It is a lion of prides, a place apart. It is the last American arena with a special, nurtured identity, its own sometimes unfashionable regard for the soil, for family ties, for the authority of God and country. Despite the influx of outsiders, the South remains a redoubt of old American tenets, enshrined for centuries by the citizenry.
Much has been changed by technology—notably the spread of the television set and the air conditioner. The South, nourished in isolation, now imports and exports ideas with the speed of electrons. The gospel songs that were once chanted by pentecostal choirs have gone commercial. Conversely, the South has seen the old enemy, the dreaded Yankees, up close on the evening news —and found that he and she are people very much like the folks from Dixie, only with a little more use for r at the end of a sentence.
More and more Yankee industries and individuals are moving to the deepest South, in no small part because air conditioning has altered the climate itself. Tyrannical heat, delirious summers, dog days that breed flies and sloth, squabbles and morbid introspection are gone with the vent.
But so much remains the same. Given its predominantly Anglo-Saxon traditions and largely Protestant population—black and white—Christian revelation is a way of life in Dixie. "Others tend to scoff at the Bible Belt," says former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, now a professor of international law at the University of Georgia. "But one can point to a strong sense of personal responsibility it engenders." Florida Governor Reubin Askew believes that "your faith has to be at the center of your life, and from it must emanate all your decisions."
Jimmy Carter's widely discussed "born again" experience may seem unusual to Northerners; in the South, it is a common occurrence. When a Southerner calls his territory "God's country," he is less Rotarian than religious —although a certain chauvinism may still shine through. A Valdosta, Ga., man likes to point to a sign displayed at a filling station that reads SMILE, GOD LOVES YOU. In the North, he claims, the sign would read WATCH OUT, GOD HAS HIS EYE ON YOU.
Says Oscar Carr Jr., who left his prosperous Mississippi farm to head the office of development of the national Episcopal Church in New York: "The greatest thing the South can offer the nation is its religious and moral sense. Once Southerners can jump into the economic mainstream they will be more liberal than people in Connecticut."