what is different about the southern states in the US

[egb_hibs]

what are the cultural factors that lead to the southern states being apparently different in character from the more northern ones?

why more god guts and guns south of the mason-dixie line? i appreciate that back in the civil war, an agrarian south needed blacks to be slaves while an industrial capitalists north needed them to be free workers, but now the economy has moved on, what is the decisive difference?

or maybe there isn't really that much of a difference and it's just a bigotted stereotype?

looking forward to the views of the stateside contingent

[Burbank Lilywhite]

I really can't answer this one egb living out here in LA. However I do believe that the south has come closer to joining the rest of the nation.

[Bartok]

The south is different for a whole bunch of reasons.

The plantations in the south grew crops that required a lot of labour, tobacco and later cotton. After the stream of indentured servants from Britain dried up the slave trade from Africa got really going. There were abolitionists in the south before the civil war, but most were in the north where farms were small-scale and didn't require a lot of cheap labour. There was very little industry in the south because they lacked the natural resources. The civil war wrecked the south's economy and if anything simply made racism more deeply entrenched there. Because federal law was limited in scope (and because the Supreme Court was racist too), the 'Jim Crow' segregation laws in the south were allowed to exist right up until the 1960s. That kind of history creates its own ethos. Antipathy towards the federal government created a sort of defensive outlook and an independent streak that fostered the popularity of firearms etc.

As far as the Bible Belt goes it was the Baptist Church that were most welcoming to African Americans and I think that may be a key reason why evangelism grew to be so popular.

The south is deeply conservative, but BL is right, it is more like the north than it ever was (so I am told). In terms of the economy, manufacturing and farming are both in decline, service sector is just as important as it is in the north though. Atlanta has a phenomenal growth rate at present, though the recession is checking that just now.

The economic patterns in north and south are very close now, and things are changing as a result. In the quiet backwaters of the south you will still find the old attitudes, but increasingly rarely.