The American Civil War: The War That Never Ended

Although a native of New York State, I have lived the majority of my life in the South which at times is like living in one huge insane asylum where grievances of 150 years ago remain alive and well in the minds of some who prefer to live in the past even though that past was not as golden as they like to pretend.  If one looks at many of the political problems now facing America, many of them trace directly to the South, it's history of bigotry, and the religious insanity of the Bible Belt where ignorance is seemingly deemed a virtue. Except for the harsh winters, there are indeed times I'd like to return to New York and its relative sanity.  A piece in The Economist looks at the South's continuing refusal to stop living in the past.  Here are excerpts:

FOR something that ended 150 years ago on April 9th, America’s civil war is strangely newsworthy. Last month the Supreme Court heard a case that asked whether Texas should allow the Sons of Confederate Veterans to put a Confederate flag on their car licence-plates, and two white students were expelled from the University of Oklahoma for singing a song about lynching taught to them by a fraternity founded in the antebellum South.

Many Americans remain fascinated by the conflict. In 2002 the Library of Congress estimated that 70,000 books had been published about it, more than one a day since the war ended. This year at Appomattox courthouse in Virginia 1,000 volunteers will dress up to re-enact the surrender there of General Robert E. Lee.

Yet the war is more than an excuse for dressing up. It created a divide that has yet to disappear. For all the economic dynamism of the South, which over the past few decades has almost caught up with the rest of the country economically . . ., it remains a region apart, from the bedroom to the ballot box. If you know whether a state was part of the Confederacy, it is possible to make a reasonably accurate guess about where it stands on a range of seemingly unconnected matters, from party politics to gay marriage.

In the autumn of 2014, when control of the Senate was decided in the mid-term elections, one of the best ways to predict the outcome was to look up the results of the presidential election of 1860.

Today, only five states have no minimum-wage laws; all were Confederate 150 years ago. Of the ten states that lock up the highest proportion of their citizens, seven were Confederate. A further two that make the top ten—Oklahoma and Arizona—were created since 1865 and settled in the late 19th century by southerners escaping the depression that followed defeat.

Does race explain the persistence of difference? This may have been true in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Republicans energetically wooed southern white Democrats who were outraged by Lyndon Johnson’s civil-rights laws. But it no longer fits. The most segregated schools are now in the north-east. Mixed-race marriages are growing faster in some southern states than anywhere else in America.

Religion is a better explanation of southern exceptionalism. The civil war divided most of America’s Protestant sects, says Mark Noll of the University of Notre Dame. Both the Presbyterian and Methodist churches split into northern branches, which opposed slavery, and southern branches, which did not. Even after slavery ended, theological divisions persisted. In the north, which saw mass immigration from all over the world in the decades after the war, Protestant churches had to find some accommodation with Jews, Catholics and, eventually, non-believers.

In the South the share of those born outside America (which was low to begin with) actually fell after the civil war. New migrants moved west or north but rarely south. Because of this, southern churches could hold more traditional views without challenge. Those tented revival meetings that were such a feature of southern Protestantism were not intended to win converts so much as to purify and strengthen beliefs that were already there.

The Southern Baptist movement, which is strongly associated with the “values voters” who favour the Republicans, has its origins in support for slavery.

When piety is grafted on to a small-government political philosophy—57% of southerners think the government does “too much” and only 37% think it should do more, according to Gallup—it explains much of why the South remains different. 

[T]here are two possible futures for what was once the Confederacy. The continuing in-migration of large numbers of northerners, including many African-Americans, may transform the rest of the South the way it has already transformed Virginia and Florida, which are both swing states these days. Or the South might continue to expand its cultural and religious reach westwards, as it has into Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico. Or both. Apologists for the old South like to point out that the last action of the war, a skirmish in Texas, resulted in a Confederate victory. It’s not over yet.

As the piece correctly notes, what truly poisons the South is conservative Christianity.  It embraces ignorance, celebrates division, and is terrified of modernity and knowledge.