I am from Georgia, but I lived for 3 years in upper New Hampshire, teaching at a boarding school. The state is utterly beautiful, as is Vermont, and is is Maine, but, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. And what I noticed about New England was (1) the sheer number of boarding schools . . . telling me that there is a helluva lot of money between Boston and New York, (2) that most of that money was not in the hands of ordinary people, whose lives seems rather bleak and stark in comparison to the rich kids I was carting around on sports trips to Exeter and St. Paul’s. I visited the Maine coast, but the money along it made upper New Hampshire and Vermont look even more bleak. And there was a difference in attutude toward things which I traced, if tentatively, to religion . . . Puritanisn, Unitarianism. The South, though highly Evangelical, has Anglo-Catholic roots. And, when I thought about it, it seemed to me that the Unitarian de-emphasis of the miracle of Christ and its emphasis on human perfection lend themselves to a form of liberalism as we ultimately come to worship Government, not God. Just a loose collection of thoughts, I know. But that was my experience.
Mr. Chips, Thanks for bringing the faith component into it. It is a huge topic, I wasn’t sure I could do it justice. Yes, Unitarian thought maybe sliding into the other faiths in a way. A telling tangent issue is the reduction in stature of the Catholic church for a host of reasons on the east coast (some no so good) and what it has done to them even at the facility level, i.e. sell of and or consolidating of Churches. Another Tangent, the Northeast Attitude of letting Gov’t take care of things i.e. Welfare, Medicare etc vs. their poor donation habits. All of this together is quite telling how we are not “one” America anymore.....