In Tennessee, it is not uncommon to see a church campus the size of a high school. The sight is almost ubiquitous with the state – these massive centers of worship looming large over the landscape and the minds of those who inhabit the region.
In fact, a 2015 report from the Hartford Institute for Religious Research found that Tennessee has the most megachurches per capita.
Driving along the state, you are just as likely to see a starkly different image right next to the sprawling church buildings: miles of trailer parks dotting the countryside. The Bible Belt, as it turns out, not only leads the nation in sheer volume of churches, but also in divorce, teen pregnancy and STDs, and poverty, according to the Los Angeles Times, Op-Med and the USDA respectively.
The dominance of the church in Tennessee is not simply spatial but a deeply political phenomenon, influencing everything down to the minutiae of our daily lives. Confronted with this deep contrast, one begins to wonder how a region marked by such piety allows such inequality?
To begin to understand this injustice, one must first understand the deep ties between church, state and capital that define Tennessee politics.
Though Christianity has been uncomfortably entwined with Tennessee politics, we find ourselves in a particularly interesting moment of Evangelical American politics. We have entered into a new age of the prosperity gospel, a movement that began in the late 19th century with the New Thought movement and proliferated in the 1980s with the rise of televangelism. Both of these movements have developed against a background of mass exploitation, the wildly unregulated Gilded Age and the vehemently anti-working-class, union-busting efforts of the Reagan era.
This new era of the prosperity gospel is especially Trumpian in flavor – gaudy, incredibly online, and at turns, deeply fascistic. Today, exploitation runs rampant, with wages still stagnant despite economic growth for the wealthiest Americans, roll-backs of business regulations occurring on a massive scale and generally anti-working class sentiments dominating the discourse.
Who, then, does Tennessee’s theocracy serve? Certainly not the working people, who are told if they simply work and pray harder they can get out of poverty. Nor women, whose bodies are routinely policed under strict abortion laws. Most viciously, not immigrants, who are told to return to the countries that have been ravaged by imperialist states like America.
In many ways, the church in the Bible Belt has become a tool of the bourgeois state, reinforcing the oppression of the working class, people of color, immigrants, women and LGBT people through a perverted doctrine of nationalism and greed. The church needs to be left out of Tennessee state politics, for the sake of the people of our state.
