American Regions and How They've Influenced Religious Development (& Conflict)

Nations hiding in plain sight

Our true founders didn’t have an “original intent” that we can refer back to in challenging times such as this, observes historian and journalist Colin Woodard. Instead, they had original intents—plural. In his intriguing book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (Penguin, 2011), Woodard points out that there has never really been one America. From the beginning, there have been several Americas.

A theme heard again and again in the U.S. in times of crisis, Woodard notices, is that Americans have become divided on account of having strayed from the core principles on which their country was founded, and that they must return to those if unity is to be restored. But this theme, he finds, ignores glaring historical fact. Each of our eleven founding cultures had its own set of cherished principles, and many contradicted each other.

The real driving forces

America’s states, provinces, and federations are the official forums through which political power is exercised and expressed. But Woodard finds that they mask the real forces that drive the continent’s affairs: the eleven stateless “nations” that have been hiding in plain sight throughout our history. Each one has a common culture, ethnic origin, language, historical experience, artifacts, and symbols. And some are far from seeing eye to eye with each other.

One might expect that over the generations these nations would have long since melted into one another, but that hasn’t happened. Instead, Woodard finds, they all have altered the places to which they emigrated, keeping their identity while assimilating into the surrounding culture.

Eleven regional nations

•  The nation that Colin Woodard calls Yankeedom was founded on the shores of Massachusetts Bay by radical Calvinists as a religious utopia in the New England wilderness. It was settled by stable, educated families. From New England, it spread westward across the northern U.S. From its outset, Woodard explains, it has put great emphasis on education, local political control, and the pursuit of the “greater good” of the community, even if that required individual self-denial.

Of all the eleven American nations, Woodard finds, Yankees have the greatest faith in the potential of government to improve people’s lives. They tend to see it as an extension of the citizenry, a vital bulwark against grasping aristocrats, corporations, or outside powers. Woodard observes that Yankeedom has been locked in nearly perpetual combat with the Deep South for control of the federal government for as long as that government has existed.

For more than four centuries, Yankees have sought to build a more perfect society here on earth through social engineering, relatively extensive citizen involvement in the political process, and the aggressive assimilation of foreigners. Its religious zeal has waned over time, but not its underlying drive to improve the world, or its set of moral and social values.

•  New Netherland began as a 17th-century Dutch colony. It was short-lived but had lasting impact by laying down the cultural DNA for what is now Greater New York City. The New Netherland nation is the most densely populated part of North America.

A global corporation, the Dutch West India Company, dominated the city’s affairs and formally governed New Netherland for its first few decades. Established as a fur-trading post, it was an unabashedly commercial settlement with little concern for either social cohesion or the creation of a model society.

However, it nurtured two Dutch innovations that were considered subversive by most other European states at the time: profound tolerance of diversity, and, uniquely among the people of 17th-century Europe, commitment to the freedom of inquiry. Dutch universities were second to none, attracting thinkers from countries where the use of reason was curtailed. The Netherlands was also a haven for persecuted people across Europe.

Among its émigré intellectuals was René Descartes, whose ideas formed the basis of modern science and were first published in the Netherlands, as was one of Galileo’s books that effectively founded modern physics. Also, Baruch Spinoza, an excommunicated Amsterdam Jew, published philosophical texts that have been credited with inspiring everything from biblical criticism to deep ecology.  And while in exile in Amsterdam, John Locke composed his letter that argued for separation of church and state. In addition, Dutch scientists invented the telescope and microscope.

These thinkers were able to share their discoveries and ideas with the world because Dutch officials accepted the freedom of the press. Dutch printers are estimated to have been responsible for half of all the books published in the seventeenth century. So in many ways, Holland’s tiny oasis of intellectual freedom was the incubator for the modern world.

Forced on the other nations at the Constitutional Convention, New Netherland’s ideals of diversity and free inquiry have been passed down to us as the Bill of Rights. And its influence over the continent’s media, publishing, fashion, and intellectual and economic life is hard to overstate. 

•  The Midlands was founded by English Quakers. It was pluralistic and organized around the middle class. It spawned the culture of Middle America and the Heartland, where ethnic and ideological purity have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate, even apathetic. Many of this nation’s ancestors fled from European tyrannies, so believed that society should be organized to benefit ordinary people.

•  Tidewater was the most powerful nation during the colonial period and the early republic. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others of our best known founders were part of it, but Woodard sees it as a nation in decline today. It has always been a fundamentally conservative region, he observes, with a high value placed on respect for authority and tradition and less on equality or public participation in politics.

The Tidewater nation was founded by sons of southern English gentry who aimed to reproduce the semifeudal manorial society of the English countryside, where economic, political, and social affairs were run by and for landed aristocrats. This nation was thus responsible for many aristocratic inflections in the U.S. Constitution, including the Electoral College and Senate.

•  Greater Appalachia was founded in the early 18th century by what Woodard calls wave upon wave of rough, bellicose settlers from the war-ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, Northern England, and the Scottish lowlands. It gradually spread all the way to the Hill Country of Texas, clashing with Indians, Mexicans, and Yankees as its people migrated.

Greater Appalachia has consistently had a warrior ethic and a deep commitment to individual liberty and personal sovereignty. It has been suspicious of aristocrats and social reformers. Its combative culture has provided a large proportion of the U. S. military. It has given us bluegrass and country music, stock-car racing, and Evangelical fundamentalism. And surveys find that its people almost always answer simply “American” when census takers ask for their nationality or ethnicity.

•  The Deep South, Colin Woodard finds, was founded by Barbados slave lords as a West Indies-style slave society, a cruel and despotic system. It has been a bastion of white supremacy, aristocratic privilege, and a version of classical Republicanism molded on the slave states of the ancient world, where democracy was a privilege of the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many. Race, says Woodard, remains the primary determinant of one’s political affiliations here. Beginning from its Charleston beachhead, the Deep South spread across the Southern lowlands, eventually extending to Arkansas and east Texas. It became the center of the states’ rights movement, racial segregation, and labor and environmental deregulation. It has been the wellspring of African-American culture. Having forged an uneasy “Dixie” coalition with Appalachia and Tidewater in the 1870s, says Colin Woodard, the Deep South is locked in an epic battle with Yankeedom and its Left Coast and New Netherland allies for the future of the U. S. federation.

•  New France is the most overtly nationalistic of the nations and has the most liberal people on the continent, Woodard finds. It includes southeastern Canada and the “Cajun” parts of Louisiana.

•  What Woodard calls El Norte is the oldest of the Euro-American nations, dating back to the late 16th century when the Spanish empire founded northern outposts. It spreads from the U.S.-Mexico border in both directions. It is overwhelmingly Hispanic, but its economy is oriented toward the U.S. rather than Mexico City. It is expected to be increasingly influential within the U.S. in coming years.

•  The Left Coast is a strip from Monterey, California to Juneau, Alaska. It includes four progressive metropolises and is in Woodard’s words “a wet region of staggering natural beauty.” It was originally colonized by merchants, missionaries, and woodsmen from New England, who arrived by sea and controlled the towns, and farmers, prospectors, and fur traders from Greater Appalachia, who came by wagon and dominated the countryside. It has retained a strong strain of New England intellectualism and idealism even as it embraced a culture of individual fulfillment. Today it combines the Yankee faith in good government and social reform with a commitment to individual self-exploration and discovery. It is the birthplace of the modern environmental movement and the global information revolution, and the cofounder (along with New Netherland) of the gay rights movement, the peace movement, and the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

•  The Far West, Woodard finds, is the only American nation in which environmental factors have trumped ethnic ones. “High, dry, and remote,” he explains, “the interior west presented conditions so severe that they effectively destroyed those who tried to apply the farming and lifestyle techniques used in other nations.” With minor exceptions, colonizing this vast region required the deployment of vast industrial resources, thus was facilitated and directed by large corporations headquartered in distant cities or by the federal government.

•  Like the Far West, the First Nation encompasses a vast region with a hostile climate, in the far north, largely in Alaska and Canada. But unlike the Far West, the First Nation’s indigenous inhabitants still occupy the area in force and still retain cultural practices and knowledge that let them survive in the region on its own terms.                 

In a future Connections, I expect to report some of Colin Woodard’s observations from American Nations about how these eleven nations have influenced the religious development of the U.S. and its current religious conflict. 

U.S. REGIONS

from 8-14

America’s long-standing religious differences

In his book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (Penguin, 2011), historian and journalist  Colin Woodard explains that our continent was originally colonized by 11 different “nations”—cultural groups whose influence is still apparent today. As shown on the map here and described in last month’s Connections, they are Yankeedom (New England and west through Minnesota), New Netherland (greater New York City), the Midlands, Tidewater (mid-Atlantic coast), Greater Appalachia (coal country and south to Tennessee, west to north-central Texas), the Deep South (Carolinas through east Texas), El Norte (both sides of the Mexico border), the Left Coast, the Far West, the First Nation (Alaska and Canada), and New France (Canada and Cajun Louisiana).

The colonizers’ influence remains

Woodard finds that over the generations, members of these groups have altered the parts of North America to which they have emigrated, but they haven’t replaced the dominant cultures of those places. In terms of lasting impact, Woodard’s research tells him, the activities of a few hundred, or even a few score, initial colonizers can mean much more for the cultural geography of a place than the contributions of tens of thousands of new immigrants a few generations later. “Our continent’s famed mobility and the transportation and communications technology that foster it,” says Colin Woodard, “have been reinforcing, not dissolving, the differences between the nations.”

That’s true of their religious characteristics along with others. A 2008 Gallup poll that Woodard cites asked more than 350,000 Americans if religion was an important part of their lives. The top ten states to answer affirmatively, he reports, were all in the Borderlands or Deep South, while eight of the bottom ten states were dominated by the cultural group that Woodard calls Yankeedom.

Polarized into two hostile blocs

After the Civil War, Colin Woodard observes, differences in fundamental values polarized the U.S. nations into two hostile blocs separated by buffer states. The result was a cultural cold war between the angry, humiliated, salvation-minded Dixie bloc and the triumphant, social-reform-minded alliance of the North and West. That conflict simmered for a century before breaking into open struggle in the 1960s. Its roots are still glaringly apparent, not only within United Methodism and other church denominations, but also within our federal and state governments.

When Northern occupying forces set up racially integrated New-England-style systems in the South, they “freed” its enslaved and oppressed blacks, but failed to provide the security or economic environment needed for true independence. The backlash against northern “carpetbaggers” was harsh, unifying the three southern nations against northern groups to a degree never before seen.

Private Protestants and racial castes

With their institutions and racial caste system under attack, Woodard observes, the Deep South and Tidewater organized their resistance struggle around the one civic institution they still controlled: their churches. Unlike the dominant church denominations in Yankeedom, southern evangelicals (including Southern Baptists, southern Methodists, and southern Episcopalians) were becoming what religious scholars have termed “Private Protestants,” in contrast to the “Public Protestants” who dominated the northern U.S. nations.

Private Protestants, according to Woodard, believed that the world was inherently corrupt and sinful, which seemed particularly evident after the shocks of the Civil War. Their emphasis wasn’t on trying to transform the world in preparation for Christ’s coming, but on personal salvation—pulling individual souls into the lifeboat of right thinking. The Private Protestants had no interest in changing society, but rather sought to maintain order, obedience, and stability. They saw slavery, aristocratic rule, and the grinding poverty of most ordinary Southerners, both white and black, not as evils to be confronted, but as the reflection of a divinely sanctioned hierarchy to be maintained at all costs against the Yankee heretics.

In all three of the southern U.S. nations, resistance to Reconstruction was largely successful. Even without a return to formal slavery, the cruelly punitive racial caste system was essentially restored through segregation, sharecropping, draconian sentencing, and prison labor.

Public Protestants and a social gospel

While this Dixie bloc was coalescing around individual salvation and the defense of traditional social values, Colin Woodard reports, a northern alliance was forming around a very different set of religious priorities. Its religious ethos focused on the salvation of society, not of the individual, and on the social gospel. And while the southern Private Protestants emphasized individual responsibility for one’s lot in life, the northern Public Protestants tried to harness the government to improve society and the quality of life.

Temperance and prohibition, for example, were driven almost entirely by Yankees and Midlanders. They saw the harmful effects of fathers’ spending hard-earned money in bars, letting wives and children go hungry. The struggle for women’s suffrage was also conceived and fought by reformers in the northern U.S. nations. They recognized the need for women to have equal rights with men and an equal voice in the public sphere. Residents of Yankeedom and New Netherland also led turn-of-the-century crusades to ensure the welfare of children, many of whom were working long hours in unhealthy conditions, with little or no education.

The three northern groups’ desire to improve the world often took precedence over religious belief, Woodard observes, especially when they saw the church as standing in the way of needed progress. Yankeedom and especially New Netherland and the Left Coast, finds Woodard, were also becoming increasingly tolerant of unusual social experiments and countercultural movements, while the Dixie bloc was fighting to keep things as they were or return to the way they used to be.

But surely education and protection of children, and equal rights for all people in the eyes of the law, are goals consistent with Christian principles. Don’t positive social changes deserve precedence over beliefs and customs that merely reflect the class-based traditions of the pre-modern world?

The Dixie bloc vs. the modern world

Sadly, we’re still asking that question today. These conflicting worldviews have put the northern and western blocs on a collision course with the Dixie bloc that still strongly affects U.S. governments and churches in the modern-day.

Opposition to modernism, liberal theology, and what Woodard calls “inconvenient scientific discoveries” occurred in pockets across the continent, he acknowledges, but only in the Dixie bloc did it represent the dominant cultural position, backed by governments and defended by state power. In the culture wars ever since the Civil War, the three southern nations have generally been the stronghold of biblical inerrancy; elimination of barriers between church and state; teaching children religious rather than scientific explanations for the origins and nature of the universe; and maintaining restraints against homosexuality and civil rights. In support of these positions, Christian fundamentalism appeared in North America, reaching its high-water mark in the 1925 Scopes trial.

After that, Woodard writes, Public Protestant majorities in the northern nations assumed that the fire-and-brimstone crowd was ruined and its irrational beliefs exposed as superstition. But the fundamentalists spent the 1930s and 1940s organizing themselves and building Bible fellowships, Christian colleges, and a network of gospel radio stations. Unnoticed by North America’s opinion elite, their numbers grew through the 1950s. A full-scale cultural war was brewing, to explode in the 1960s.

That “second Reconstruction” forced some social changes but didn’t significantly change the Dixie bloc’s Private Protestant values. And the youth-driven cultural revolution of the 1960s barely touched the Dixie bloc. In fact, it led many Dixie residents to become even further entrenched in the southern evangelical worldview.

Will the standoff ever end?

Colin Woodard feels that neither the Dixie bloc nor the northern alliance is likely to make major concessions to other groups. Instead, he predicts, the “red” and “blue” U.S. nations will keep wrestling with each other for control over federal policy, with each doing what it can to woo the “purple” nations to its cause, just as they have done since they gathered at the First Continental Congress.

Woodard hopes that over time, they will at least reach accommodation and agree that the status quo isn’t serving anyone well. But I’m afraid that’s unlikely, because so many powerful people, not just Southerners, side with tradition and the status quo.

Groups well served by the status quo

Unsurprisingly, holders of top government offices, recipients of the top salaries paid by giant corporations, and church leaders whose positions guarantee lifelong income, especially if it’s large, feel that the status quo is serving them well. They don’t want it changed. Others of us who are financially secure may not either.

How can Christians get past the past?

But what about the working poor and others who are not being served well by the status quo? How might Christians encourage the people in power, in our governments and our churches, to promote changes that would help those others—changes that would further the common good, not just our individual good? How could we help unify American identity by ensuring quality public education, civil rights, and religious freedom for all?

Some of these social movements began or first took hold in regions other than our own. Those of us who are Southerners, especially, may even have opposed social progress in the past. But we can’t turn back time. We can’t keep using the Bible to defend injustice in the way that our ancestors used it to excuse slavery, subjugate women, or suppress academic learning. The progressive community spirit fostered by inclusive education reflects core Christian values that we all need to promote, no matter what part of the U.S. we happen to live in.

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Are we really a melting pot?

Because we think of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants, it’s hard to believe that the distinct “American nations” that Colin Woodard describes have survived from colonial times until today. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, tens of millions of people came here from all over the world. Didn’t their arrival herald the birth of a unified American identity that cemented the country together? “The short answer,”  Woodard says, “is no.”

Education was a unifying factor in the north

Until the 1950s, quotas mostly restricted immigration to northern Europeans, who didn’t spread out evenly across the U.S. Virtually none came to southern U.S. regions. Most were fleeing countries with repressive feudal systems, and the Deep South and Tidewater were like the entrenched aristocracies they longed to escape. Appalachia had few cities or jobs, and El Norte was too remote.

Many settled in Yankeedom, which focused on educating its immigrants and their children. Northerners valued equal public education for all, with a common curriculum to foster social and cultural assimilation. In Woodard’s view, the notion of America as a melting pot really refers to that civic education, which essentially changed many immigrants into Anglo-Protestant Americans.

A mythic “national” history

 Woodard also observes that Yankee civic institutions crafted a mythic “national” history for students to celebrate. The story emphasized the Pilgrim voyage, the Boston Tea Party, and Yankee figures such as Paul Revere and the Minutemen. Largely ignoring other early settlements and colonizers, it highlighted the Puritans and recast them as champions of religious freedom—a twist that might well have surprised the Puritans themselves, who rejected Catholic and Anglican ritual, persecuted Quakers, and used censure and ex-communication to enforce conformity.

In the 21st century, a new wave of immigration continues to fuel a heated debate about American identity. What other ethnic, religious, and cultural groups were typically left out of the histories that we were all taught in school? What does it really mean to be American today?