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Douglas Carl Abrams, Joseph L. Locke. Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion., The American Historical Review, Volume 124, Issue 2, April 2019, Pages 683–685, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz115
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Prohibition is a complex subject and requires careful exercise of historical imagination. Once upon a time in America, an overwhelming consensus led to a constitutional amendment that banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol. In Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion, Joseph L. Locke examines how alcohol prohibition in Texas mobilized conservative Protestants and in the process transformed the way religion related to politics in the South. Locke’s story begins in the late nineteenth century and concludes in the twentieth century with the evangelical George W. Bush as the culmination of a movement that sought to combine evangelical religiosity and conservative political beliefs. Locke’s writing is exceptionally clear.
Locke’s book can be understood in connection with Christine Heyrman’s effort to understand the origins of the Bible Belt with evangelical accommodation to the secular South from before the Revolutionary War through the early republic (Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt [1998]). That entente apparently needed more work after the Civil War, as southern religious leaders considered alcohol the “age’s greatest malady” (2).
