Bible Belt Reverend
| 📖 | |
| Era | The Sixties |
|---|---|
| Age | 50-65 |
| Home | Macon, GA |
| Demographic | rural, white, Baptist pastor |
| Lean | segregationist |
| Race | white |
A rural Georgia Baptist pastor in his fifties whose pulpit shapes his congregation's politics. He represents the religious wing of Southern white resistance to integration, a Democrat by inheritance who is drifting away from the national party.
Who they stand for
The Southern Baptist Convention was the largest Protestant body in the country in the 1960s, with roughly ten million members concentrated in the former Confederacy, and its white rural pulpits were the moral authority of the Deep South. The pastor's people had been Democrats since Reconstruction and voted for Kennedy uneasily in 1960, many balking at voting for a Catholic. In 1964 the five Deep South states went to Goldwater, and four of them went to Wallace in 1968.
Two rulings drove the shift in this bloc's politics as much as the Civil Rights Act did. Engel v. Vitale in 1962 and Abington v. Schempp in 1963 removed state-sponsored prayer and Bible reading from public schools. This bloc read these rulings as the federal government turning against Christianity itself. Dixiecrat Dale defends segregation as a matter of property and custom. The Reverend defends it as a matter of divine order. This is why the religious right of the 1970s grew out of this argument after the legal defeat of segregation.
Playing to them
He responds to a president who speaks the language of faith and leaves the schools alone. He wants a president who supports prayer in public schools, who restrains federal marshals and Justice Department lawsuits in Georgia's schools and churches, and who respects the churches as the South's own moral authority. He is winnable on anti-communism and on a president's personal piety, which is why a visibly devout Protestant gets an easier hearing from him than a Catholic does. What he will not forgive is federal enforcement of integration in Georgia's schools and churches. A president who describes the civil rights movement as consistent with the Gospel puts himself in conflict with the Reverend and his congregation.
Winning him costs the same support as winning Dixiecrat Dale. Birmingham Rosa, Harlem James and South Side Dorothy are lost outright. Faculty Eleanor and Campus David become hostile. Catholic Mary becomes suspicious of a president who courts an old opponent of her own community. A president does not have to win him outright to avoid losing him. A president who says little about race and speaks often about faith can keep him neutral without taking on the full cost of winning his support.
Where they live
The five states where Bible Belt Reverend makes up the largest share of the electorate in the sixties:
- Mississippi
- Alabama
- South Carolina
- Georgia
- Louisiana