From “Know Your Place: Helping White, Southern Evangelicals Cope with the End of The(ir) World” by Justin R. Phillips
The same factionalism exhibited by my students in their assembly is not so far detached from the southern virtues of fidelity to place and tradition. There remains an abiding conviction that Southerners are a people called to a promised land, yet exiled there. They live in hope that their prayers will be answered by a faithful God who speaks with a slow drawl. The more pressing point for Bible-believing Southerners is to consider whether or not we are as hospitable as we believe ourselves to be, because exclusion and division is the thick air we breathe. Our cultural mosaic is more than Charleston plantation photo shoots, NASCAR, or Duck Dynasty. The South is also Fannie Lou Hamer’s activism, the music of Beale Street, the greatest literature and food on the planet, and the lingua franca of Christendom that allows me to say, “I’ll pray for you” and for you to know that I’m not part of a cult.