One of the first things I noticed as I made my way around the American South was the lack of community. There were no town squares. The downtowns were empty. What’s more, church attendance was down across the United States, a fact confirmed by numerous recent studies. In 2015, a Pew Survey of 35,000 adults revealed that the number of Americans who identified themselves as “Christian” was at its lowest point in history at 70.6 percent, 7 points lower than its 2007 figure of 78.4 percent, a decline happening all over the United States, including the Bible Belt.
