“Southern Baptists, the biggest white evangelical grouping, remain the largest force in religious life in the Deep South, Tidewater and Greater Appalachia, which are also the stronghold of nondenominational Christian churches, the vast majority of which are independent Baptist fundamentalist congregations. The distribution of the Great Wave immigrants is the primary force behind today’s religious geography.
One consequence of all this is political. These are the only regions where white Christian Nationalism — the belief that the United States is a country founded by and for white Christian evangelical Protestants — is sufficiently widespread to influence politics and policy. In all the other regions, white Protestants, whether evangelical or not, haven’t been a plurality of the population for decades or even centuries, but in the southern nations, evangelicals have been in the driver’s seat since the early 19th century. A majority of white evangelical Christians hold Christian Nationalist views compared to a third of white mainline Protestants and just 30 percent of white Catholics, according to a 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. Among white Christian Nationalist adherents, 81 percent believe “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background” and 87 percent believe that God intended the U.S. to be a promised land for “European Christians.” (By comparison, Americans overall rejected the latter assertion by more than two to one, the former by more than three to one.)
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the three “southern” regions have seen a substantial increase in the foreign-born population: roughly tenfold in the case of Tidewater and the Deep South, and a more than doubling in Appalachia. Now these regions have a higher proportion of foreign-born people than either Yankeedom or the Midlands, and Greater Appalachia isn’t far behind.
To be clear, it’s not that those regions have a higher share of immigrants than some other parts of the country. Rather, it’s that the share of the foreign-born population has grown dramatically in places where, historically, there were few immigrants to begin with and very little experience with living with them. Almost all of the immigrant growth in these regions has happened since the late 1990s, the result of the collapse of Yankee-Midland manufacturing and the transfer of factory jobs to the south’s low-wage, low-regulation, low-tax jurisdictions.
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Much of the scholarly research suggests that people in regions that have always been prominent immigrant destinations and continue to be so now tend to have positive feelings about immigrants, but people in regions that have recently become destinations after having few if any foreign-born residents are more likely to see them as invaders.
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Yankeedom’s Puritan founders had strict religious and moral requirements for citizenship…Newcomers were meant to “melt” into the existing culture.
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the Deep South and Tidewater were ruled by slaveholding oligarchs and aristocrats who saw no need for immigrants and created an economic and social environment that offered few reasons for any to come… These regions were tightly bound to narrow ethnoracial and religious criteria for belonging and remained so right into living memory, though the Tidewater has rapidly transformed in recent decades because of the massive federal presence around the District of Columbia and Hampton Roads, site of the world’s largest naval base.
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the Midlands and New Netherland each embraced different strains of pluralism and multiculturalism from their 17th century foundations onward. In both regions, immigrants were not only welcomed but encouraged to retain their cultural practices, identities, and languages…. “The process of Americanization…is not one of assimilation or conformation to any particularly ethnic type,” argued Marion Dexter Learned, a Delaware-born Midlander who headed the Germanic department at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 20th century. He said Americans should be a “composite people” composed of overlapping but still distinct ethnic cultures. America, in this tradition, is a mosaic not a melting pot.
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Greater Appalachia’s mythic narrative was developed in response to the Great Wave whose decidedly un-Protestant character panicked many “old stock” Anglo Protestants. In the midst of this “invasion,” the intellectual elite of Appalachia — many of them transplants from Yankeedom or natives who’d been educated there — asserted their region was a repository of unadulterated Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers, a time capsule where millions of people were living, speaking and worshiping just as their pioneering 18th century ancestors had, uncorrupted by unsavory aliens and degenerate cosmopolitans… Thus was born the notion that there were “real Americans” who were members of an American ethnicity that was British, Evangelical Protestant, English-speaking and white and to whom the country was supposed to belong.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/12/13/woodard-immigration-00679254