Being from the Deep South, I don’t think I ever met a Catholic while I was there.
Most of the Catholics in the South are on the edges of the area. Baltimore/DC in the north, New Orleans, and Hispanic populations in South Florida and Texas.
Like the 1.2 million Catholics in Georgia? Or the 200,000 in South Carolina? Or the roughly 400,000 in North Carolina? Or the 673,000 in Virginia (12% of the population)
And I don’t know how you can hand-wave away Texas, Florida and Louisiana and say there aren’t Catholics in the South.
I wasn’t trying to say that most people aren’t Baptist, but that there are a whole lot of people there who aren’t, but you’d never know it, because the Baptists are so obnoxiously outspoken and up in your business about it.
I met very few Catholics before the Hispanic influx around 20 years ago. Lots of them now. (I can count the number of people that I’ve met down here that I know to be Jewish I can count on the fingers of one hand.) Oh, and one Buddhist.
The Baptist Church was called a frontier religion because it required no hierarchy. This made it much easier to spread in the unsettled South.
As for Louisiana, there are many Catholics outside of New Orleans, though mostly in the southern part of the state. Catholic Cajuns live in most all of southern Louisiana.
As Emo Phillips put it (joking/not joking): *Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”
He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?” He said, “A Christian.” I said, “Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me, too! What franchise?” He said, “Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?” He said, “Northern Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”
He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said, “Me, too!”
Northern Conservative†Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.” I said, “Die, heretic!” And I pushed him over.*
I wasn’t trying to be offensive, and I didn’t say there weren’t any. I am just giving my experience.
I grew up in SC. So that 200,000 is only 4%. Which is probably substantially higher than 30 years ago before the Hispanic population grew.
I am just saying I wouldn’t not describe that population as “a LOT.”
When I lived in Lafayette Catholicism was the default religion. The Baptists were oil people who came from Texas.
That’s what I was going to post … the reasons the South has a lot of Baptists are complex, historically, but the Second Great Awakening is a major factor.
Does my dad’s family of West Virginia Quakers count as Southern?
I was in Mexico City five decades ago drinking with an older Gringo who said he was a Free Baptist bishop. He ordained me, no charge except more cheap aguardiente. Voices in my head later promoted me to bishop but I have no ambition to be archbishop or establish a Naked Baptist church adjacent to a WalMart. Am I damned? 
Back to demographics. Does anyone have numbers on the economic status of various Southern denominations? Which denominations tend to be richest and poorest?
Maybe not Catholics themselves, but if you roll in Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Lutherans, you have a pretty sizeable number.
I mean, I grew up in Texas, and while Catholicism is pretty popular here, as is Baptist-ism, there were always a whole lot of Methodists around, and a fair number of the other denominations as well, especially as you go up the socio-economic scale. In other words, the poorer someone is, the more likely they are to be Baptist (or Catholic), while the other denominations seem to be more popular among more wealthy people.
That actually tracks with this study as well:
Pedant alert.
There is no “Southern Baptist Church.” There are Southern Baptist churches. Individual churches are fully autonomous, unlike many other denominations. Individual churches may voluntarily join the Southern Baptist Convention, but the SBC has no actual authority over the actions of the individual churches (other than to expel them or otherwise express displeasure).
The individual churches may vary a great deal in their attitudes and actions. My former wife was ordained as a minister in a Southern Baptist church in the 1980s. I have attended several same-sex unions at Southern Baptist churches as far back as 1993. Now, the SBC wasn’t happy about these events, but that’s a story for another time.
Depends on what one means by “the South”. We have a lot of Catholics in Texas. Texas may or may not be considered South depending on the situation.
Texas is simultaneously the south and a region that can only be called “Texas.”
Louisiana is still more Catholic, but as noted upthread it’s not as strongly so as you might expect from Mardi Gras and other cultural depictions.
Yes. Ralph Stanley was a Primitive Baptist Universalist. Primitive Baptists generally believe in predestination with regard to salvation, with PBUs believing that everyone is predestined to go to heaven.
Non-universalist Primitive Baptists often refer to the Universalists as “No hellers.”
Which is why I once saw a sign that read “4th Baptist Church, Reformed” and I thought “There’s somebody in there that doesn’t get along with anybody!”
Probably not for this discussion.
West Virginia became a state because the Civil War. That part of Virginia was more closely allied culturally to the northern states. People in that area generally did not own slaves, and did not want to secede from the Union. When Virginia left the Union, West Virginia left Virginia.
Since there wasn’t much slavery in that area before the state formed, Quakers with their strong anti-slavery sentiments would have been quite welcome there.
West Virginia started out mostly Presbyterian, because that’s who settled there first. During the first half of the 1800s, Methodists and Baptists converted a lot of other protestant religions. Methodists came to dominate the state. There are plenty of Baptists in the state, but not in the same proportions that you see in states further south. The most popular religion in the years leading up to the Civil War were the “northern” Methodists, who were more strongly opposed to slavery than Methodists in southern states. To this day, Methodists remain the most popular religion.
In other discussions, you might want to group West Virginia differently. Culturally, West Virginia is Appalachian, so it shares a lot of that culture with Tennessee and Kentucky.
And in more rural areas you’ll find a lot of yahoos with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks, which I never understood. It’s like dude, you remember why we became a state, right?
Some people put the north-south divide at the Mason-Dixon line, which means that only us folks who are from the northern panhandle (like me) are technically northern. The accent does change a bit and becomes more of a southern drawl once you get below the Mason-Dixon line.
The Pew Forum website has a breakdown and statistics by state and by region:
In the Pew study that gkster and bump linked to, if you drill down to the Southern region, and “Evangelical Protestants” (which is going to include the Baptists, among others), you see:
- 36% make less than $30,000 a year
- 22% make between $30,000 and $49,999
Compare that to “Mainline Protestants” (e.g., Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etc.) in the South:
Catholics:
- 27% under $30,000
- 17% between $30,000 and $49,999
Not a huge difference, but the Evangelicals are, indeed, more likely to be lower income.
I asked a friend about this; she grew up in Georgia and has lived near me in the Northeast for several years. She said that her mom was proud of being Methodist because that meant they were a cut above the Baptists, even though they weren’t really well-off either.
Northern Louisiana, Monroe and Alexandria, is a lot more traditionally southern.
As Justin Wilson said of a small town called Bunkie, right in the middle of the state “the Dixon and Mason line runs right through Bunkie” to Cajuns.