 Some of my Southern brethren are real talented at putting their own spin on what the good book says. And the most dominant strain of religion in my neck of the woods is Protestant evangelicalism. This is a school of Christianity focused on spreading the good news, taking a more literal interpretation of Bible stories, and accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. The kind of Bible thumpers who got mad at Kevin Bacon for trying to dance, those are my people. Protestant evangelicalism, as we know it, grew out of the Church of England, which was founded back in the 16th century when the Pope refused to let King Henry VIII get divorced and marry his dead brother's ex-wife. Defying authority and coveting thy brother's wife? That's the most redneck sh**t I've ever heard. So it ain't so surprising that this strain of Christianity birthed the dominant religion in the South. Protestant evangelicalism carried over this major lesson from the Church of England. If you don't like what your religion is telling you, pretend it's saying something different. Anything they don't want to do is either Old Testament, so Jesus said they don't have to anymore, or it was a metaphor, you know? Imagine if we were allowed to live our lives that way, you know what I mean? Like, baby, I'm sorry I didn't mean to cheat on you, I thought our valves were like a metaphor. But coming up with your own understanding of the Bible has its downsides, like using it to justify the unjustifiable. slavery became the most contentious issue in religious communities in the build-up to the Civil War. In fact, it's been written that the Civil War began in churches decades before the first shot was fired. They read the Old Testament, Abraham on slaves, the New Testament, the Apostle Paul tells slaves to obey their masters, obviously if we weren't meant to on slaves, the Bible would have said something about it, so it was very easy for them to reconcile. See, while some churches were using the good book to justify slavery, others were using the same source as an argument for abolition. It was pretty important among early Methodists. What happened with the Methodists is they got creamed when they started preaching that and they had to back off. After enslaved black preacher Nat Turner led a rebellion in 1831, Virginia went ahead and passed a law mandating that black churches have white pastors to control the message folks were receiving from God. Imagine getting a substitute math teacher who's there to tell you that two plus two equals white people are better than you. Nat Turner was trying to use the power of group, of organization, of faith, of belief to do some good and of course the white man of that day and age came down on him. The thing that gets me about it is it kind of shows us how starved for entertainment. They were that the people were actually listening in church. I don't mean to be too harsh on southern evangelicals as they have contributed significantly to the culture I grew up in. See one of the guiding principles of evangelical Christianity is doing good works. It's what leaves the Bible Belt to give more to charity than anywhere in the country. It's the spirit that's got Jimmy Carter, a devout southern Baptist for most of his life, still building houses for Habitat for Humanity at 95 years old. And also we cannot skip black evangelical churches in the civil rights movement. They were the literal backbone of the southern civil rights movement. Now you gotta do the negative there too. The KKK was ostensibly founded as a religious organization. The thing is, everybody went to church back then, so if you were going to have a meeting and discuss shit, you were going to do it at the church. Plus without evangelicals we wouldn't have one of the south's most colorful regional traditions, snake handling, which is still practiced by some Pentecostals in parts of Appalachia. If you don't know what snake handling is, it's where you hold a poisonous snake in church to demonstrate your faith. I like to imagine what it would be like if the devil had came to Eve as some animal other than a snake. Now you'd have hillbillies going to church on Sundays to fist fight gorillas. That's a church I go to. If you're a northerner before you get all snobby about being enlightened, I would remind you that the south has never held witch trials. Yet, I don't know who needs to hear this, but Jesus don't have a stance on gay marriage, the Second Amendment, or carbon emissions. But the good news is, while the south hasn't been very religiously diverse, unless you believe Methodist, Southern Baptist, and Episcopalians living together counts as diversity, that is finally changing. The south has a lot more immigrants than it used to have. Evangelicals are smart, realize that the future of their movement lies in recruiting ethnic minorities. And studies show that non-white evangelicals are more likely to hold progressive views. For example, they're more likely to believe that climate change is real. But the idea that immigrants are destroying America is fake. If a bunch of new people moving in and changing the religious character of your community makes you uncomfortable, just keep in mind a simple lesson that's both catchy and easy to remember. Love thy neighbor.