So /r/atheism had its shitpost of the day comparing a few vaguely defined maps and reaching the conclusion that religion = lower human development. Someone suggested that perhaps this apparent divide between the South and the rest of the country was because of the American Civil War, to which /u/acideath responded by blowing it off was a "pissweak excuse."
How accurate is my paragraph below his response, and how much does the ACW affect the South today?
http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/3a5yid/these_3_maps_seems_to_be_similar/csa6bmd?context=3
It's absolute bollocks (the religion argument, not your response).
In the first case, the South was hardly any more religious than the North in the 19th century; the argument could be made that the North was more religious. Both regions were heavily Protestant, and both experienced an explosion in evangelical Christianity after about 1810, and continuing into the 20th century. By evangelical Christianity I refer to the more personal religious experiences offered by the Methodist and Baptist denominations, in contrast to traditional Anglicism and Presbyterianism. The North seems to have put more of an emphasis on the social side of religion - ie, that one should reshape society in a Christian Utopian image - while religion remained more a personal matter in the South until after the Civil War.
The North, while far more developed in an industrial-commercial sense, was not richer than the South before the Civil War. Immense wealth was concentrated in the South; the twelve richest counties in the country were all located below the Mason-Dixon Line. But, while industrial development had begun to take off in the South after about 1840, in 1860 the South's wealth remained heavily tied up in land and slaves, especially in the Deep South, the richest portion of the South. The effect of the Civil War was, of course, to free the slaves, which made the billions of value they represented worthless overnight; it also severely reduced the profitability of agriculture. When you add that to the devastation of Southern industry and infrastructure by advancing Union troops and retreating Confederates, it's not surprising that the Civil War left a one hundred year hangover in the South.
Edit: If anyone's interested in sources;
Levine, Bruce; The Fall of the House of Dixie
Blum, Edward J; Reforging the White Republic
Some of the discrepancy goes back before the Civil War as well. In addition to slavery, the Southern states often looked at internal improvement bills passed by the federal government to be beyond its Consitutional power and resisted fiercely. There was a bill build a road from Buffalo to New Orleans that got voted down (https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-1608567161/restricted-authority-slavery-politics-internal-improvements - though this isn't the full article), and I believe I remember some mention of resistance to implementing the waterway improvements of the Tennessee Valley Authoirty in the 1940s as an overreach as well, though I'm not quite as certain about that.