[kickaha]

I lived in NC for a total of 10 years. The Bible Belt.

So why is it that it isn't until I live in NY that I see an ad for McDonald's 25th Annual Gospelfest?

I think the Bible Belt is misplaced - this area is much more overtly religious than NC was.

More overtly racist, too, but that's another post.

Personally, I'm starting to believe that quite a bit of the stereotype applied to the South is simple projection of local attributes no one wants to own up to.

Comments

[theevilhalf.livejournal.com]

It's that the South has more Evangelical Christians than up here. Going to church up here sometimes comes across as a habit or tradition rather than actually going because you believe.

I agree with the racism issue too. Thankfully, we don't have a problem w/it in our town - probably, because we're 98% white. Which has really taken getting used to after living in Queens nearly 7 years.

Sort of related: after living in NYC for a year, I went home to Raleigh and got together w/some old friends at one of the First Friday events on the Fayetteville St. Mall. While waiting for them to show up, I was people watching and kept getting this eerie 'somethin' ain't right' feeling. I finally figured it out - the crowd was mainly white or black and dressed like they all shopped at the same 3 stores. It was a very homogenous crowd, something I hadn't seen in over a year. Living in Queens, I had gotten used to whites being just another minority.

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

I have not been to the South (because we all know Kissimmee doesn't count), so this is probably more projection. :)

But I've observed a massive discontinuity between urban and rural Washington State--King, Pierce, and Snohomish Counties (the three counties containing the Seattle metroplex, for your readers who are unfamiliar) skew very hard to the left, to the wealthy, and to the agnostic or atheistic.

The entire rest of the state, including the eastern portions of the counties mentioned above, skew very hard the other direction. It seems reasonable to imagine that this dichotomy is causative and creates its own feedback cycle--broadly, people leave the cities to get away from the godlessness*, and flock to the cities to get away from the intolerance.

Given this, it is likely that the larger the city, and/or the more different its environment and attitudes than the surrounding rural area, the greater the chasm between the two.

I submit that the overall economic situation in the South the past hundred, hundred-fifty years or so may have led to their rurals fleeing to urban areas in the North and West, rather than to their "own" cities, on the theory that, if you're going to relocate, you might as well relocate somewhere you can find a job. This leads to the supposition that the gap between urban and rural in the South might be narrower than it is elsewhere. Which means that the gap between Southern urban areas and urban areas elsewhere is commensurately larger.

And since media concepts like "Bible Belt" are created in urban areas, and folks in urban areas tend to pay no attention to the rural areas around them at all, and minimal attention to the rural areas around other urban areas, except as a reinforcement of the prevailing attitudes of the urban areas under observation, the "Bible Belt" appellation makes perfect sense.

Alternately, it could be that of the places you've lived, it's only in New York that an event like a "Gospelfest" *requires* corporate sponsorship. (And since this idea only occurred to me *after* I put together the preceding line of "reasoning", we can only conclude that Occam is a bitch. :) )

*And here I mean "godlessness" to be a wildcard for all the liberalities and diversities and lifestyle choices that draw one group of people to the cities and drive another away.

[franktheavenger.livejournal.com]

Honestly in the NE I think it's more class-based than anything. You go to church not because you believe, but because you need to show your neighbors that you're a 'good person.' You dislike lower-class folks (that are usually a minority) because they're lower class, go to different churches, etc. Then you can just lump the racism in, as so many minorities are lower-class it's OBVIOUS it's a failing of the race.

Class-based snootyism.