The Bible Belt and Sexual Morality in the American South

Where does the term Bible Belt come from?

The term Bible Belt is generally credited to the Baltimore journalist H. L. Mencken in the 1920s, and Merriam-Webster gives 1924 as its first known use ^[1]. The dictionary defines it as a region, chiefly in the southern United States, where residents are believed to accept the literal accuracy of the Bible without question, and it adds a looser meaning: any area marked by strong religious fundamentalism ^[1]. The entry does not name an author, so the attribution rests on other sources.

Accounts differ slightly on where the phrase first appeared. Wikipedia's summary of the scholarship says the earliest known use is a 1924 column by Mencken in the Chicago Daily Tribune, and that he claimed the term as his own invention in 1927 ^[3]. A centennial essay on Religion Unplugged, by contrast, places it in the short news items Mencken wrote for The American Mercury, the Baltimore magazine he co-founded ^[2]. Both agree on the decade and on the author.

The context was satire. Mencken had already mocked the South in his 1919 essay "The Sahara of the Bozart," and in 1925 he covered the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, a prosecution under the state's ban on teaching evolution that he nicknamed the "monkey trial" ^[2]. He used "Bible Belt" for a region where Baptists and Methodists dominated religious life and social norms ^[2]. The label therefore began as an outsider's joke, which is one reason historians treat it as a stereotype as well as a description.

Later geographers turned the joke into a mapping exercise. The geographer Wilbur Zelinsky defined the region in 1961 by where Southern Baptist, Methodist and other evangelical groups were the main affiliations, and in 1978 another scholar, Heatwole, defined it as the area dominated by 24 fundamentalist Protestant denominations, a territory he found to match Zelinsky's ^[3]. The Religion Unplugged essay notes that plotting counties where more than half of church members were Baptist or Methodist in the early 20th century traces the region's edges "with uncanny precision" ^[2].

Timeline

1. 1919Mencken publishes his essay "The Sahara of the Bozart," mocking the culture of the South.
2. 1924First known use of "Bible Belt" according to Merriam-Webster; other sources credit H. L. Mencken.
3. 1925The Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, which Mencken covered and nicknamed the "monkey trial."
4. 1961Geographer Zelinsky maps the region by Baptist, Methodist and other evangelical affiliation.
5. 2018Gallup reports that 43% of Southeasterners and 45% of Southwesterners are very religious (2017 data).
6. 2019Pew finds 35% of white evangelicals accept cohabitation without plans to marry.
7. 2020Virginia repeals its fornication statute, section 18.2-344, by Acts 2020, chapter 122.
8. 2026Gallup records 65% of Americans calling sex between unmarried adults morally acceptable.

Which states are in the Bible Belt?

No official border exists, but most definitions center on the Southeast and the southern Plains. Wikipedia lists Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Tennessee, plus northern Florida, most of Texas, most of Virginia outside its northern suburbs, and West Virginia. Parts of Missouri, Louisiana, Indiana and Ohio are often added ^[3]. Nashville, Tennessee, is home to the headquarters of the Southern Baptist Convention, one of the denominations that Zelinsky treated as defining the region ^[3].

Definitions shift with the method. Researchers who mapped audiences for religious television identified two cores rather than a single belt: an eastern one around Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee, and a western one around Arkansas and Oklahoma ^[3]. The same sources describe smaller regions that borrow the nickname, such as parts of West Michigan and the western suburbs of Chicago, and they place southern Louisiana, central and south Florida, south Texas and northern Virginia outside the belt ^[3].

Measured religiosity gives a second way to draw the map. Gallup's analysis of 130,959 interviews conducted during 2017 found that 45% of residents of its Southwest region and 43% of its Southeast region described themselves as "very religious," the only two of its eight regions above 40% ^[4]. At the state level the leaders were Mississippi (59%), Alabama (54%), Louisiana (52%), Arkansas (50%) and South Carolina (50%), while the lowest were Vermont (16%), Maine (22%) and New Hampshire (23%) ^[4]. Gallup noted that nine of the 11 most religious states lie in those two regions, which it said reflects the area's reputation as the core of the Bible Belt ^[4].

These figures are now several years old, and they describe religious intensity, not sexual attitudes. Gallup also found that Protestants and other non-Mormon, non-Catholic Christians made up 63% of the Southeast and 59% of the Southwest, and that Black Protestants in particular were highly likely to be very religious ^[4]. That detail matters for the picture of the Bible Belt: its religiosity is not only white evangelical.

How did religion shape Southern morals laws?

Religion shaped Southern morals laws mainly through the Protestant assumption that sex belonged inside marriage, but the laws are older than the term and are not confined to the Bible Belt. North Carolina's statute is a typical example. Section 14-184 punishes a man and woman who, not being married to each other, "lewdly and lasciviously associate, bed and cohabit together," classes the offense as a Class 2 misdemeanor, and bars one partner's admissions from being used as evidence against the other ^[6]. A neighboring section, 14-186, applies the same classification to an unmarried couple found occupying one bedroom in a hotel, inn or boarding house for an immoral purpose, or registering falsely as husband and wife ^[6].

North Carolina is not alone. Our state-by-state survey, checked against official and widely used code compilations on October 23, 2026, finds fornication or cohabitation provisions still in the codes of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Mississippi, all Bible Belt states, and also of Illinois, which is not one; the full list, with penalties, is in our overview of fornication laws still on the books. The overlap is striking but proves little about motive. Massachusetts, far outside the Bible Belt, kept its own fornication offense until 2018, and several Western and Midwestern states carried similar statutes until the repeals of recent years.

What the Bible Belt states share is that those laws have lingered rather than been used. Cornell's Legal Information Institute explains that because the Supreme Court held in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) that private sexual acts between adults are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, fornication laws cannot be enforced, and that a lawsuit challenging them generally requires actual harm, so they tend to stay in the code until a legislature votes to remove them ^[8].

Virginia shows the exception. Most of the state falls inside the Bible Belt as Wikipedia draws it ^[3], yet its fornication section, 18.2-344, now reads "Repealed by Acts 2020, c. 122" ^[9]. The Virginia case suggests that regional religious culture does not by itself keep an old statute alive; legislative attention does. That reading is an interpretation, not a finding from the sources, and the repeals of 2018 to 2023 in other regions followed their own local politics.

What do Bible Belt believers think about sex before marriage?

Believers in the Bible Belt tend to hold more traditional views, but the clearest numbers come from national surveys of religious groups, not from regional ones. The most useful is Pew Research Center's survey of 9,834 U.S. adults, conducted between June 25 and July 8, 2019, which asked whether it is acceptable for unmarried couples to live together even if they do not plan to marry ^[5]. Roughly nine in ten religiously unaffiliated adults said yes, as did 76% of white Protestants who do not identify as born-again or evangelical, and 74% of Catholics ^[5]. Among Black Protestants the share was 47%, and among white evangelical Protestants it was 35% ^[5].

Pew did not report the results by region, so the data cannot be used to compare Mississippi with Massachusetts. They show something narrower and more reliable: a gap of roughly 40 points between white evangelicals and non-evangelical white Protestants, who share a country and often a county ^[5]. The 2019 survey also found that majorities in every age group accepted cohabitation, with 78% of adults aged 18 to 29 doing so ^[5].

National trend data from Gallup add context. When it asked in May 2026 whether sex between an unmarried man and woman is morally acceptable, 65% of Americans said yes and 31% said it is morally wrong; the figure was 53% in 2001, peaked at 76% in 2022, and slipped to 68% in 2025 ^[7][10]. Gallup's page, as read for this article, does not break the result down by region or religion, so it cannot be used to say how Southern evangelicals answered ^[7]. For the evangelical teaching behind these numbers, see how American evangelicals view sex before marriage.

One caution applies to every figure above. Attitudes and behavior are different things, and surveys of what people consider acceptable say nothing about what they do.

Is the Bible Belt changing?

The Bible Belt is changing in composition more than it is disappearing. Pew's 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study, as summarized by Religion Unplugged, found that only 12% of Southerners identify with the Southern Baptist Convention or the United Methodist Church, the two denominations most closely tied to the Baptist and Methodist traditions Mencken had in mind ^[2]. According to census figures cited in the essay, white residents make up 52.5% of the Southern population, more Black, Latino and biracial Americans live in the South than anywhere else, and Black and Latino Americans are more likely than white Americans to identify as Christian ^[2]. The essay's argument is that "Bible Belt" has always oversimplified a region that was more varied than the nickname suggests ^[2].

The religious profile of the region is shifting, but the sources consulted give no current regional figure for the religiously unaffiliated. Gallup's religiosity data date from 2017 and predate the 2023-24 Pew study, so they should be read as a snapshot rather than a current measure ^[4].

On sexual morality, the national direction is not a straight line. Gallup's acceptance of sex between unmarried adults climbed for two decades and then fell from 76% in 2022 to 65% in 2026 ^[7]. The share calling a baby outside marriage morally acceptable followed a similar pattern, from 45% in 2002 to a peak of 70% in 2022 and 58% in 2026 ^[7][10]. Gallup's page does not offer an explanation for the recent decline, and any reading of it would be speculation.

The legal landscape has moved more clearly. Virginia repealed its statute in 2020 ^[9], and the Bible Belt states that retain theirs have laws that are considered unenforceable ^[8]. For the long history behind these laws, including the Puritan colonies that preceded the Southern ones, see fornication in Puritan New England.

Frequently asked questions

Who coined the term Bible Belt?

The journalist H. L. Mencken is generally credited with it. Merriam-Webster dates the term to 1924, and sources differ on whether his first use ran in the Chicago Daily Tribune or in The American Mercury. According to Wikipedia, he claimed the invention as his own in 1927.

Is the Bible Belt only in the South?

No, although the term refers chiefly to the South. Most definitions center on states such as Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee and the Carolinas, but Missouri, Oklahoma, parts of Texas and Virginia are often included. Smaller areas, such as West Michigan, have also borrowed the nickname.

Do Bible Belt states still have fornication laws?

Several do. Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Mississippi still list fornication or unmarried cohabitation in their codes. Virginia repealed its law in 2020, and after Lawrence v. Texas (2003) these statutes are considered unenforceable against private, consenting adults.

Which state is the most religious?

Mississippi, in Gallup's 2017 data. It had the highest share of residents describing themselves as very religious, at 59%, followed by Alabama at 54%. Vermont ranked lowest at 16%. These figures date from 2017 and may have changed.

Do evangelicals accept living together before marriage?

A minority do. In Pew's 2019 survey, 35% of white evangelical Protestants said it is acceptable for unmarried couples to live together without plans to marry, compared with 74% of Catholics and 76% of non-evangelical white Protestants. Pew did not report a regional breakdown.

Is the Bible Belt shrinking?

It is diversifying more than shrinking. Pew's 2023-24 study, as summarized by Religion Unplugged, found that only 12% of Southerners identify with the Southern Baptist Convention or the United Methodist Church. The South is also more racially and ethnically varied than the nickname suggests.