Driving through the South is always an...experience. In particular, GPS took me on a weird road through rural North Carolina to avoid Charlotte traffic. It was striking how many Confederate flags I saw, how many "Back the Blue" yard signs, how many Trump stickers on the back of trucks. I mean, it's not surprising, I guess, but striking.
I can't help but also note that the prevalence of a certain brand of Christianity was everywhere, too. There is a certain culture that relies on authority to maintain a status quo, and that usually relies on a specific reading about divinity and the relationship between man and God. It isn't fundamentally different than the attitude about authority in some forms of Orthodox Judaism or Islam. God's authority on earth is communicated through sacred texts and interpreted, usually through a male clerical class.
This culture usually relies on various ancient gender and racial ideas that depend on uniformity and conformity. God's word is not to be questioned or adapted. It's God's word.
The people in these communities are often referred to as "Real Americans," but we have seen under Trump that they are unusually quick to ally themselves with an authoritarian movement, which isn't surprising, because their faith is fairly authoritarian. People who marvel that Evangelical Christians can support someone as nakedly immoral as Trump miss that this strain of Christianity is not doctrinal but cultural.
This isn't a condemnation of all Christianity, but rather a narrow, rural sect. But that makes any outreach to them incredibly hard, because it's not just a political position, but a religious one as well.
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