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F e a t u r e A r t i c l e
Bible-Belt Catholics
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This Rock
Volume 14, Number 7
 September 2003 
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SIGN NUMBER FOUR: The rapidly changing demographics of the Old Confederacy suggest that the Catholic Church may on the verge of great advances in an area in which it has long been virtually invisible. While Catholics make up only three to five percent of the population of the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Virginia south of the Rappahannock, prosperous urban areas of the "New South" are 15 to 20 percent Catholic. And the percentage is growing, mainly through migration from other parts of the country and through immigration.
Moreover, the Catholic population at the region’s major state and private universities is 20 to 25 percent and increasing. At Duke, nominally Methodist, Catholics are the largest religious group on campus, followed by Jews; Methodists are third. Similar situations obtain at the University of North Carolina, Wake Forest, The Citadel, and the University of Georgia. If a sizable portion of these southern-educated Catholics remain to work in the South, the future upper-middle-class and upper-class elites of the New South are likely to be Catholic in significant percentages.
The economic vitality of the New South and the region’s increasing influence in national politics also afford opportunities for the Church. Given the decline of mainline-oldline Protestantism in the South, as elsewhere, the major Christian options are Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism of various forms. And in shaping the future of public life in the New South, Catholicism has a certain comparative advantage. Catholic social doctrine is a well-developed approach to the tangled moral questions involved in creating the free, virtuous, and prosperous society.
Moreover, its natural-law "grammar" gives it more public traction than Evangelical Protestantism has in an increasingly pluralistic (and secular) society, given the tendency of some Evangelicals to make public moral arguments in ways that seem to preclude the participation of non-Evangelicals in the debate. Catholic social doctrine can be engaged by everyone, and Evangelicals of a more intellectual cast of mind find it a rich resource for their own reflection.
All of this portends a very interesting future—politically and ecumenically, a future full of possibilities.
—George Weigel
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