Having lived in the South for over a decade I think I can give a fair assessment of the positives and negatives of the region. As a non-native I approach with different eyes able to see from an outside perspective, it's easier to see things amiss in a home that you are a guest in rather than in your own home.
The Negatives
I begin with the negatives of Southern culture, largely so I can end on a positive note. In this fallen world there is no perfect culture, no utopias, no system of government or way of life that will bring heaven fully on earth. We get glimpses, tastes, and hints of it here and there, but on our earthly pilgrimage until the full realization of Christ's kingdom it will always be that, hints, glimpses, tastes. That said, some cultural manifestations are simply better or worse than others and more closely approximate a Christian ideal than others. I start with the negatives that I have observed in Southern culture.
Littering
Southerners don't seem to care very much about littering. It's that simple. The evidence of this is observable driving down nearly any road in the South, there will be trash that has been flung from people's cars adorning the sides of the road. Bags from bottom tier fast food restaurants, Monster energy drink cans, bottles and cans of the worst beers known to man, and even the occasional full bag of household trash will regularly be seen on the roadside. Nearly every time I set to work in my yard cutting the grass, and doing general maintenance of my property, I will be obliged to pick up the random leavings of some inconsiderate driver who deemed my yard a better place for his trash than his car.
All sin can be reduced to a failure to love your neighbor, littering fails to love one's neighbor in that it passes the labor of proper clean up of ones' mess to ones' neighbor. I now have to pick up the trash that some human slob flung from his car, he is stealing time from me, but more than that he is uglifying my yard and the world in general.
Beauty matters, this seems to be lost on many Southerners who have a gnostic Baptistic approach to aesthetics. This is why church buildings often are just gigantic cubes, or imitation shopping malls, where function soullessly triumphs over beauty. The same can be said of the roadside, the country roads here are often beautiful areas full of oak trees, and pastures, yet trash from local Quick Trip mini-marts regularly defaces an otherwise beautiful scene.
By way of contrast, in my home state of Wisconsin, this is a rare occurrence. People regularly recycle and it is pretty much unthinkable that you would simply toss your random trash from your car window. No I am not an advocate of recycling, and I think the climate change narrative is largely bullocks, I am most certainly not one of those guys. But I think the habit of recycling has the effect of making people more conscientious regarding their trash on a very practical level. While visiting family in Wisconsin this past summer as we drove down country roads I remarked to my wife, "Notice how there is no trash in on the sides of the road?"
It may seem like a small trivial thing but it's in the little things that our character is revealed, it reflects greater character issues within a culture. Southerners litter. There is a park near my home that has a waterfall and a nice natural swimming hole in it, it could be a beautiful spot, but despite there being trash receptacles clearly available people simply leave their trash about the riverside and detract from the natural beauty. This is actually part of being a conservative, we want to conserve the natural beauty of an area when we take dominion over it. Guys like Teddy Rosevelt were some of the first American conservationists, being opposed to wack job leftists doesn't mean we are required to give up a sane respect for the environment.
The Driving
Drivers here are terrible. Yes, I know people always complain about the driving where ever they may are, but in the case of Southern drivers it isn't just an opinion, the objective data backs this statement up. South Carolina, my current home, is number 1 for worst drivers in the nation. The states in the South regularly lead the nation in accidents per capita, and accidents that lead to fatalities. So, yeah I get it people always say, "The drivers here are so bad!" no matter where they live, but in the case of the South it's objectively true. The picture on the right is a perfect example of a scenario that is has a decent probability to be chaotic if it happened here.
Every single time (not an exaggeration) I go somewhere in a vehicle I am forced to be a witness to some poor or outright dangerous driving. A perfect and regular example of this is at a four way stop sign. I tell you dear reader, four way stops simply boggle these people's minds. Again, people will think I am exaggerating, but every single time I come to a four way stop where a number of cars will be involved it is guaranteed that I will be witness to confusion and stupidity. There are so many people who simply don't know when it is their turn to go. My favorite is when you roll to the four way stop and there is a car already stopped on the opposing side of the road and you want to turn left. You were clearly there after the opposing driver, yet, rather than going as it is their turn to go, they begin waving you on to make your turn out of order. It's infuriating, on the surface it may seem polite to get waved on out of order. I assure you it is not polite. It's rude because they are asking you to break the rules rather than simply following the rules and taking their turn. I've been at intersections identical to the one in the picture above, and seen people stopping when they need to go, waving others on, and, as Sir Topham Hatt would say, generally causing confusion and delay.
Another bizarre driving phenomena that I have repeatedly observed is at lights that are going from red to solid green both ways with no left turn arrows. In such instances, drivers who are making a left turn will sometimes bolt out ahead of oncoming straight traffic immediately when the light turns green. I have lived in a number of parts of the country, West coast, Rocky Mountain, Midwest, and the Northeast, and I can tell you that I have never seen this happen anywhere else. It's like people simply don't know the rules of the road here. I was again reminded of this after being in Wisconsin over a week when I finally saw someone do something stupid and dangerous on the road, I commented to my wife, "That's the first time since we've been here that I saw someone do something stupid on the road." It happens everywhere, it's just distilled and concentrated like a bourbon here in the South.
This regular phenomena of bad driving prompted me to create a stupid driver scale to categorize levels of infractions, it is as follows:
Level 1- This is a stupid driving move that is not necessarily dangerous, and it doesn't effect any other drivers on the road.
Ex: Driving with your wipers on a super fast setting when it is only misting. Drivers with their turn signals on for miles. A guy who passes you on a dotted center line when there are like a half dozen cars in front of you all going the same speed, thus accomplishing nothing by passing you.
Level 2- This is a stupid driving move that is not necessarily dangerous, but it does effect other drivers on the road.
Ex: Slow poke drivers. Drivers who basically come to a crawl when making a right turn. Waving other people on at stop signs when it isn't their turn.
Level 3. This is a stupid driving move that is in fact dangerous, but no one else's driving is forced to be altered as result.
Ex: Blowing a stop sign at a four way stop but no one else has gotten to the intersection yet. Guys on the freeway driving insanely fast in a clear left lane.
Level 4. This is a stupid driving move that is in fact dangerous and other drivers have to alter their driving to prevent an accident. It results in nearly causing an accident, other drivers have to slam on their breaks or veer to avoid the stupidity that would otherwise cause an accident.
Ex: Making a left turn into oncoming traffic but the oncoming driver is aware and brakes before T-boning the stupid driver. Weaving in and out of traffic racing your buddy on the freeway.
Level 5- The stupidity reaches such a height as to cause an accident.
Ex: Call the police and call a lawyer, stupid people often don't have insurance. Hit and runs are common here. I'd recommend dash-cams for insurance and court purposes.
On my travels I regularly see level 2 infractions, as I said above every time I go out, and probably 2-3 times a month I will witness level 4 infractions. The most recent example was a car that was inexplicably stopped in the road with its hazards blinking, the driver ahead of me didn't notice this until the last second and slammed on his brakes and veered off of the road up a curb where a pedestrian was walking literally about 6 feet away. No one was hurt but it was yet another "What the hell?" driving moment. Maybe the guy who nearly rear-ended the guy parked in the road was too busy throwing a beer can out his window and wasn't paying attention to the road?
Air Conditioning
The second to last of my complaints about Southern culture is with regard to air conditioning. People here love, love, love their air conditioning. I don't. There are a lot of people here that simply can not function without the air conditioning keeping things at around 68 degrees. Not an exaggeration. During the summer months yes, it is hot, humid, and frankly miserable. Despite this, I work outside a regularly, having a small hobby farm, and I drink plenty of water and tough it out. I figure that since people did this in the past living in the South before air conditioning technology was granted to us, so there is no reason I can't do it today.
Not so with many others, they begin to panic and complain about being hot the moment the thermostat gets north of 70 degrees. I don't think these people go outside during the summer, at least not any longer than the walk from their air conditioned car to their air conditioned house takes. Mostly the complaints regarding the thermostat are from fat sedentary men and menopausal women. At the various places that I have worked such are the ones that dictate the thermostat, they guard it like a dog does his favorite bone constantly aware of any threats to the bone. It gets so bad that myself and other co-workers who are neither fat nor menopausal are reduced to bringing fleeces and sweatshirts to work throughout the year, yes, they have the air conditioning running even in the winter months. It's bizarre showing up to work when it's 90 degrees outside carrying a sweatshirt but this is where things stand, the fatties and the aging women have spoken.
This isn't simply a workplace phenomena, it carries over to restaurants and stores in general. Walking into a restaurant or grocery store here in the South you will likely be greeted with an arctic blast of air hitting you like a Norse gods' breath as you enter. To be clear, it's not necessarily the temperature that bothers me, it is the constant blowing of the air conditioned air. Again, by way of contrast with life in Wisconsin, at no point during our recent visit did I feel like there was excessive air conditioning being used. When we visited restaurants and stores it always felt like a reasonable temperature and there wasn't a blasting sense of artificially cold air as you entered a building.
Perhaps this is because summers are shorter and not nearly as intense that people are far more judicious in their use of air conditioning in that part of the country as opposed to the South. The Summers there are not nearly as humid with highs averaging in the 80's. On our return trip home from Wisconsin the first place that I noticed an absurd use of air conditioning was at a restaurant stop in Tennessee, I said to my shivering wife, "Well, I guess we are back in the South." I am also reminded of articles during the yearly Summer heatwaves, which the media used propagandistically to push the climate change narrative, but contained the interesting fact that Europeans in general do not regularly own air conditioning units, nor do they use much air conditioning, and they think that it is bizarre how infatuated Americans are with it. They choose rather to live life in a manner that embraces the flow of the seasons, rather than fighting for an indoor season free equilibrium that constant use of air conditioning brings about. I find this a sensible outlook and is in keeping with my own experience.
To be clear, I think air conditioning can be a good thing, if it's over 90 degrees outside and it is as humid as a swamp it sure is nice to have the ability to bring the temperature down and knock out the humidity to a more comfortable level. It's the abuse of this good thing that I have a problem with, and it seems to be done with an enthusiasm in the South that I haven't seen anywhere else in the country.
All the Worst of American Christianity is Here
The worst aspects of American Christianity thrive here in the South. The church culture is generally low, individualistic Baptistic, and Zionist. Much more can be said on this than I will say here, but let me give a 30,000 feet up overview of my final complaint.
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| Southern Mega Church |
The Christianity here ubiquitous, everyone is a Christian, even lesbian coworkers I've had are Christians and regularly would go to church. It is a very thin Christian culture, where belief is private, in one's heart, and no one can judge me but God. I've seen countless tattoos to that effect, "Only God Can Judge Me" is the most popular. Life is lived that way, I can live however I want and no one can tell me otherwise because no one knows what's in my heart. Well, I might not know what's in your heart but a wise Man once said a tree is known by its fruit, but what we He know?
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| Simple Lutheran Church |
The church buildings are ugly. This I think ties in a bit with what I said regarding littering, there isn't a high emphasis on beauty. Couple that with hyper-individualistic Baptist thinking and buildings only exist to provide space to meet, not to transport or enthrall worshippers with a sense of the grandeur of God. Couple this with a belief that the world is about to end and America has to do everything within its power to support Israel, and you will have a whole lot of ugly church buildings.
Compare the two churches pictured, which building seems more reverent, more serious, more timeless, and less modern? Which building do you think has robust preaching? Which building do you think will likely have communion if you attend the service? Which building do you think is more fitting for a church? If your response to this simple line of questioning is, "The building don't matter, it's what's in people's hearts that matters!" or something like that, you are infected by gnostic ideas.
Conclusion
To be clear, I love the South, these criticisms are simply my observations after over a decade of living here as a non-native. As promised I will follow this post with a glories of the South post. These are simply the negative cultural phenomena that I can't help but notice, I notice them every time I cut my grass and have to pick up Natural Light beer cans that conscientious men with "Only God Can Judge Me" tattoos have chosen to decorate my lawn with. I notice these problems every time I drive and there is some sap waving me on at a stop sign when it is unquestionably his turn to go. Lastly, I notice this stuff every time I get blasted with excessive air conditioning, when that happens I know that I am indeed in the South.
