Christine Leigh Heyrman's book Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt

Another classic is Christine Leigh Heyrman’s Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. In this book, Heyrman describes the arrival of the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians in the antebellum South and examines how evangelicalism displaced Anglicanism as the dominant religion of the South, as well as how southern evangelicalism came to embrace southern attitudes on slavery, race, gender and dominated the religious landscape of the South. As she mentions in the book, Evangelicalism came late to the American south, as an exotic import rather than an indigenous development. Before the 1740s, the South was dominated by the Anglicanism and Evangelicalism played little significance in it.   

 However, two factors greatly changed the religious landscape in the South. One was the demographical fluidity, which caused a large number of Scots-Irish Presbyterians and German pietists to come to the south. As she points out, “settlers began to spill south and west of Pennsylvania, pushing into the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia during the 1740s, into the backcountry of the Carolinas and Georgia during the 1750s and 1760s, and later into adjacent Kentucky and Tennessee. These newcomers came mainly from the ranks of Scots-Irish Presbyterians and German pietists like the Moravians, Dunkers, Mennonites, and Schwenkfelders.”  Also, the evangelical revivals in the northern colonies in the first half of the 18th century greatly transmitted evangelical ideas in the south and inspired the southerners to become evangelicals. As she notices, “in the late 1740s, Presbyterian preachers from New York and New Jersey began proselytizing in the Virginia Piedmont; by the 1750s, a group known as the Separate Baptists moved from New England to central North Carolina and quickly extended their influence to surrounding colonies; and in the late 1760s, the first English Methodist missionaries began preaching in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.”  As more and more Methodist missionaries and Presbyterians preached in the south, traditional religious views of the Anglicanism were greatly challenged and more people converted to evangelicals rather than Anglicans.                                                                          
Through examining various religious groups and their roles in southern states, Christine discusses religious dissemination and its impact on religious proselytization. Rather than focus on a specific religious group in a state, Christine explores it from an inter-state perspective, which greatly enriches our understanding of religious change in the American south.