Is the Bible Belt Immoral, Unhealthy, and Violent?

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. We're gonna respond today to a meme.

That's right, a meme. I don't do that all that often. I did that, I think, during, I had like an episode,

Top 10 Pro Black Lives Matter Movement Memes, and I responded to all of them.

This is just one meme, though. This whole episode, one meme. Someone sent it to me and said, what's your response? Ask me the questions.

This is a listener -generated episode. And it was one of the patrons had,

I guess, come across this on their Facebook newsfeed, and just wanted to see, you know, how do you respond to this? And I don't know if there's a silver bullet.

I don't know if there's a one right way. If you know a friend who posted something like this, you may respond to them differently than another friend who posted it.

But I wanna at least give you some general things to think about. And not all of you are gonna find this episode interesting.

You're not supposed to say that at the beginning of a podcast, right? But I'm trying to be upfront and straightforward.

Not all of you will find this kind of thing interesting. It deviates a little bit from what I usually talk about. Some of you will, though.

Some of you actually might find this more interesting. So you can put your comments in the info section as to whether or not you find this interesting or not, or helpful.

And if you have explanations that are different than mine for what I'm about to bring up, then please feel free to interact because that's what this is about.

We're learning, we're sharpening each other. And this is something that I think should not be ignored.

I think, honestly, and I don't know the hearts of people. I just, I do think stuff like this does get ignored by some conservatives.

And I think it's helpful to actually interact. Interact with the arguments that people on the left are making.

So here's the meme, you ready? See if I can cue this up here. I'll blow it up so everyone can see what

I'm looking at here. This is the meme. And it's a very popular meme when it was posted.

Lizzy the Lezzy, I don't know who that is, but I think it's a secularist on social media, posted the

Bible Belt. And there is, for those listening, a outline of the

South and really it's the South and maybe a little portion of the

Midwest there with a Christian cross. And it says, the Bible Belt is also the divorce belt, the teen pregnancy belt, the obesity belt, the homicide belt, the poverty belt, the smoker's belt, the infant death belt, the low life expectancy belt.

Now, the assumption behind all of this, you need to figure out first, before even interacting with something like this, what's the assumption?

What is this trying to communicate? Well, it's obvious that there's a causation correlation going on here, a causal correlation between people loving the

Bible, adhering to the Bible, and people apparently, in some instances, not following the

Bible. See, this is the interesting thing. Before you even know any stats, you think, wait, hold on a minute.

These are the people that love the Bible, yet they're the people getting divorced. They're the people that are practicing obesity.

I mean, it's one of the, what, seven deadly sins, right? But more importantly, there's

Bible verses against obesity. The homicide belt, right? That homicide's not certainly in keeping with biblical teaching on murder.

Poverty, I mean, if they're practicing the Proverbs principles for money, then they shouldn't be in poverty, as at least compared to the rest of the country.

Smoking, I mean, that's maybe a cultural thing, but hey, our body's the temple of the Lord. Infant death, low life expectancy, some of this could be the result of poverty and some of these other things.

I mean, a lot of these things that are in this are related to one another. I mean, you could say it's the poverty belt, and that would probably explain about half the things on this list.

Or, you know, divorce also doesn't really help a lot of these things. But obesity and low life expectancy would also be, there'd be a relationship there.

So it's kind of expanded out, which makes it sound even, you know, as bad as it can be, if we're just going to itemize all the different things that are negative attached to this region.

So that's the intent behind it. People that are into the

Bible apparently are a bunch of hypocrites, because they're not following it, right? That has to be, so you need to point that out,

I think, right away. If there's someone who's, you know, are you saying that these people are hypocrites?

Are you saying that they are not following the Bible? Are you saying that other regions are following biblical principles better?

Is that what you're saying? Because obviously the issue is not the Bible. It's not the Bible that's causing these things.

The Bible teaches against most of these things. So it's not the Bible doing this. So what's the explanation?

And if you start out with a question like that, I think you'll find the discussion's gonna be a little more rich.

Because you can't just immediately say the Bible's the cause. Because this person probably wants that to be the case.

Look, the people who are most into the Bible have all these problems. But again, a lot of these problems aren't problems that arise from the

Bible. The Bible preaches against a divorce and homicide, right? So that's,

I think, the first thing, is to say, okay, well, what's the explanation then? The explanation can't be the

Bible's causing it. It's gotta be something else. I mean, it's people then. You're making a great argument for people, I guess, being hypocritical, sinful.

Hey, you know what book makes sense of that? The Bible. But here's the other thing. Because I don't think that's entirely satisfactory.

I think that's a really good start. I think that's a really good, I think it's honestly probably where a lot of the conversations are gonna go and they're gonna stop.

Because you need to be able to separate the working issues attached to a meme like this.

You can't just focus on defending all the people who live there.

You need to start out with, this person's trying to blame the Bible. Let's try to take that one off the table. And I think you can pretty handily do that.

All you need to do is quote some Bible verses that are against some of the things on this list. But the reason it's not entirely satisfactory is because the people are part of it.

The people who claim to be the most religious, the people who really, I mean, it's the region of the country that is the most religious has some of these problems, right?

So, or do they? Or do they? And that's what I wanna get into. I wanna get into the specifics of this.

Because this is an oversimplification. And there are other explanations. I'm not gonna claim I have all the answers to all of this.

But I want to at least provoke everyone to think a little more deeply into this. Because this is an oversimplification.

And so that's the second thing. So first thing, number one, can't blame the Bible for this stuff, obviously.

Second thing is, are these, is this an oversimplification? Is this actually an accurate meme?

And, or are you slandering people unnecessarily? Would you have an ax to grind?

And I think that's the case. This person has an ax to grind, a bitterness about them. And that's what's causing this. This is not out of the good heart of someone who really wants to steer people away from the

Bible because they're afraid they're gonna get divorced and get murdered or something and live in poverty.

This is someone who clearly just has an ax to grind with this region. And, you know, and I would say also on a political level, well, why don't you just kind of, why don't we maybe let them go their own way or something?

Why don't we push for maybe there to be two separate or three separate or four separate regions of the

United States kind of governing themselves? Why does it have to be this one size fits all, the whole country as,

I mean, look, if you go to Seattle or Portland, which I was just at recently, I was, this last year,

I was in Alaska, I was in California, I was in Seattle, I was in Portland, I was in Alabama, I was all over the place.

There is a huge difference between let's say Alaska and Portland and Alabama.

There is a huge difference. You're in different countries, quite frankly, especially look at the difference.

I remember one day I went from Alabama and all the way we were near the

University of Alabama. And in one day I flew from there and I flew into Portland. It could not have been different.

These are two separate countries. And why should they all be, and this is a question,

I know some of you have answers for it in your minds, you know, you can't, they're sort of a mystical attachment to this union thing, but why should they be united and they're in a common destiny when they clearly have completely different ideas of what a good society looks like and what they want for themselves?

That's a question too, to bring up when someone brings up something like this, oh, let's disparage this region.

Well, you know, maybe they should be their own thing. All right, so let's get into the stats. So that's what you're really here for.

And that was the question, I think, that prodded this whole thing with someone who wanted me to get into the specifics.

So here's some specifics for you. And this is fascinating to me. First map, for those who are listening,

I'll try to describe what I'm looking at. Percentage of the population claimed by all participating religious groups.

So this is all religions, basically, that participated in this. This is a 2012 Association of Statistics of American Religious Bodies study.

And this was posted on the UK Daily Mail. And you can see when you break it down by county level, things look a little different.

Yellow is the most religious. Now, if you wanna look at the most yellow parts of the country, you're looking at Utah, you're looking at Idaho, right?

This is Mormon country. There's regions of New Mexico and Southern Colorado.

I'm not entirely sure what that would be. I don't think that would be evangelical, maybe Colorado, I'm not sure.

And then there's this kind of line that goes up from Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, all the way up to North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota, kind of bleeding into Wisconsin a bit, and Minnesota.

And of course, those regions, I think, would be more Lutheran up there. But there's this kind of, it's interesting, it's like the country is split in half there by this yellow line.

And that is percentage of the population. So this is all religious groups and basically who they claim. These are the people that adhere to our religion.

Then the next tier is the brown. And you can see the brown is the Midwest, parts of the

West, and a significant portion of the

Lower South, especially. Also parts of Pennsylvania, some counties in New York and Massachusetts, but almost all of Long Island.

So that would be probably Catholic. Now, go to the next tier, that's red. Now you look at, and I don't know what the,

I mean, it looks like it might be more brown than red. I'm not sure, but it's pretty close. There's a lot of red in the

South, a lot of red in the Midwest. There's Northern tip of Maine has some red,

Montana has some red, green, Florida, Virginia, a lot of North Carolina, a lot in New York, a lot in California and Arizona, Wyoming.

So we're getting towards the lower end of the spectrum here like the least religious, right? And the least religious, of course, is blue.

Most of Maine is covered in blue, Vermont, New Hampshire covered in blue, mostly. Oregon, Washington's got a lot of blue.

Interestingly, Northern Idaho, Western Montana, Northern California, Western Nevada, Western Arizona, lots of blue.

So there's, you can see when you look at this map by county that there are some definite trends going on here.

And look, it is the South and the Midwest. When you look at your yellows and your tans, you're looking at, a lot of it is

Utah and of course the Mormon country being an exception, but you have the South and the Midwest and mostly, and then if we include red in that, that's what you're looking at mostly.

But places like West Virginia, I think, are fascinating to me. West Virginia, Southern Ohio, this is Appalachia.

This is Eastern Kentucky covered in blue. So least religious, right?

There's not much, and these are people, if you drive through those areas, you would think that they would be more religious.

Now, I'm not sure what the, I don't know how to account for all that, but all this to say, all I really wanna communicate in this map, and we're gonna go through so many maps

I need, I'm gonna spend a lot less time on the next ones. I just wanted to upfront just say, look, the situation's more complicated, obviously, way more complicated than just looking at a map and at the state level.

Once you get into the county level, you start seeing trends that you don't see at the state level. And I would have never known that there's this yellow belt kind of running from Texas all the way to North Dakota of yellow people that are religious adherence to some form of Christianity, I would assume.

So I think that's interesting. Now, when you look at evangelicalism, and most people who probably bring this up have an ax to grind with evangelicals, that's the deep

South, right? But the Midwest is pretty close. 29 % self -identifies evangelical, whereas 31 % in the

South. So Midwest versus South, 29 to 31%. Northeast, 13%, West, 18%.

But then this is a LifeWay study, Southern Baptist study. When you get into their actual beliefs are evangelical, it's only 23 % of the

South. And that's the highest. It's 5 % of the Northeast, 15 % of the Midwest, 10 % of the West. So your highest evangelical by belief is in the

South, and it's only 23%. That is not all that much. Now, to call this the

Bible belt, okay. But, and I found this even living. Now, I was in the

Upper South. I was in Raleigh, and then I was in Lynchburg, Virginia. So this is not,

I know it's much different than a lot of my family in Mississippi in some ways, but it's, I found that there, you know, the church is on every corner, but it's going the way that the

Northeast went 100 years ago, or a little more than that. It's going the same direction where secularization has taken root.

It's just been delayed. It's taken a lot longer in the South. Culture is different. The culture remembers things a lot longer.

They're much more traditional, much more respecting of hierarchy, and the church is a hierarchy. Religion plays a prominent role in their life.

They're certainly not as bifurcated as people in the Northeast or the West are on that.

And so it's lasted longer, but man, 23%, you can hardly call this, I mean,

I remember living even in Lynchburg recently and thinking that there's churches everywhere. The biggest

Christian university in the world is here. And yet how many churches that I visited were absolutely dead?

How many churches I went to were, I mean, between the social justice, the absolute just kind of falling apart when

COVID happened, just the churches with bad doctrine, period, it was very difficult.

And I didn't think it would be in a place like Lynchburg, but you're finding this all over the place.

The percentage isn't quite as high. Now that doesn't mean that Christianity doesn't filter into the culture more. And I think that's part of it.

I think it's a political thing that people have a problem with, especially in the South. They're Republican, they vote a certain way, pro -life, all that kind of thing.

And they carry when a Republican wins, look at the South, that's the region that one of the big regions and the

Midwest, the regions that they're carrying. And so I think that has a lot to do with it.

Christianity still, there's a sort of a memory of Christianity, even if people aren't practicing it today, you can remember grandma and grandpa used to have this.

And some of those cultural elements were passed down, cultural, cultural, and that's where it stays for a lot of people, if only 23 % are actually evangelical by belief, if this study is accurate.

So not quite as Christian as maybe some of you thought and county level, a little more complex.

And I just wanted to bring that out. Now, let's get in to some other factors.

And I'm only bringing these factors up, just to ask a question, I'm not making any statements.

I need to be very clear on this. I'm not attributing any of the negative things that are on that meme to these particular maps.

I'm not saying there's a correlation here like the meme creator is and saying, well, it's because of these things that you have high poverty or whatever.

What I'm trying to say is there's probably more than just this, but are there things that might make sense of some of those factors?

Some of them, are there? I'm just asking, are there other things other than it being the Bible Belt? Are there other things that might make sense of let's say a high homicide rate, average yearly temperature and average annual relative humidity?

Guess where they meet? Yeah, it's that Bible Belt area. It's the South, it's the deep South, especially.

If the homicide rates are higher, and we'll get into that in a minute, but if they are, here's a headline from CBS News 2012.

Hot and bothered experts say violent crime rises with the heat. Is it possible that because it's hot, that could have a contribution?

Now you might say, John, that's silly. Well, is it? If it's more violent in Northern cities in the summer and you have a place that's summer all year long, would it, and why is it that more murders happen?

Maybe it's because just more people are out when it's hot. You're doing more things. Could that contribute? I don't know, but it could.

Is that something that is worth looking into? And that's my only question is, are there other factors other than just it being the

Bible Belt? It's the hot, humid area of the country. I don't know, I get agitated when

I'm hot and humid. How about the Catholic Church, right? Now this is, look, I'm just throwing this out there.

I'm not saying that these other two maps necessarily mean anything, but maybe they do mean something.

I don't know. I'm just saying there might be more research that needs to be done here. Adherence as a percentage of total population.

Guess what the least Catholic area in the whole entire country is? Yeah, it's the Lower South. It's that Bible Belt area.

And West Virginia, which we already determined was not very religious according to the first map on a county level.

It's also not very Catholic either, probably because there's not much religion there, period, formally at least.

But that whole region, covered in blue for least Catholic. I mean, it's about the same as Utah, right?

Now, question, could there be a correlation there? Is there a correlation with some of those negative attributes to maybe

Catholics are better at some of these things? And I'm sure the person who created that meme doesn't like Catholics. They don't like, maybe they have their most disdain for evangelicals and the

Bible Belt because of how they vote and everything. But most people really don't like the Catholic Church if they're really progressive. They can't stand it.

Well, that's the area with the least amount of Catholics. Could that have something to do with it? States with the largest black populations for 2018.

Again, it's the Lower South. It's that Bible Belt area. Could that have anything to do with some of those things?

I mean, we've been told last year that there's such great disparities in healthcare access and poverty rates and all these kinds of things with black people.

Could it be that the states that they live in more than other states would have greater percentages of poverty, let's say?

And that's where they live. And maybe, now look, I'm gonna put my social justice glasses on for a minute.

Maybe that's the whole reason behind this. It has nothing to do with the Bible or Bible Belt or culture in that sense, at least.

Religion, I should say. But it has everything to do with discrimination against black people.

And so that's a racist meme that that person posted because they're making fun of a disparity that's caused by racism or something.

I mean, look, if we're gonna try to figure out what's going on, why some of these things happen, and I'm gonna give you some hints as we go through and some possible explanations for some of these things, but why don't we put everything on the table?

Let's look at that region and let's think about all the things that might be different about it, not just the fact that, well, you know, hey, more people seem to respect the

Bible there. Guess that's why there's more smoking, right? Yeah, I don't think it quite works that way.

Okay, so this next slide is on the access to healthcare. You can ignore that first map.

That really, that's old data and I probably should not have included it in this slideshow and it's really not the most relevant.

Look at the second one though. The second one is percentage of adults 18 to 64 years old without health insurance at the time of interview, 2009

Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, US. Now this is kind of old too, 2009. It's hard to find newer stuff with the time

I had available, but here's the interesting thing about this to me. A lot of states that are part of the

Bible Belt, and West Virginia, of course, and do we wanna say they're part of the Bible Belt? I don't know, but a lot of states that are part of the

Bible Belt and some states that are in there in the Northwest as well seem to be the least, have the people with the least health insurance, 18, 64 year olds without health insurance.

The greatest percentages are in those regions. Of course, the best seem to be the

Upper Midwest and then the Northeast, they're insured. So why is that?

Why is there a disparity that exists in these areas? That's a question.

I wanted to find something that showed access to healthcare as far as clinics and hospitals and stuff.

I was having a hard time, I couldn't find one. But I know from doing stats for the book, Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict, which comes out this week,

I did a study of Appalachia and found they have the least access to healthcare of any population in the entire country.

So I would assume that if we did have a map of that, you would see less dots, where there's a clinic or something in some of these rural areas, especially in those areas.

Now, is that now a cry for social justice? That's my question. If we've been told that disparities are such a, there's a disparity that needs to be rectified, does that mean that a whole bunch of money, federal money needs to be poured into the

Bible Belt and people need to start saying that Bible Belt lives matter or something like that?

Because there's a disparity. Now, look, this is, you may think I'm having fun or I'm making fun or something, but I want to apply the logic that we're so often told.

The logic of the meme is, well, they're just a bunch of really unhealthy people in that area.

Maybe that's true, but guess what else? They just don't seem to have the access to healthcare that others do in the country.

So are you making fun of them? Because they don't have access to healthcare, which is probably tied to poverty, which maybe there's some discrimination behind, oh, who knows?

I mean, this is when you start to drill a little deeper, you start to see maybe there's some other things going on.

It's not just unhealthy people. Now, maybe it is just unhealthy people, but they didn't get that from the Bible, we know that. Let's keep going here.

And we'll get into the weeds even more. Okay, so we're gonna go into some rates here, obesity rate. Obesity rate, the

Midwest 34 .1 % and the South 34 .1%. The Midwest and the South are even when it comes to obesity.

And then the West is 29 .3%, the Northeast 28%, which honestly, it doesn't make me that positive about really any region of the country when

I'm like, okay, the most healthy region, the Northeast apparently, well, when it comes to obesity, is 28%, that's really not that great.

But yeah, without question, the South and the Midwest are the two regions that have the most. Now, if you look at a map, you can see it starts in Texas, and there's this kind of belt that kind of goes through Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, all the way to the

Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Iowa is part of this kind of too, and Kansas. These are the states that have the most obesity.

Now, there's also a sense in which these are areas in which the cuisine is a lot of fried food.

These are places that many of them, especially if you're in the South, they were very impoverished.

And the best way to get calories was to fry your food. The best way to kill stuff was to fry your food. You know, bacteria or things that could be in there that would harm you.

So that's part of the cuisine. Is that because the Bible? Did the Bible tell them to go eat this stuff? No, I mean, a lot of people were on the farm and they could eat that stuff.

They're not on the farm anymore, and they're still eating the same stuff. And it's a problem. It is a problem in some of these areas.

There is no doubt about that. But it's not because they're Bible -believing Christians, unless they're going to all the potlucks, right?

In fact, Chick -fil -A has a grilled sandwich. You don't have to go and buy, get fried chicken all the time.

But in a lot of these places, that's what everyone eats. It's fried chicken. It's greasy stuff.

And it's the cultural cuisine. It's sweet tea. It's a lot of sugar. It's Coca -Cola. I mean, Coca -Cola came from this area.

So that's a problem. I'm not gonna say it's not. And I'm not gonna say that maybe there's not some hypocrisy there.

But you're not talking about the entire population either. Whatever it was, 23 % of people that take there are evangelical.

Are they the ones that are having this problem? Maybe some of them, but I don't know where these numbers actually meet.

So without a study that would tell us, we don't know if there's a lot of hypocrisy going on there or not. There may not be.

There may be some. There may not be some, as much as we think. We don't really know.

So again, this goes past the Bible Belt. This extends into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

This is not something that's just unique to this area. This is mostly the South and Midwest, but the whole country is not doing too well on this.

And I will say one more thing. I think Colorado is one of the most healthy states. It's usually one of those healthy states.

Areas that tend to be mountainous are areas where people are doing a lot of outdoor activities that require physical exercise.

They tend not to have these problems as much. Also, obviously areas where the cuisine is not as rich and sweet and fattening.

Infant mortality. Infant mortality. Again, it's the portions of the

Midwest and the West, but look, the Bible Belt's got it the worst. Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, first three, and then

North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Wyoming, Georgia, South Carolina, Ohio. Places with the worst infant mortality.

Now, I think there's a correlation here with probably health insurance and access to healthcare and these kinds of things as well.

So again, I mean, a lot of these things are related. Cigarette smoking. How about West Virginia, which we already saw was one of the, by counting, one of the least religious, at least by religions claiming that they have adherence there.

Kentucky, it looks like Arkansas, and then Guam. Guam is the next one. After West Virginia, Kentucky, and Arkansas, it's

Guam. And then Indiana, Tennessee, Ohio, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma.

South, Midwest, and Guam. It looks like Alaska too has an issue with this.

Again though, this is a cultural thing. This is where can this stuff be grown. The South has a longer memory.

They hold onto traditions longer too. So granddad did it, dad did it, I'm doing it.

There's probably other explanations here as well, but this isn't the Bible told me I should smoke.

This isn't necessarily because of Christianity. Look, West Virginia, of all the places in Appalachia in the

South that we determined, West Virginia is not really very religious.

So, and they're the number one for cigarette smoking here. Next one, life expectancy.

I got a county map for this one. Now, on the state level, West Virginia is the first. Then Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana.

A little bit of the Midwest, mostly the South. I got a county map though here, and you can see where it's really heavy.

Again, it's a combination of everything we've been talking about. Culturally rich foods.

You also have less access to healthcare. There's more poverty. All these kinds of things add up to create a situation like this.

Is this because the Bible caused them to do this? Is it because their Christian faith is causing low life expectancy?

No, it's all the other stuff. That would make a lot more sense. There's also, but on the county level,

I think it's interesting, because you also see these states that are more healthy, but then they have a county here or there that just is in the same category as lower

West Virginia. Alaska even has that, which I think is fairly fascinating. Then we have homicides.

And homicides, if we're looking at numbers, California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Missouri, New York, Michigan, it's states with large populations.

If we're looking at the rate, it's actually Washington, DC. That's the first one. And I can tell you right now, they're not the most

Christian city, Washington, DC. And then you have Louisiana. Now, Washington, DC, by the way, is off the charts.

23 .5, 23 .5, nothing else comes close. The next state or next district that they're counting

Washington, DC as a state, the next state is Louisiana, and it's at 11 .7. It's half what

Washington, DC is. Washington, DC is off the charts with the homicide rate. Then it's the state of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alaska.

Now, I have to say this too. Washington, it's almost not fair because Washington, DC is a city. It's just mainly an urban area.

If we were comparing apples with apples, it would be what's Chicago, what's New York, what's LA, what's Houston, that kind of thing.

It's the major cities that are gonna have the larger homicide rates. That's where the people are, and that's where gangs are, and that's where that kind of violence is.

Where people are spread apart, you're not gonna have it as much. But anyway, I digress. Louisiana, Mississippi, Alaska, Missouri, Maryland, South Carolina, New Mexico, Arkansas, Alabama.

So there's quite a few states from the South, but there's also a number of states that aren't from the South. What would cause this?

Well, there could be heat, like I said, that maybe that's a correlation. Could be poverty.

Could be traditions that trace back to Scotch -Irish days in some of these areas, in Appalachia especially, but even through the

Lower South, a lot of Scotch -Irish people, and they're in Cajuns in Louisiana and stuff.

There's a temper that sometimes is associated with those things, and kind of a mentality, and I'll just tell you straight up, because I've noticed this.

There's sort of a mentality of we do things our own way here. We're not necessarily calling the police.

We're not necessarily relying on the government to solve our problems. We're gonna solve them, and sometimes that means they're gonna solve them their own way with a gun, and that mortifies people in the suburbs, especially if it's an actual, if it's a homicide, it's evil, it's wrong, but I think there's also a cultural thing going on here that causes some of this, because I've lived in New York for most of my life, but I've also spent some time in Mississippi, and obviously

North Carolina and Virginia, and I've just noticed there are way different mentalities. I mean, in New York, especially people from the city, they call the police at the drop of a hat.

I mean, I don't know how many times I've seen where someone, you're making too much noise, and the police show up.

The neighbor doesn't even do the, they don't call you. They make these big fences to separate neighbors from each other.

They're just not as friendly, and when there's more interaction between people, and I'm gonna take things into my own hand, that person offended me and offended my honor, and honor's a big part of that Scotch -Irish tradition kind of going back, and even the

Cavalier tradition, people who settled in the South, that's going to, that could contribute to this, and I'm spitballing myself.

I'm not saying those are the reasons, but I'm saying there could be a lot of other reasons. The Bible doesn't tell you to commit homicide, obviously, but the more rural, the less access to police, and culturally, the less reliance on police, the more you're gonna have these kinds of things.

Crime and homicide by county. Now, this is interesting to me.

You see, for those listening, I'll try to describe this. Violent crime incidents per 1 ,000 people in 2014.

Now, you see there's a bunch of pockets in New Mexico and Texas. Alaska's got some deep pockets.

There's some in Michigan, and throughout the Midwest, there's some. Look at this, though. Look at the South. It starts up here in Tennessee.

It follows the Mississippi River down to Louisiana, and then it kind of takes a right, and it kind of goes through the middle of Mississippi.

If you notice, the regions of Mississippi, Mississippi's mostly white. There's mostly no data, or it's not much.

There's not a whole lot of crime, but there's this sort of line in the middle of Mississippi.

That line extends through the middle of Alabama, kind of. Southern Alabama a bit, jumps to the middle of Alabama, and then you kind of see lower

Georgia, and extends through South Carolina, North Carolina, up, but it's this line, and you can see it when you look at it from the county level.

Like I said, it's almost like a U that goes through the South, and so if you're gonna, hey, look, these regions are really violent.

Well, are they, or is the crime happening in certain counties in those regions?

Now, this is where I think more study should be done. Where are the most religious regions?

Is it the areas where these dots are? Is it the areas, where are they, where those dots aren't?

Because look, it looks like there's actually, in some of these counties, there's not a whole lot of crime at all, but then there's these regions that probably pull the whole stats for the state up.

What do you attribute that to? Why is it? Why are the people living in these certain counties more prone to crime?

This is, this next map is homicides. So the first one was crime, violent crime. This is just homicides, and you can see some of the same kind of things playing out, but look, even

Georgia, and Alabama, Mississippi, like there's what, a few counties that are red, and then the rest of it's just white?

But you see this go through, and you see the whole, the Northeast, there's this line that goes up, and there's a line of red.

California, there's a whole lot of red. So there's, it's honestly, it's not states as much as it is, certain regions, certain counties, where this stuff is happening.

It's not like it characterizes an entire state. Who's living in, well, obviously, that's Atlanta. That's an inner city area in Georgia, right?

You can see that's where the homicides are happening. So it's not like rural Georgia, guy going to church every

Sunday, faithfully, farmer, he's the problem. He's the one committing the homicides. Well, look, it's

Atlanta, where the homicides are happening mostly. So the stereotypes are starting to melt away a little bit when you look at it on the county level.

Now, here's marriage and divorce. Marriage, number one places, or I'll start with divorce.

Places, number one, New Mexico. Well, it's not the Bible Belt. Arkansas, okay, that's the Bible Belt.

Nevada, that's not the Bible Belt. Oklahoma, I guess somewhat, maybe Bible Belt -ish. Kentucky, somewhat

Bible Belt, but we already determined Eastern Kentucky, not very Christian, or at least religious. Delaware, that's not

Bible Belt. Mississippi is, Alabama is, Georgia is, Indiana's sort of, maybe -ish. So yeah, there's definitely a number of states that are

Bible Belt, but there's a number of them that aren't, and the highest one here, New Mexico, is certainly not, for divorces.

Now, here's a county -level adjusted divorce rate. Again, if you look at it,

I don't know what in the world is happening with Arkansas. I really don't. You look at Arkansas, and you look at Indiana also, even though Indiana, I know it's number 10 on the list, but if you look at it at the county level, they are, it's just like divorces are happening left and right.

In West Virginia, Indiana, Arkansas, to some extent Oklahoma, obviously California, Nevada, New Mexico.

Why is that? And in Maine, my goodness, Maine. Georgia, to some extent.

So, this is, there's not, it's not just as simple as saying, well, it's the Bible Belt. There's definitely a lot of it's outside.

In fact, the more deep South, you know, you're not in Arkansas, in Oklahoma, in West Virginia, Indiana, Maine.

So, what's up with that? Now, and you look at, there's counties here, and there's certain counties, like in Mississippi, like there's, like a third of the counties look like high divorce rates, but then a third of them, not as high, or maybe a quarter of them, not as high.

So, South Carolina, right? That's definitely Bible Belt. There's not one county in South Carolina that is in that 21 percentile of divorces.

So, North Carolina, Virginia, again, this stuff, this is Bible Belt, but you're not seeing the divorce stuff there as much either.

Why is that? It could correlate with economic prosperity in some ways. That could be part of it. When someone loses their job, when times are hard and it's, you know, living is a struggle, that could be part of it too.

And again, you know, are they gonna make the case for some kind of social justice thing, or I don't know.

But clearly, at the county level, another story is told here.

I wanted to show you too, here's the marriage rate. So, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Washington, Idaho, North Dakota, Nebraska, Maine, Oklahoma, Kansas.

Here, or this is the percentage of people who are married, the higher percentages. I wanted to go down though, county level adjusted marriage rate.

This is actually fascinating to me. This is absolutely fascinating. I haven't heard anyone else talk about this. Look at this dearth of marriage.

So, the darker the region, the more marriages, okay? So, you can look out west.

In certain counties, a lot of people marry, probably ranchers and stuff. I'm assuming rural areas,

I don't know. But Northern New York and Southern Vermont, there's a lot of marriages.

A lot of marriages in Upper Alabama and Lower Georgia. The coasts from North Carolina, South Carolina, a lot of marriages.

A lot of marriages, ironically, a lot of marriages in Arkansas and a lot of divorces in Arkansas. People are really getting married and divorced in Arkansas a lot.

And I don't know why Arkansas, and the same thing with New Mexico. So, New Mexico and Arkansas, I don't know what's going on with those places.

Lots of marriages, lots of divorces. But here's the fascinating thing. You ready for it?

Check this out. Do you see the belt? You see, and this is very similar to what I showed you earlier with crime.

Not exactly the same, but it's very similar. It's the same, almost the same regions where there was high crime, there's low marriage.

Look at that. Running right through the South and going up. Now, check this out.

I happened to come across this. Rates of persons living with diagnosed HIV. Guess what you see again?

The same belt. That same line. You have where there was crime and where there was low marriages is high rates of people living with HIV.

Go figure that one out. So the lower the marriage rate, the higher it looks like the correlation with rates of persons living with HIV.

Now, if you go beyond that belt where there's low marriages, right?

And you look and it gets drastic real quick. And then all of a sudden there's high marriages. I just think this is absolutely fascinating.

And I don't really have, I don't have a lot of explanations for this. I think maybe in some rural areas,

I think there might be some people who are just doing, they might not even be registering with the state when they get married.

I've seen this before at least. So I don't know how prevalent it is. I mean, I don't have the information in front of me.

But there does seem to be a possible correlation between crime, between being unmarried and having

HIV. There's, in these regions at least. And are those, is that the 23 % of people who are evangelical in their belief?

Are they the ones that have HIV, are unmarried and are committing crime?

Or is there another, are there different kinds of people living in these same regions?

And the stats for the state might go up because of some of the people living there. See, these are questions that need to be answered.

How about teen births? Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Alabama, West Virginia, Kentucky, New Mexico, Texas, Tennessee.

Okay, all of those Bible Belt except for New Mexico. Why is that?

Well, I don't know all the explanations for all of this, but I will show you this. And again, I didn't get deep, deep, deep, but child marriage is more common in the

Southern United States. So where people are getting married, they're getting married young. And by the way, I have heard this before too, and I don't know how true it is.

But the younger someone gets married, the higher chance they're gonna get divorced later. And that's, again, the

Bible Belt area holds on to traditions longer, whether they're good or they're bad, or they're fit for the modern world or not, they hold onto them longer.

And so I find this fascinating. Of course, West Virginia is in that. West Virginia, again, not very religious, but holding on to the highest rate in the whole entire country of child marriages in West Virginia.

It's also where there's less access to healthcare. It's also where one of the highest poverty rates in the whole entire country.

It's also where a lot of the teen births are happening. So it could be that there's a lot of young married couples in their teens who are having children.

Didn't used to be uncommon for people to get married even at 16, 17, 18, 19.

And that's still probably happening in West Virginia. So it doesn't mean that this is all out of wedlock.

Some of it probably is, but there's also people who are legitimately married having kids as well in those regions.

Okay, 2019 poverty rate in the United States. Again, you can see, look, this is where people have less money.

West Virginia is on top. Actually, poverty rate, Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico, Kentucky, Arkansas, West Virginia, Alabama, Oklahoma, Tennessee, South Carolina.

Yep, the Bible Belt is, they got that one. The most poor states are in the bottom. Now, why is that?

Is it because of the Bible? The Bible caused them to be poor? I think there's a combination of a lot of things.

Let me give you a few. Let me show you this real quick. This is personal property, 1860.

John, why are you going back over a hundred years? Because I want to show you something. The richest states in the country were the

Deep South, the richest, the most affluent and wealthy per capita, Deep South, and then by extension, the rest of the

South. Arkansas, not so much, but it wasn't as settled as much at that point. But this is, so this is a fascinating thing.

This is before a big war happened in which over 600 ,000 people died. And then afterward, a million people basically starved in that region.

Devastating, devastating to the populations there. Absolutely devastating. And they never quite recovered.

And this is why there's bitterness. Even in some areas, there's some bitterness that's still there about what happened that long ago.

Because there was an, it's not the war itself. The war definitely caused damage, but there was an, there was something changed economically after that happened.

And the Republican Party gained ascendancy. In fact, the Grant, many people still think, now

I think Biden's given him a run for his money, but that the Grant administration was one of the most corrupt administrations in all of American history with the corporatism, corporations, this is where lobbying really started.

I think it was actually the Lincoln administration where the term lobbyist originated. But they would stay in the lobby, right?

They would try to get the attention of congressmen and senators to try to get support for their projects.

And it was not the case as much before the war. After the war, that stuff was mainly in the industrial centers in the

North. Businessmen were starting to, the lines between government and business, let's say we're getting closer and closer and more vague, and it was hard to see the difference, to the point now where we just, government and business, they're like big business, are like the same entity almost, the way they function.

But anyway, this changed when we went from more manufacturing and technology and commercialism, that kind of stuff, and less agriculture.

Things changed drastically. And so you have a situation now where the most impoverished regions are the regions that during 1860 and before that would have been some of the most rich and affluent.

So there's a lot of, what would have changed that? Well, there's a whole lot of things. There's a devastating war, obviously.

There's years and years of reconstruction, but really economic colonization and domination of that region.

And that certainly has an effect. But if you go to some of the cities in the

South, obviously they're the ones booming now. They're the ones everyone wants to move to. They're the ones that are doing well because of their lower taxes and all that kind of thing.

They're attracting people. They're attracting a different kind of industry. That's the

New South, right? The New South is getting out of this. But again, this is a region where traditions run deep and a lot of people wanna continue the traditions that their parents had and their grandparents had.

And they don't like, especially in the outlying areas, they don't necessarily want. The family farm means something to them.

The old homestead means something. They wanna hold onto those things. And so some of those traditions might even be holding them back economically.

And that's fine with many of those people. That's fine with them because their value system's a lot different. They're not valuing everything by the dollar.

A lot more sentimentality, a lot more family connectedness, that kind of thing. But there's probably a whole host of so many things that would actually play into this.

But I think a big part of it is changes in industry. And the

Industrial Revolution really, it planted itself in the

Northeastern United States especially, and that's where a lot of the wealth was made.

And it bypassed the region of the South. And it's come there much later.

And so is that the Bible that's caused that? Is that Christianity that's caused that? Well, not really.

It's not like Christianity caused this state of affairs where there's a disparity or a wealth gap between these regions.

And I've made this point many times, by the way. I've made this point. I've said, look, if you wanna try to, like last year, take a racial group and say, there's a disparity, therefore reparations, therefore social justice, therefore whatever.

What if we took out a map, I said, and did this? You're gonna find a region of the country that most of the left does not like too much is going to be on the short end of the stick.

Do they deserve reparations? And why not? Why do you do it for a racial group, but you won't do it for a regional?

Why not? That's a legitimate question. Lots more could be said, but I feel like it's not probably, it's not something that I'm probably educated on enough, at least the economics of it.

I'm not aware enough of why there's that disparity to talk more about it, but I'm giving you some ideas at least.

Now, here's some positive things I just wanted to show you. How about percentage of salary by state that's given to charitable causes?

Guess what? Bible Belt, parts of the West. Bible Belt though, gives the most.

Other than, let's see, what's the biggest? Utah and Idaho, probably because of the Mormon. They're giving to the Mormon church.

But after that, it's the Bible Belt. They are the ones giving more to charitable causes.

And I think church would be included in this as a percentage of their salary. And that's the way you have to look at this. They're making less, things cost less also.

So yeah, you move down there, property prices are great. And salaries are also not that great.

So everything's sort of adjusted down. But so if you look at it as a percentage, it's gonna make a lot more sense.

And I mean, the people of Mississippi are out giving the people of New York by more than a third.

There's no comparison here. So I mean, like what's up with Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, Massachusetts?

I mean, what's up with these places that are giving 2 .5%, 2 .8 %? And then

Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, 6 .2%, 7 .2%. Why is there such a disparity?

The people who have the least are giving the most percentage of their salaries. Why is that? Maybe that's the

Christianity. If we're gonna attribute all the Christianity, maybe that's part of it, I don't know. Probably, but this is interesting because the people who are in the most elite sort of, the states that are the most progressive and want to hatch their plans, the people from the

Ivy League schools that like to enact their ideas across the entire country are the ones giving the least.

Think about that. They are willing to give the least amount of their personal income. That should show you some, if you wanna talk about hypocrisy, right?

And this is what the whole meme's about. It's like, oh, there's all these hypocrites in the Bible Belt. What about that? All right, retirement -friendly.

And this is, I think, this is a huge thing to me. It's the Bible Belt. Hands down, okay,

North Dakota, Wyoming, outliers. Then it's pretty much the Bible Belt. Best place to retire. The most retirement -friendly laws, you can keep your money.

You know, places, they're looking, they're not going to the places that are high crime, but there's a lot of low crime places in those states you can go.

People love to retire in these areas. And if you look at the moving trends, yeah, there's people moving to different states that aren't in the

Bible Belt, but a lot of them, it's the Bible Belt. People love to move to the South. Why do people, especially, and this is,

I think this is my last slide, it is. I lived in the Northeast for a while. Well, I lived in New York.

And I did a lot of furniture repair in that area. And I was in hundreds of houses, thousands, really.

And the most common discussion I had with people was where they were gonna go. If they were under 40, 45, generally, they all wanted to go to the

Carolinas. If they were over that age, they all wanted to go to Florida. Everyone in New York wanted to get out of New York.

No one wanted to stay here, it seemed. I mean, it's just, and today, it's even more so that way.

People are getting out, and they're voting with their feet. They're showing that the place they wanna live, the place they feel is a nice place to live, the place that they're gonna be able to keep their money, where there's more freedom for them, is in the

South. That's pretty significant. That is very significant, because you can wipe all those stats away, however accurate they are, and you can do so many things with stats and maps and all those kinds of things.

Wipe that all away. There's people themselves are choosing where they want to live, and they're voting with their feet.

They're saying, these are the places that are nice to live. These are the places that are doing it right, that I wanna put myself, that I wanna put the safety of my family.

If it's really this horrible region that's just characterized by violence, by poverty and health risks and all these things, why are so many people from the areas that are supposedly more healthy with less violence and less health risks, why are they all moving to those areas?

That's the big question that needs to be answered. So what

I've been doing this whole entire episode, let's go back to the meme, if I can pull up the meme, is that this was all in response to a meme, and I'll probably give you more information than it's like a fire hose of information here, but here's the meme.

That's the region that people wanna live in. Okay, why? Why do they wanna live in that? If it's the divorce belt, the teen pregnancy belt, et cetera, et cetera, why do people wanna live there?

I've been poking holes in this meme the entire time. That's what this whole thing has been about. I've been trying to show you this is a little more complicated.

If you think more deeply into it, there's more here. I'm not saying there's not hypocrisy. There certainly is.

I'm not saying that there's not cultural Christianity that is illegitimate.

There certainly is. I'm not saying that everything's great about this area. There's no area that's absolutely great.

Some of these are real problems. We showed that. Some of these are real problems in these areas. But when you look at it at the county level, when you look at, when you see that there's certain regions of these states that pull some of these percentages up, and it doesn't characterize the whole state, when you see that it's only, what, 23 % or whatever

I said of people in these areas that are actually convictionally evangelical, when you start to see that it's not just this area, but for many of these stats, many of these barometers, there's a number of other places in the country that have the same issues going on.

And so some of the questions I'd ask someone who makes a meme like this, obviously the first one is, okay, are you attributing any of this to the

Bible? Is it the Bible that's doing this? Once you get through that, okay, so you're saying they're all hypocrites.

What do you think about people who want to vote for government programs, but won't give up their own personal money?

Is that hypocrisy too? What do you think about the fact that the people from the regions you say are so far ahead want to live in this region that's so far behind?

Why is that? Why do they choose to live in that area? I think you'll have a better discussion.

And it would not be fair to say that it's the belt for all these other things too.

It's maybe the poverty belt, but is that caused because of the Bible or was there some other economic factor that played into this?

All right, I've beaten the dead horse. We're done with this. I hope that was helpful for some of you.

I know I don't usually talk about this stuff, but I thought this is going out there as an argument against Christianity.

And I think it does need to be at least addressed some way. And maybe I've started the ball rolling in that direction. Maybe someone else has answered it and I just am not aware of their answer to that.

But my point is not to defend every single person living in that region, but it is to show that there's a lot of oversimplification and a lot of vilification unnecessarily.

And you can easily flip this back around on someone who wants to attribute this to the

Bible or something like that. And just say, well, should we have some kind of a social justice effort in that area?

Should we do reparations? Should we redistribute income or privilege or something like that to the people that don't have it?

Because you're making the same kind of arguments that were made last year. The reality is, and this is just off the top of my head from knowing so many people in the

South, in the deep South, they don't want anything from the government. They don't want any of that stuff. In fact, they certainly don't vote for the people that would promise them that kind of thing.

They want to be left alone. They want to live their lives the way they want to live. And they're not asking for anything, even though many of them live in poverty and many of them don't have the same access to healthcare and those kinds of things in rural areas.

And I think that's also telling. There's a lot more going on and it's culture.

Culture can be complicated. Culture ranges from region to region, even in a state.

It's more than just religion. There's a lot of factors that play into it. So if I don't get anything else through, hopefully that got through, that culture is complicated.

All right, we have more coming up later in the week. Hopefully that was helpful for you. God bless.