![]() A 2014 study by the Pew Research Center found that the states with the highest belief in the Bible as the literal word of God were Mississippi (56%), Alabama (51%), South Carolina (49%), West Virginia (47%), Tennessee (46%), Arkansas (45%), Louisiana (44%), Georgia (41%), Kentucky (41%), and Texas (39%). A study by the Pew Research Center in 2016 found that the ten most religious states were Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Carolina, West Virginia, Georgia, Oklahoma and North Carolina. It determined the 10 most "Bible-minded" cities were Knoxville, Tennessee Shreveport, Louisiana Chattanooga, Tennessee Birmingham, Alabama Jackson, Mississippi Springfield, Missouri Charlotte, North Carolina Lynchburg, Virginia Huntsville-Decatur, Alabama and Charleston, West Virginia. The report was based on 42,855 interviews conducted between 20. Bible-minded cities mapĪ study was commissioned by the American Bible Society to survey the importance of the Bible in the metropolitan areas of the United States. His eastern Bible Belt was focused on a core that included the major population centers of Virginia and North Carolina. Tweedie's western Bible Belt was focused on a core that extended from Little Rock, Arkansas, to Tulsa, Oklahoma. "is research also broke the Bible Belt into two core regions, a western region and an eastern region. He finds two belts: one more eastern that stretches from Florida, (excluding Miami, Tampa and South Florida), through Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, the Carolinas, and into Southside Virginia and another concentrated in Texas (excluding El Paso, and South Texas), Arkansas, Louisiana, (excluding New Orleans and Acadiana), Oklahoma, Missouri (excluding St. Tweedie, an Associate Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography at Oklahoma State University, the Bible Belt was viewed in terms of numerical concentration of the audience for religious television when he first published his research in 1995. ![]() A 1978 study by Charles Heatwole identified the Bible Belt as the region dominated by 24 fundamentalist Protestant denominations, corresponding to essentially the same area mapped by Zelinsky. On the other hand, areas in the South which are not considered part of the Bible Belt include heavily Catholic Southern Louisiana, central and southern Florida, which have been settled mainly by immigrants and Americans from elsewhere in the country, and overwhelmingly Hispanic South Texas. In addition, the Bible Belt covers most of Missouri and southern parts of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. ![]() The region thus defined included most of the Southern United States, including most of Texas and Oklahoma, and in the states south of the Ohio River such as Kentucky and Tennessee, and extending east to include central West Virginia and Virginia, from the Shenandoah Valley southward into Southside Virginia and North Carolina. In a 1961 study, Wilbur Zelinsky delineated the region as the area in which Protestant denominations, especially Southern Baptist, Methodist, and evangelical, are the predominant religious affiliations. ![]() The name "Bible Belt" has been applied historically to the South and parts of the Midwest, but is more commonly identified with the South. The term is now also used in other countries for regions with higher religious doctrine adoption. Mencken, who in 1924 wrote in the Chicago Daily Tribune: "The old game, I suspect, is beginning to play out in the Bible Belt." In 1927, Mencken claimed the term as his invention. The earliest known usage of the term "Bible Belt" was by American journalist and social commentator H. ![]() The evangelical influence is strongest in northern Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, southern and western Virginia, West Virginia, the Upstate region of South Carolina, and east Texas. Whereas the states with the highest percentage of residents identifying as non-religious are in the West and New England regions of the United States (with Vermont at 37%, ranking the highest), in the Bible Belt state of Alabama it is just 12%, and Tennessee has the highest proportion of evangelical Protestants, at 52%. The region contrasts with the religiously diverse Midwest and Great Lakes, and the Mormon corridor in Utah and southern Idaho. Church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. The Bible Belt is a region of the Southern United States and one Midwestern state, the state of Missouri, in all of which socially conservative Protestant Christianity plays a strong role in society. ![]()
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