The interplay—both public and private, if they can be separated—between religion and society intrigues me, especially in how it influences the identity and movement of peoples around the world. My immediate environs of Waco, Texas, offer a context in which to consider group identity. It is observable here along lines of race and class—and manifested everywhere from supermarket aisles and hair salons to church pews and board of trustee meetings. Although the fierce "republic-an" loyalty of most Texans does not often invite comparison with the rest of the South, there is one parallel that exemplifies a cultural link between race and religion—here as elsewhere.

It is said that Waco is the capital of the Texan Bible Belt. To borrow from sociologist Benedict Anderson, that distinction refers, in my view, to an "imagined community." That is to say, to a historically specific identity that creates particular idioms, collective narratives, demographic "facts," and cultural symbols. This identity reproduces itself by polarizing and excluding the idioms, narratives, facts, and symbols of communities that differ from itself, the dominate community.

The Bible Belt is a phrase coined around 1925 by writer and critic Henry Louis Mencken to refer to those regions of the United States, particularly the "belt" of southern states from Arkansas to the Carolinas and below, where fundamentalist beliefs prevail and Christian clergy are especially influential in politics and society. It is as much a cultural distinction as a geographic reference, in its advocacy of a particular perspective on the proper structure, relation, and transcendental foundation of politics, religion, and society.

Those participating in the dominant identity of the Bible Belt (thus inside its imagined community) use the phrase positively to demarcate and stand in solidarity with other culturally and theologically conservative Christians. As I witness around me, "blue laws" benignly protect the community’s moral fiber, girl’s promise rings are as common as male Promise Keepers, and faith and the family dominate public discourse.

What is nearly invisible to the image of the Bible Belt that I grew up with is how very "white" it is, relating perhaps more to way that race socially constructs itself than to a pattern within religion, except where faith is not critical of its historical conditioning and social privileging. To a friend of mine, this is because of its geographic overlap with the former states of the Confederacy.

In contrast, those "outside" the Bible Belt in either cultural identity or geographic location—frequently polemicized as urban, secular rationalists (a.k.a. liberals)—sometimes use the phrase derogatorily to distinguish themselves from what they consider, in one author’s words, "narrow-minded, Bible-thumping, pushy, insensitive, [intolerant]" Christian fundamentalists. Clearly there are conflicting definitions and implications of group identity within any one label.

The Deep South is another label as much geographic as cultural and political. It, too, shows how ingrained assumptions of race are frequently combined with religiosity and narrow, collective moral narratives. Although the Deep South refers to a smaller geographic region (the southernmost portions of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, I want to argue that the Deep South can be compared to the Bible Belt along the axis of race relations vis-à-vis religion.

As opposed to the gentle present of a nonfractured, stable, and highly moral community in the Bible Belt, common usage of the Deep South recalls a disjointed and violent past—one that still eerily informs the present consciousness of many. Lynchings, midnight raids, secret societies, forced integration, and residual resentment (an dangerous "other-izing" emotion) between white European and black African Americans are frequently recalled in the corpus of civil rights literature that deals with this region. Yet compared to the "closed society" image of the Bible Belt, a new social gospel and a courageous black theology grew out of the troubles of the Deep South, critically and positively including race into the structure of religion as a means to open and transform society.

"Red and yellow, black and white—all are precious in his sight." The familiar ditty plays in the back of my mind as I write, reminding me that our identifying heritage, whether we construct it on the lines of race, gender, geography, politics, or doctrine, or worship style, are human boarders, not divine. The subjective, objectifying reading of such group identities is too frequently made, albeit invisibly and uncritically, on the grounds of whose stories and whose sufferings (or lack thereof) dominate the collective narrative. Such is not of God’s will, and creates the precise boundaries that Christ came to cross and erase from the sands of time.

Christians and others must resist uncritical value judgments made at first sight, when communities are divided on the basis of race, class, gender, educational attainment, ethnicity, sexual orientation, property ownership, or whatever. God is a lover of all cultures, all peoples, all children, at all stages of life, and we all fall short of the glory of God. I firmly believe that the idea a community can be more—or less—desirable before God on the basis of such socially imagined identities is fallacious and untenable, whether you live in my corner of the Bible Belt or elsewhere.

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