There comes a point in every bad relationship when one party has to stop lighting candles around the red flags and ask the vulgar little question that has been pacing in the hallway for years: what, exactly, am I getting out of this? Not in the gauzy language of shared heritage, not in the patriotic narcotic of we are all one nation under god, not in the sentimental drivel cable news trots out every time the republic starts chewing on its own ankle. I mean in hard civic terms. Material terms. Moral terms. Political terms. If the Northeast and the West Coast are expected to keep underwriting, accommodating, and legitimising the Bible Belt as a central pillar of American life, then what is the return on investment? What public good, what democratic ballast, what cultural wisdom, what measurable social competence is this region offering in exchange for the money, the patience, and the constitutional power it keeps extracting from everyone else?

Because the answer, once you strip away the hymns and the mythology, is getting harder to dress up as anything but a grim joke.

The Bible Belt has spent decades selling itself as America’s moral torso. It is the place where family still matters, where church still means something, where children are supposedly raised with discipline and decency rather than by drag queens, atheists, and whatever fresh demon is haunting Fox News that week. It is the part of the country that regards the Northeast as decadent, the West Coast as diseased, and both as spiritually bankrupt. It does not merely disagree with those regions. It believes itself superior to them. Cleaner. tougher. closer to god. More authentically American. That is the swagger. That is the brand. That is the sermon.

Now compare the sermon to the ledger.

Across a depressing number of social measures that actually indicate whether a society is functioning, the Bible Belt keeps turning in the sort of performance one would expect from a government run by feral raccoons and a Chick tract. Teen birth rates remain disproportionately concentrated in Southern states. The latest CDC state data still show places like Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama and Mississippi clustered toward the high end, while states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut sit far lower. Poverty rates tell a similarly ugly story. Educational attainment remains weaker across much of the Deep South than in the Northeast or coastal West. Public health outcomes are worse. Obesity rates are worse. Maternal health outcomes are worse. Incarceration rates are often worse. Homicide rates, depending on the year and measure, are frequently worse. And because the region has fused conservative Christianity with a form of anti-government sadism so fanatical it borders on erotic, the political response to these failures is almost never to build a better public sphere. It is to punish someone, ban something, sermonise harder, and cut another tax cheque to the people least in need of one.

Now, before somebody in a seersucker blazer starts panting about “elitism”, let me make the obvious distinction the right always hopes its critics are too lazy to make. No serious person is claiming that every one of these pathologies is caused by religion in some neat monocausal chain. That would be idiotic. The South’s history includes slavery, Jim Crow, underinvestment, labour exploitation, racial terror, extractive oligarchy, healthcare deserts, and a class structure designed with all the tenderness of a meat grinder. Poverty reproduces poverty. Weak schools reproduce weak schools. Poor health policy produces poor health. We know this. But the Bible Belt’s governing ideology does not mitigate those problems. It embalms them. It takes every structural failure and wraps it in the language of moral virtue until the rot itself becomes sacred. The result is not merely underperformance. It is underperformance defended as righteousness.

That is the trick. That is the con. The Bible Belt is not just a place with social problems. Plenty of places have social problems. It is a place whose dominant political theology routinely opposes the very remedies that might reduce them, then claims moral authority over the rest of the country anyway. If a state has high teen birth rates, underfunded schools, weak health coverage, and stagnant wages, a sane government might expand sex education, healthcare access, child poverty relief, labour protections, and school funding. The Bible Belt version of governance is to call sex education grooming, denounce public assistance as socialism, treat labour unions like a communist fungus, force women to carry pregnancies, and then act mystified when the county hospital closes and half the local economy is a pawn shop attached to a church.

And this is where the question becomes less sociological and more prosecutorial: why should the Northeast and the West Coast continue to treat this model as a legitimate source of national authority rather than what it increasingly resembles, which is a subsidised engine of civic decay?

Take the money first, because money has a useful way of cutting through bullshit. One of the great farces of American political life is that the loudest anti-government regions in the country are often among the most dependent on government flows. This has been true in one form or another for years. Recent balance-of-payments work still shows the familiar pattern: a number of coastal and Northeastern states send substantially more to Washington than they receive back, while many Southern and more conservative states receive more than they remit. California, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Washington and others are regularly among the donor states. Meanwhile a number of states across the South and interior receive net inflows. Alabama, South Carolina and others have remained on the receiving end in recent accounting. In plain English, the parts of America most routinely denounced as decadent and godless are often helping foot the bill for the parts that cannot stop moralising about them.

And if the arrangement ended there, one could at least file it under the ordinary obligations of a federal republic. Wealthier regions help poorer ones. Fine. That is how countries work when they are not being run by libertarian adolescents and Ayn Rand fan fiction. But the Bible Belt does not merely receive from the union. It uses the power granted by that union to attack the autonomy of the very states subsidising it. That is the detail that should end the romance.

California and New York do not simply contribute to the federal pot from which poorer states draw. They also help finance the machinery by which Bible Belt politicians and judges attempt to impose Bible Belt norms on the rest of the country. Through the Senate’s grotesque bias toward low-population states, through gerrymandered House maps, through an Electoral College that rewards reactionary geography, and through a judiciary stuffed with right-wing legal missionaries, the Bible Belt has acquired a kind of imperial leverage wildly out of proportion to its civic performance. It is not content to run Mississippi like Mississippi. If it were, that would be grim enough, but at least local. No, the project is national. It wants to decide what books children in New Jersey may read, what healthcare women in California may receive, what history teachers in Massachusetts may teach, and what kinds of families are legitimate in Seattle. It wants donor-state money and cultural obedience. It wants to be subsidised and obeyed. That is not federalism. That is extortion with a baptismal font.

Nothing exposes this better than abortion, because abortion strips the Bible Belt’s moral theatre down to its wiring. For half a century, the anti-abortion movement insisted it was animated by compassion, by reverence for life, by a tragic but noble concern for mothers and babies. Then Dobbs arrived and much of the Bible Belt got the legal world it had demanded. So what did it build? Did it rush to create a humane maternal care state? Did it expand prenatal coverage, postpartum care, rural obstetrics, childcare, housing support, and paid leave? Did it produce a civilisation remotely recognisable as pro-family in any material sense? Of course not. It produced coercion. It produced confusion in emergency rooms. It produced fear among doctors, delayed miscarriage care, and women bleeding into the cracks of legal ambiguity while state legislators congratulated themselves on defending life from the comfort of leather chairs. Emerging research after the bans has found worse infant mortality outcomes in ban states than expected, along with disrupted miscarriage care and continued associations between restrictive abortion policy and higher maternal mortality. Even where the causal pathways are still being studied, the broad pattern is clear enough to embarrass anyone pretending these states are engaged in some noble ethic of care. They are not building life. They are criminalising female autonomy and then acting shocked when maternal and infant outcomes remain atrocious.

This is the moral signature of Bible Belt governance. Compulsion first, care maybe never. Carry the pregnancy, but do not expect universal healthcare. Have the baby, but do not expect childcare, paid leave, safe schools, or decent wages. Marry the father, but do not expect the state to give a damn if he becomes abusive. Worship motherhood, but do not ask for public structures that make motherhood survivable. The point is not life. The point is discipline. More precisely, it is the discipline of women, the policing of sexuality, and the conversion of reproductive suffering into a sacrament for other people’s politics.

And if you think I am being unfair, ask yourself why the same states that preen most aggressively about family values also spend so much of their legislative energy attacking the very institutions that allow families to flourish. Public schools are starved. Teachers are vilified. libraries are raided for ideological contraband. Comprehensive sex education is treated like a demonic incantation. Medicaid expansion is resisted even when hospitals are collapsing. Labour rights are weak. Housing policy is feeble. Gun laws remain loose enough that schoolchildren can practically smell the gun oil through the civics lesson. If a hostile foreign power were trying to produce a region with weak public health, low educational attainment, high reproductive precarity, and a permanently frightened workforce, it would not need to invade the Bible Belt. It could simply sit back and let conservative Christianity keep voting.

Education is perhaps the clearest example of the region’s long sabotage of its own future. The Northeast and the West Coast have many sins, but they contain a massive share of the country’s research universities, biotech firms, media institutions, high-end healthcare systems, financial infrastructure, and innovation clusters. They are expensive and often maddeningly unequal, but they are also productive because they invest in knowledge, however imperfectly. The Bible Belt’s dominant politics, by contrast, treats expertise like a contagious disease. Scientists are suspect. university faculty are radicals. historians are traitors if they mention slavery too bluntly. teachers are dangerous if they admit gay people exist. librarians apparently now rank somewhere between pornographers and cartel couriers in the conservative imagination. The result is not homespun independence. It is civic self-lobotomy.

The Census data on educational attainment are not subtle here. States in the Northeast and on the West Coast consistently outperform much of the Bible Belt on the share of adults with bachelor’s degrees or higher. That matters because educational attainment is not some elitist vanity metric. It is tied to earnings, health, civic participation, labour productivity, and resilience against demagogic bullshit. A state that trains fewer doctors, engineers, teachers, researchers and high-skill workers does not merely deprive itself of status. It deprives itself of capacity. Then, because history has a mean sense of humour, that same state often turns around and screams that the educated people who left are arrogant coastal snobs. Yes, darling. If you spend decades trying to turn public education into a hostage negotiation with the Book of Leviticus, the people with options are going to leave. Women leave. queer kids leave. doctors leave. teachers leave. researchers leave. Sometimes they flee with the urgency of prisoners tunnelling out with a spoon. Then the region complains that it has been abandoned, as though it did not personally set fire to the exits.

The Bible Belt’s defenders like to retreat at this point into a gauzy argument about community. Fine. Let us talk about community. There is truth there, which is precisely why it must not be sentimentalised. Churches can provide real social support. Small-town networks can be generous. Extended family ties can matter enormously, especially in poor regions where the state has failed. I am not going to pretend every coastal city has discovered some superior formula for neighbourliness while people step over homeless men outside a seven-dollar coffee shop. But community is not a magic word that absolves everything attached to it. A community that feeds you, but votes to deny your daughter healthcare, is not morally uncomplicated. A community that rallies after a tornado, but treats your gay son as a contamination risk, is not simply wholesome. A community that brings casseroles to the grieving widow while electing men who will gut Medicaid, slash school funding, and force rape victims to carry pregnancies is not some Norman Rockwell republic with a few rough edges. It is a community with conditional mercy. Warm if you fit. Cold if you don’t. Beautiful, at times, in the way a velvet noose is beautiful.

And that conditionality matters because the Bible Belt’s social cohesion is too often built on exclusion. Belonging comes with terms and conditions. Be the right kind of Christian. The right kind of straight. The right kind of wife. The right kind of man. The right kind of child. The right kind of patriot. If you fit the mould, you may experience tenderness, loyalty, and the sort of communal intimacy that genuinely can be absent in transient urban life. If you do not, the same social structure can become a machine for humiliation. Ask the pregnant teenager who needs actual medical information instead of purity lectures. Ask the trans kid in a state where adults discuss their existence like a public infestation. Ask the woman trapped in an abusive marriage in a culture that treats divorce as a sin but male domination as ambience. Ask the teacher trying to navigate a classroom under a legislature that thinks books are explosives.

Which brings us to the one argument Bible Belt apologists can never quite answer: even if one granted every good-faith defence of Southern community, church life, local loyalty, and cultural cohesion, why should that translate into national deference from the Northeast and West Coast when the region’s political output is so often openly hostile to pluralistic democracy itself?

This is not merely a policy disagreement over tax rates or school curricula. The Bible Belt has become one of the principal laboratories of minority rule in modern America. It is a region where voter suppression is treated as prudent housekeeping, where electoral maps are drawn with the shamelessness of a crooked casino, where public universities are increasingly bullied into ideological compliance, where school boards function like little inquisition panels, and where libraries are investigated with more zeal than wage theft or maternal mortality. It is impossible to separate this from the broader project of using state power to lock in a Christian nationalist order that cannot survive fair democratic competition. That is what the book bans are. That is what the attacks on reproductive rights are. That is what the anti-LGBTQ moral panics are. That is what the endless sneering at expertise is. They are not isolated tantrums. They are the furniture of an authoritarian culture trying to preserve itself by narrowing who counts as fully human, fully credible, fully free.

So I return to the question at the heart of this essay, and I return to it with less patience than when I began: what societal value is the Bible Belt offering the Northeast and West Coast that justifies the scale of indulgence it receives?

Is it superior public health? No. Is it stronger educational attainment? No. Is it a more sustainable fiscal model? Also no, unless dependency with a persecution complex now counts as innovation. Is it a humane family policy framework that produces better outcomes for mothers and children? Christ, no. Is it democratic stability? Not unless you define democracy as “the same eleven men deciding everyone else’s rights from a courthouse and a church parking lot.” Is it a culture of liberty? Again, no, unless liberty now means the right of local oligarchs to underpay workers, police women’s bodies, and turn queer children into campaign material.

What it does offer, in its current political form, is a large, disciplined, reactionary voting bloc that repeatedly exports cruelty into national law while demanding to be thanked for preserving civilisation. It offers a mythology of virtue that collapses on contact with data. It offers lectures on family from states that refuse to support families. It offers lectures on life from politicians willing to let women miscarry in parking lots. It offers lectures on freedom from governors who panic at the sight of a library card. It offers lectures on fiscal responsibility from regions whose budgets are often steadied by money generated elsewhere. It offers sermons on morality while producing a civic landscape littered with preventable suffering and then insisting the suffering itself is a mark of holiness.

Now, because I can already hear the inevitable response, let me say this plainly: none of this means the Northeast and West Coast are innocent. They are not. California’s housing crisis is a moral disgrace. New York finance has laundered misery into a profession. Seattle and San Francisco have managed the impressive trick of being both staggeringly wealthy and visibly incapable of housing everyone humanely. Liberal governance can be smug, technocratic, classist, bureaucratic, and full of its own performative bullshit. There are cities in blue America where inequality is so naked it ought to be prosecuted for indecent exposure. Fine. None of that rehabilitates the Bible Belt. It simply means the coasts have their own failures to answer for. The distinction is that those failures do not generally arrive wrapped in a divine mandate and a constitutional project to force them on the rest of the country.

That is the real obscenity here. The Bible Belt is not merely failing itself. It is claiming the right to fail upward on everyone else’s dime while dictating the moral terms of national life. It wants the federal government weak when poor people need help and strong when women need punishment. It wants local control until California does something it dislikes, at which point suddenly Washington must intervene. It wants religious freedom for Christians and moral surveillance for everybody else. It wants sympathy for its poverty and silence about the policies perpetuating it. It wants to be romanticised as the soul of the nation while behaving, far too often, like a theocratic spoiler attached to the republic’s wallet.

So perhaps the most useful way to phrase the question is not “What value does the Bible Belt offer?” but “Why has the rest of the country been bullied into pretending that this arrangement is normal?” Why are the donor states expected to subsidise a political culture that openly despises them? Why are women in Massachusetts or Oregon expected to watch rights vanish because a coalition of Southern legislators and judges believes female suffering is spiritually educational? Why are queer kids in New Jersey expected to have their dignity negotiated against the electoral anxieties of men in states that cannot keep obstetric units open? Why are we still speaking as though the Bible Belt is a noble repository of moral seriousness when so much of its public life consists of using religion to sanctify neglect?

If the Bible Belt wants to be treated as an asset rather than an albatross, the route is not mysterious. Build competent schools. Expand healthcare. Stop criminalising medicine. Stop treating teachers as enemy combatants. Stop governing women’s bodies like rented livestock. Stop using queer people as sacrificial props in every election cycle. Stop kneecapping labour and calling it freedom. Stop taking federal money with one hand while giving the finger to federal capacity with the other. Stop pretending that cruelty is authenticity and ignorance is virtue. In short, stop confusing domination with civilisation.

Until then, the Northeast and West Coast are entitled to stop genuflecting before the myth. They are entitled to look at the tax flows, the health outcomes, the school systems, the abortion bans, the prison numbers, the poverty maps, the maternal mortality research, the anti-democratic legislation, and ask the obvious question with all the reverence it deserves, which is none whatsoever.

What the hell are we getting out of this?

Because reverence is earned. So is moral authority. So is the right to call yourself the conscience of a nation. And if a region wants to spend decade after decade producing avoidable misery, obstructing democratic pluralism, and exporting punitive theology into national law while leaning on money generated elsewhere, then it does not get to demand admiration on top of subsidy. At some point the rest of the country is allowed to put down the hymn book, examine the invoice, and conclude that America’s self-proclaimed moral heartland has become one of its most expensive and destructive political habits.

This post was taken with the author’s permission from JillyBean Monet’s Substack. To view her other posts, please click here: https://jillybeanmonet.substack.com/archive?sort=new