Alfred A. Knopf, 1997

The Bible Belt. Few images of the South have a more tenacious grip on the popular imagination. Many who use the term as shorthand for evangelism’s centrality to southern culture assume it has always been so. The South, after all, never changes. Southern Cross should help dispel the idea of a seamless history of evangelical domination. Christine Leigh Heyrman shows how what came to be the religion of the South began as an “exotic import.”