The Weakness of The Bible Belt

The Bible belt is a region of the Southern United States where Christianity is socially acceptable, and very few people will bat an eye if you choose to pray in public. It is a place where you will often find that the government upholds traditional Christian political views, and you rarely have to have your beliefs challenged by someone. Now there are always some who will disagree with you, but by and large, most people in the Bible belt will confess to being a Christian or at least choosing to label themselves as one. I grew up in the Bible Belt and grew up a social conservative and even Mennonite for much of my childhood, so I could not have been more thoroughly exposed to cultural Christianity had I wanted to be. It was a conservatively safe place for me to be raised. It was a place that did not challenge my beliefs but allowed me to believe whatever I wanted. 

Here is where I want to engage today. I believe the Bible belt is fundamentally a good thing, and I am deeply grateful for it, but I also must ask, is it socially healthy to never have your beliefs challenged and never to be asked, "why do you believe that?" It is overall a safe place for young Christians to grow up, and that was something my parents wanted for my siblings and me. They wanted us to be raised in a safe place, Safe from exposure to the world's corruption. This was enough of a concern that, for a time, my family and I lived among the Amish, again in hopes of keeping us safe and keeping us from being exposed to the "sex, drugs, and rock and roll," a culture that was becoming more and more prevalent in the Mennonite community. I don't blame my parents or judge my parents for their concerns. I know they wanted to protect their children from what they saw as a danger to them, but I believe that protection, while warranted and well-meaning, also had its cost. All things in life have a cost; we each have to measure the cost and decide if the price is worth the reward. We each live a life where we will be exposed to some form of social, physical, and emotional danger. This is an inescapable fact. No matter how safe we try to make the world, we can not remove this principle of life. To live in this world is to risk danger, hurt, and trauma. 

Today we have a culture that is obsessed with the idea of safety. We don't want anyone to get hurt, so we create ultra-safe bubble environments where everyone is protected, and no one ever has to experience being told they are wrong. We try to protect people from words, even if those words are true and would be beneficial. We see this happening all over American culture, where colleges have safe spaces for students who have experienced violence through words. We are breeding a generation of young people who are infantile well into their twenties. This fact has been well documented and written about in two books I would highly recommend. The first is; The Codling Of The American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, and the second is; iGen by Jean M Twenge. Again both of these books do a fantastic job of presenting concerns for our current and future generations who are being raised in a world where they are isolated and protected from any ideas that may hurt or offend their existing beliefs. 

The bad thing is that we are not backing down from this safety culture but are doubling down. In California today, we see the rules of math being rewritten so that we don't hurt or offend someone because we can't tell someone they are wrong anymore; we have to affirm them, we have to agree and support everything they believe, and feel. It's a dangerous game we are playing, making a fragile generation of children. Children who aren't prepared for a world that does not care about their feelings. Someone reading this and going, well, yeah, okay, but what does that have to do with the Bible belt? I'll get to that, but first, I want to share a little more about my brief Amish life. 

As mentioned, when I was about seven years old, my parents chose to move to Kentucky to live with the Amish. They did not want us to grow up surrounded or influenced by the modernized Mennonite culture, influenced by the message of the 80s of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. So to protect us and keep us safe from that world, they decided to return to a simpler lifestyle that would be safe from this modern message. It was a wild three years. I don't know what most children remember from the ages of seven to ten, but I can tell you I remember it clearly as it was a truly unique and wild time of my life. It was a time filled with adventure. Often spent in a nearby forest with no parental supervision or in the back of a buggy wagon hauling silage for the cows, my brother and I would milk by hand. There were so many crazy adventures. My brother and I nearly got plowed down by an angry bull because our neighbor's son decided he would taunt it because he was some tough guy. Or this one time, when we disobeyed our mom and went skating on a frozen pond even though my brother and I had been explicitly told not to get on the ice! 

We had all these crazy experiences and adventures, which I hope to write out in further detail in later posts. We had been protected from the influence of modern America, but eventually, we left that culture and that world. When we did, in many ways, we were not prepared for the contemporary world and the messages of that world. I know my parents did their best, and they tried their hardest to protect and raise us right, and I am grateful every day for my Mom and Dad and the heart behind what they did. But the truth is that protecting us from one thing only exposes us to other dangers. You see, there is no safe space; to live is to be in danger in some shape or form. All we can do is mitigate the threat and teach the young how to engage with it. 

There is no safe place not among the Amish and not in the Bible Belt, not in some mountain retreat and not on a deserted island. We can hide all we want, but danger will find us; the form it takes may just vary. So each of us should be prepared to engage in that danger, no matter what form it takes. If it is physical danger, then train your body. If it is a mental danger, then train your mind. Our culture today is becoming increasingly opposed to Christianity and its values, and thinking that just because you live in some small rural town, you will be safe is foolish. We each are responsible for training ourselves. For myself, this was made abundantly clear in a moment when someone once dear to me told me that they didn't believe anymore. I was shattered and distraught, I was also entirely unprepared for the questions I was asked, and suddenly I didn't know if what I believed had any value or was based on any truth because I had never been exposed to someone who disagreed with me. Everyone just believed what they believed, but they had no real reason for it beyond what they had been taught or been exposed to through osmosis. I can say that I had never really been pushed to measure my beliefs against those of others, and maybe this was uniquely my experience. Still, I think it is the experience of many in the protected bubble that we each place ourselves in, whether the Bible belt or some other "safe space." 

So as ever, I leave you with a challenge. A challenge to train yourself and not be caught off guard. Instead, equip and train yourself with knowledge and wisdom. Equip yourself with an understanding of what you believe and why you believe it. Do not be like a reed in the wind of culture blowing in whatever direction is trendy or politically correct at the moment because there is no firm foundation there. 

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