The ante-bellum South was very different from the post-bellum South. It was an almost European feudal society dominated by high church Anglicans and Catholics (I have a theory that this is why most Black clergy wear vestments). The "Bible Belt" didn't emerge until after the Civil War. The ancestor of today's Bible Belt is not the ante-bellum South (as liberals like to maintain) but Puritan New England and the northern Great Awakenings (eg, New York's "burned over district). It was in the ante-bellum North that one found shouting, spasms, and the other phenomena now associated with Southern "holy rollers." Liberals also routinely ignore the inconvenient fact that the victims of Southern racism shared the religious beliefs of the perpetrators, so scientifically "Biblical literalism" is eliminated as a "cause" of white racism and violence.
The original post-war KKK was very different from its twentieth century imitators. It had Catholic and Jewish members (including Dr. Simon Baruch, personal physician to Jefferson Davis and father of Bernard Baruch) and didn't burn crosses. The cross-burning was initiated by Col. Simmons' post WWI Klan based on a fictional cross-burning in Thomas Dickson's novel The Clansman (which served as the basis for the motion picture The Birth of a Nation).
Unfortunately, for all the philo-Semitism of the ante-bellum and Civil War South (and the immediate post-bellum era), anti-Semitic populism eventually reared its head and even today is a component of many neo-Confederate and Southern identity groups (many of whom engage in virulently socialist anti-"banker" rhetoric and clamor for the Northern Hamiltonian protectionism their ancestors fought against). I regard these anti-Semitic, quasi-fascist "Southern" and "Confederate" movements as posers.
"It was an almost European feudal society dominated by high church Anglicans and Catholics"
This is incorrect, as far as NC is concerned.
INteresting post.
Thanks for that information.
Heckuva good post, ZC.