] Are Southerners mainly people who are trying very hard to ] be old-fashioned Northerners? ] ] The phenomenon seems to go back a long, long way, and it ] may have something to do with how the South got to be the ] Bible Belt. Two centuries ago, when New England was the ] Bible Belt, the South had a reputation as an unchurched ] wilderness populated by godless heathens. Knoxville, in ] particular. In 1810, when it was capital of Tennessee, ] Knoxville was described with horror (by a ] Pennsylvania-churched minister) as the only capital city ] in the world without a single chapel of any denomination. ] But later, in that respect, the South became more ] Northern than the North. ] ] A related native of the North was prohibition. The ] American temperance movement started in Massachusetts in ] the 1820s. The idea gained some advocates in Tennessee, ] but they weren't successful in a big way until after ] Illinois reformer Frances Willard conducted her more than ] one crusade in Knoxville. She sometimes made the South ] seem as if it was behind the times because unlike ] some progressive Northern communities, we didn't yet have ] prohibition. A very interesting observation on the collective psychology of the South. The Old North |