Around the nation, big beer producers contribute to the campaigns of politicians who will support policies that discourage competition from local upstarts—for example, taxes on breweries and laws that prevent breweries from selling their kegs directly to consumers (instead of through a distributor). But what's unique about the South is that there's a voting bloc—the Baptists—whose moral stance against alcohol happens to align with large producers' desires to keep new competitors from getting started in the business. The support of Baptists provides Southern politicians with a reason to hinder brewers that politicians in other regions don't have. As a result, the states with the most Baptists tend to have the fewest breweries.
What Gohmann found is a correlation, of course, but it's a convincing one. There's no counter-argument that Southerners simply don't like beer: Louisiana happens to be the state with the 10th-highest beer consumption per capita, and South Carolina isn't far behind. And while there are other religious groups—Mormons and Muslims, to name two—that abstain from alcohol and live in high concentrations in areas with lots of breweries, those groups, unlike Baptists, take firmer stances on what they themselves can drink than on what others are allowed to.In fact, there's even more of a religious pressure for temperance in the South than Gohmann has it. While Baptists take the strongest position against alcohol, Methodists have also publicly advocated for temperance. "Between the two of them, they account for a very large proportion of the population in the South," says Nancy Ammerman, a professor of sociology at Boston University.
Do the Baptists and Methodists realize that they are no better for drinking football beer?
Source: The Atlantic
