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Notes -
There was, I know it’s hard to believe, a lot of generational churn from the end of the civil rights act to the present. The south wasn’t more Republican than the country as a whole until the nineties and that was probably due to evangelical Christianity, not race. Even until pretty recently, there were conservative southern democrats winning elections regularly. Louisiana had a pro-life democrat in the governors office until 2022. The most conservative democrat in the house was from rural Texas in the most recent congress.
And I think ‘evangelical Christianity is a coverup for racism’ is a convenient narrative on Reddit, but the reality is that non-Catholic organized religion has been pretty Republican for most of America’s history(republicans win Orthodox Jews and won Muslims while this shift was ongoing), and this is more returning to form than anything else(Catholics shifting right has mostly to do with pelvic issues taking front and center). When you look at actual figures who became born again Christians you tend to see a shift away from racism on a personal level, and the SBC(far and away the largest religious body involved) shifted pretty hard away from its racial history when it embraced evangelicalism. And clinching Republican control over the south was, well, in a lot of cases going on while bush was playing hard to the evangelical base.
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