White evangelical Protestants are the most likely (76%) to support preserving the history of the Confederacy with memorials and statues. Majorities of white mainline Protestants (65%), Latter-day Saints (65%), Hispanic Catholics (63%) agree.@baptist_newshttps://t.co/jzoyIu0O3H
— PRRI (@PRRIpoll) October 3, 2022
I can confirm this.
In the 21st century, support for Confederate monuments and symbols breaks down along the fault lines of Civil War 2. The country is no longer divided between North and South.
Are you a traditionalist or a modernist? Are you a conservative or a progressive? Are you a Christian or an atheist or agnostic? Do you live in the interior of the country or along a coast? Do you live in a rural area, a small town, a suburb, a college town or a large urban metro? Do you have a college degree? Are you working class, middle class or upper middle class? Do you have a PMC job?
The answers to these questions are far more revealing about your politics and values including whether you support Confederate monuments than where you live in the country. Charlottesville is technically still in the South but it is full of insane anti-Southern shitlibs. You will see far more Confederate flags in rural Missouri than you will in Southern metros where Ukraine flags are more common.
“Several years ago, I was driving on a rural road when I came up behind a pickup truck with a Confederate-flag sticker on the back window. This isn’t such an unusual sight in some parts of the United States, but this instance surprised me: The truck had Pennsylvania plates, and the road was in Gettysburg, where an invading force of tens of thousands of Confederates, formed to defend Black slavery, arrived in summer 1863 on a pillaging expedition.
But though the Civil War was a battle between two regions of the country, sympathy for the Confederacy is no longer confined to states that seceded and border states. Support for Confederate symbols and monuments now exists across the country, following lines of race, religion, and education rather than geography. This is one of many ways in which the South is no longer simply a region: A certain version of it has become an identity shared among white, rural, conservative Americans from coast to coast. That’s one takeaway from a new survey about Confederate symbols from the Public Religion Research Institute and E Pluribus Unum. …
Southernization coincides with a geographic sorting in the United States. Not long ago, there were Democrats in both rural and urban areas and in every region of the country; the same was true of Republicans. But now Democrats are largely extinct as a political force in rural areas throughout the country, and few and far between in statewide offices across the South. Republicans, meanwhile, are wholly marginalized in almost every large city and have vanished from the Northeast. The GOP is a mostly white party; overwhelming portions of Black voters cast ballots for Democrats. The result is that the backbone of the Republican Party is a group of Americans who are white, rural, and conservative; many have lower educational attainment that Democrats (though not necessarily lower income), and they typically identify as evangelical Christian. …”
If the country does break apart or secession happens again in our lifetimes, the fault line where the fracture will occur will be along the coasts and will divide the atheists in the Acela Corridor and the West Coast from the Christians in the Heartland. Missouri, for example, was the first state to ban abortion.