Bayesian epistemology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_epistemology 

 

Part of a series on
Bayesian statistics

Bayesian epistemology is a formal approach to various topics in epistemology that has its roots in Thomas Bayes' work in the field of probability theory. One advantage of its formal method in contrast to traditional epistemology is that its concepts and theorems can be defined with a high degree of precision. It is based on the idea that beliefs can be interpreted as subjective probabilities. As such, they are subject to the laws of probability theory, which act as the norms of rationality. These norms can be divided into static constraints, governing the rationality of beliefs at any moment, and dynamic constraints, governing how rational agents should change their beliefs upon receiving new evidence. The most characteristic Bayesian expression of these principles is found in the form of Dutch books, which illustrate irrationality in agents through a series of bets that lead to a loss for the agent no matter which of the probabilistic events occurs. Bayesians have applied these fundamental principles to various epistemological topics but Bayesianism does not cover all topics of traditional epistemology. The problem of confirmation in the philosophy of science, for example, can be approached through the Bayesian principle of conditionalization by holding that a piece of evidence confirms a theory if it raises the likelihood that this theory is true. Various proposals have been made to define the concept of coherence in terms of probability, usually in the sense that two propositions cohere if the probability of their conjunction is higher than if they were neutrally related to each other. The Bayesian approach has also been fruitful in the field of social epistemology, for example, concerning the problem of testimony or the problem of group belief. Bayesianism still faces various theoretical objections that have not been fully solved.

Relation to traditional epistemology

Traditional epistemology and Bayesian epistemology are both forms of epistemology, but they differ in various respects, for example, concerning their methodology, their interpretation of belief, the role justification or confirmation plays in them and some of their research interests. Traditional epistemology focuses on topics such as the analysis of the nature of knowledge, usually in terms of justified true beliefs, the sources of knowledge, like perception or testimony, the structure of a body of knowledge, for example in the form of foundationalism or coherentism, and the problem of philosophical skepticism or the question of whether knowledge is possible at all. These inquiries are usually based on epistemic intuitions and regard beliefs as either present or absent. Bayesian epistemology, on the other hand, works by formalizing concepts and problems, which are often vague in the traditional approach. It thereby focuses more on mathematical intuitions and promises a higher degree of precision. It sees belief as a continuous phenomenon that comes in various degrees, so-called credences. Some Bayesians have even suggested that the regular notion of belief should be abandoned. But there are also proposals to connect the two, for example, the Lockean thesis, which defines belief as credence above a certain threshold. Justification plays a central role in traditional epistemology while Bayesians have focused on the related notions of confirmation and disconfirmation through evidence. The notion of evidence is important for both approaches but only the traditional approach has been interested in studying the sources of evidence, like perception and memory. Bayesianism, on the other hand, has focused on the role of evidence for rationality: how someone's credence should be adjusted upon receiving new evidence. There is an analogy between the Bayesian norms of rationality in terms of probabilistic laws and the traditional norms of rationality in terms of deductive consistency. Certain traditional problems, like the topic of skepticism about our knowledge of the external world, are difficult to express in Bayesian terms.

Fundamentals

Bayesian epistemology is based only on a few fundamental principles, which can be used to define various other notions and can be applied to many topics in epistemology. At their core, these principles constitute constraints on how we should assign credences to propositions. They determine what an ideally rational agent would believe. The basic principles can be divided into synchronic or static principles, which govern how credences are to be assigned at any moment, and diachronic or dynamic principles, which determine how the agent should change her beliefs upon receiving new evidence. The axioms of probability and the principal principle belong to the static principles while the principle of conditionalization governs the dynamic aspects as a form of probabilistic inference. The most characteristic Bayesian expression of these principles is found in the form of Dutch books, which illustrate irrationality in agents through a series of bets that lead to a loss for the agent no matter which of the probabilistic events occurs. This test for determining irrationality has been referred to as the "pragmatic self-defeat test".

Beliefs, probability and bets

One important difference to traditional epistemology is that Bayesian epistemology focuses not on the notion of simple belief but on the notion of degrees of belief, so-called credences. This approach tries to capture the idea of certainty: we believe in all kinds of claims but we are more certain about some, like that the earth is round, than about others, like that Plato was the author of the First Alcibiades. These degrees come in values between 0 and 1. 0 corresponds to full disbelief, 1 corresponds to full belief and 0.5 corresponds to suspension of belief. According to the Bayesian interpretation of probability, credences stand for subjective probabilities. Following Frank P. Ramsey, they are interpreted in terms of the willingness to bet money on a claim. So having a credence of 0.8 (i.e. 80 %) that your favorite soccer team will win the next game would mean being willing to bet up to four dollars for the chance to make one dollar profit. This account draws a tight connection between Bayesian epistemology and decision theory. It might seem that betting-behavior is only one special area and as such not suited for defining such a general notion as credences. But, as Ramsey argues, we bet all the time when understood in the widest sense. For example, in going to the train station, we bet on the train being there on time, otherwise we would have stayed at home. It follows from the interpretation of credence in terms of willingness to make bets that it would be irrational to ascribe a credence of 0 or 1 to any proposition, except for contradictions and tautologies. The reason for this is that ascribing these extreme values would mean that one would be willing to bet anything, including one's life, even if the payoff was minimal. Another negative side-effect of such extreme credences is that they are permanently fixed and cannot be updated anymore upon acquiring new evidence.

This central tenet of Bayesianism, that credences are interpreted as subjective probabilities and are therefore governed by the norms of probability, has been referred to as probabilism. These norms express the nature of the credences of ideally rational agents. They do not put demands on what credence we should have on any single given belief, for example, whether it will rain tomorrow. Instead, they constraint the system of beliefs as a whole. For example, if your credence that it will rain tomorrow is 0.8 then your credence in the opposite proposition, i.e. that it will not rain tomorrow, should be 0.2, not 0.1 or 0.5. According to Stephan Hartmann and Jan Sprenger, the axioms of probability can be expressed through the following two laws: (1) ${\displaystyle P(A)=1}$ for any tautology ${\displaystyle A}$; (2) For incompatible (mutually exclusive) propositions ${\displaystyle A}$ and ${\displaystyle B}$, ${\displaystyle P(A\lor B)=P(A)+P(B)}$.

Another important Bayesian principle of degrees of beliefs is the principal principle due to David Lewis. It states that our knowledge of objective probabilities should correspond to our subjective probabilities in the form of credences. So if you know that the objective chance of a coin landing heads is 50% then your credence that the coin will land heads should be 0.5.

The axioms of probability together with the principal principle determines the static or synchronic aspect of rationality: what an agent's beliefs should be like when only considering one moment. But rationality also involves a dynamic or diachronic aspect, which comes to play for changing one's credences upon being confronted with new evidence. This aspect is determined by the principle of conditionalization.

Principle of conditionalization

The principle of conditionalization governs how the agent's credence in a hypothesis should change upon receiving new evidence for or against this hypothesis. As such, it expresses the dynamic aspect of how ideal rational agents would behave. It is based on the notion of conditional probability, which is the measure of the probability that one event occurs given that another event has already occurred. The unconditional probability that ${\displaystyle A}$ will occur is usually expressed as ${\displaystyle P(A)}$ while the conditional probability that ${\displaystyle A}$ will occur given that B has already occurred is written as ${\displaystyle P(A\mid B)}$. For example, the probability of flipping a coin two times and the coin landing heads two times is only 25%. But the conditional probability of this occurring given that the coin has landed heads on the first flip is then 50%. The principle of conditionalization applies this idea to credences:  we should change our credence that the coin will land heads two times upon receiving evidence that it has already landed heads on the first flip. The probability assigned to the hypothesis before the event is called prior probability. The probability afterward is called posterior probability. According to the simple principle of conditionalization, this can be expressed in the following way: ${\displaystyle P_{\text{posterior}}(H)=P_{\text{prior}}(H\mid E)={\frac {P_{\text{prior}}(H\land E)}{P_{\text{prior}}(E)}}}$. So the posterior probability that the hypothesis is true is equal to the conditional prior probability that the hypothesis is true relative to the evidence, which is equal to the prior probability that both the hypothesis and the evidence are true, divided by the prior probability that the evidence is true. The original expression of this principle, referred to as Bayes' theorem, can be directly deduced from this formulation.

The simple principle of conditionalization makes the assumption that our credence in the acquired evidence, i.e. its posterior probability, is 1, which is unrealistic. For example, scientists sometimes need to discard previously accepted evidence upon making new discoveries, which would be impossible if the corresponding credence was 1. An alternative form of conditionalization, proposed by Richard Jeffrey, adjusts the formula to take the probability of the evidence into account: ${\displaystyle P_{\text{posterior}}(H)=P_{\text{prior}}(H\mid E)\cdot P_{\text{posterior}}(E)+P_{\text{prior}}(H\mid \lnot E)\cdot P_{\text{posterior}}(\lnot E)}$.

Dutch books

A Dutch book is a series of bets that necessarily results in a loss. An agent is vulnerable to a Dutch book if her credences violate the laws of probability. This can be either in synchronic cases, in which the conflict happens between beliefs held at the same time, or in diachronic cases, in which the agent does not respond properly to new evidence. In the most simple synchronic case, only two credences are involved: the credence in a proposition and in its negation. The laws of probability hold that these two credences together should amount to 1 since either the proposition or its negation are true. Agents who violate this law are vulnerable to a synchronic Dutch book. For example, given the proposition that it will rain tomorrow, suppose that an agent's degree of belief that it is true is 0.51 and the degree that it is false is also 0.51. In this case, the agent would be willing to accept two bets at $0.51 for the chance to win $1: one that it will rain and another that it will not rain. The two bets together cost $1.02, resulting in a loss of $0.02, no matter whether it will rain or not. The principle behind diachronic Dutch books is the same, but they are more complicated since they involve making bets before and after receiving new evidence and have to take into account that there is a loss in each case no matter how the evidence turns out to be.

There are different interpretations about what it means that an agent is vulnerable to a Dutch book. On the traditional interpretation, such a vulnerability reveals that the agent is irrational since she would willingly engage in behavior that is not in her best self-interest. One problem with this interpretation is that it assumes logical omniscience as a requirement for rationality, which is problematic especially in complicated diachronic cases. An alternative interpretation uses Dutch books as "a kind of heuristic for determining when one's degrees of belief have the potential to be pragmatically self-defeating". This interpretation is compatible with holding a more realistic view of rationality in the face of human limitations.

Dutch books are closely related to the axioms of probability. The Dutch book theorem holds that only credence assignments that do not follow the axioms of probability are vulnerable to Dutch books. The converse Dutch book theorem states that no credence assignment following these axioms is vulnerable to a Dutch book.

Applications

Confirmation theory

In the philosophy of science, confirmation refers to the relation between a piece of evidence and a hypothesis confirmed by it. Confirmation theory is the study of confirmation and disconfirmation: how scientific hypotheses are supported or refuted by evidence. Bayesian confirmation theory provides a model of confirmation based on the principle of conditionalization. A piece of evidence confirms a theory if the conditional probability of that theory relative to the evidence is higher than the unconditional probability of the theory by itself. Expressed formally: ${\displaystyle P(H\mid E)>P(H)}$. If the evidence lowers the probability of the hypothesis then it disconfirms it. Scientists are usually not just interested in whether a piece of evidence supports a theory but also in how much support it provides. There are different ways how this degree can be determined. The simplest version just measures the difference between the conditional probability of the hypothesis relative to the evidence and the unconditional probability of the hypothesis, i.e. the degree of support is ${\displaystyle P(H\mid E)-P(H)}$. The problem with measuring this degree is that it depends on how certain the theory already is prior to receiving the evidence. So if a scientist is already very certain that a theory is true then one further piece of evidence will not affect her credence much, even if the evidence would be very strong. There are other constraints for how an evidence measure should behave, for example, surprising evidence, i.e. evidence that had a low probability on its own, should provide more support. Scientists are often faced with the problem of having to decide between two competing theories. In such cases, the interest is not so much in absolute confirmation, or how much a new piece of evidence would support this or that theory, but in relative confirmation, i.e. in which theory is supported more by the new evidence.

A well-known problem in confirmation theory is Carl Gustav Hempel's raven paradox.Hempel starts by pointing out that seeing a black raven counts as evidence for the hypothesis that all ravens are black while seeing a green apple is usually not taken to be evidence for or against this hypothesis. The paradox consists in the consideration that the hypothesis "all ravens are black" is logically equivalent to the hypothesis "if something is not black, then it is not a raven". So since seeing a green apple counts as evidence for the second hypothesis, it should also count as evidence for the first one. Bayesianism allows that seeing a green apple supports the raven-hypothesis while explaining our initial intuition otherwise. This result is reached if we assume that seeing a green apple provides minimal but still positive support for the raven-hypothesis while spotting a black raven provides significantly more support.

Coherence

Coherence plays a central role in various epistemological theories, for example, in the coherence theory of truth or in the coherence theory of justification. It is often assumed that sets of beliefs are more likely to be true if they are coherent than otherwise. For example, we would be more likely to trust a detective who can connect all the pieces of evidence into a coherent story. But there is no general agreement as to how coherence is to be defined. Bayesianism has been applied to this field by suggesting precise definitions of coherence in terms of probability, which can then be employed to tackle other problems surrounding coherence. One such definition was proposed by Tomoji Shogenji, who suggests that the coherence between two beliefs is equal to the probability of their conjunction divided by the probabilities of each by itself, i.e. ${\displaystyle Coherence(A,B)={\frac {P(A\land B)}{(P(A)\cdot P(B))}}}$. Intuitively, this measures how likely it is that the two beliefs are true at the same time, compared to how likely this would be if they were neutrally related to each other. The coherence is high if the two beliefs are relevant to each other. Coherence defined this way is relative to a credence assignment. This means that two propositions may have high coherence for one agent and a low coherence for another agent due to the difference in prior probabilities of the agents' credences.

Social epistemology

Social epistemology studies the relevance of social factors for knowledge. In the field of science, for example, this is relevant since individual scientists often have to place their trust in the discoveries of other scientists in order to progress. The Bayesian approach can be applied to various topics in social epistemology. For example, probabilistic reasoning can be used in the field of testimony to evaluate how reliable a given report is. In this way, it can be formally shown that witness reports that are probabilistically independent of each other provide more support than otherwise. Another topic in social epistemology concerns the question of how to aggregate the beliefs of the individuals within a group to arrive at the belief of the group as a whole. Bayesianism approaches this problem by aggregating the probability assignments of the different individuals.

Objections

Problem of priors

In order to draw probabilistic inferences based on new evidence, it is necessary to already have a prior probability assigned to the proposition in question. But this is not always the case: there are many propositions that the agent never considered and therefore lacks a credence. This problem is usually solved by assigning a probability to the proposition in question in order to learn from the new evidence through conditionalization. The problem of priors concerns the question of how this initial assignment should be done. Subjective Bayesians hold that there are no or few constraints besides probabilistic coherence that determine how we assign the initial probabilities. The argument for this freedom in choosing the initial credence is that the credences will change as we acquire more evidence and will converge on the same value after enough steps no matter where we start. Objective Bayesians, on the other hand, assert that there are various constraints that determine the initial assignment. One important constraint is the principle of indifference. It states that the credences should be distributed equally among all the possible outcomes. For example, the agent wants to predict the color of balls drawn from an urn containing only red and black balls without any information about the ratio of red to black balls. Applied to this situation, the principle of indifference states that the agent should initially assume that the probability to draw a red ball is 50%. This is due to symmetric considerations: it is the only assignment in which the prior probabilities are invariant to a change in label. While this approach works for some cases it produces paradoxes in others. Another objection is that one should not assign prior probabilities based on initial ignorance.

Problem of logical omniscience

The norms of rationality according to the standard definitions of Bayesian epistemology assume logical omniscience: the agent has to make sure to exactly follow all the laws of probability for all her credences in order to count as rational. Whoever fails to do so is vulnerable to Dutch books and is therefore irrational. This is an unrealistic standard for human beings, as critics have pointed out.

Problem of old evidence

The problem of old evidence concerns cases in which the agent does not know at the time of acquiring a piece of evidence that it confirms a hypothesis but only learns about this supporting-relation later. Normally, the agent would increase her belief in the hypothesis after discovering this relation. But this is not allowed in Bayesian confirmation theory since conditionalization can only happen upon a change of the probability of the evidential statement, which is not the case. For example, the observation of certain anomalies in the orbit of Mercury is evidence for the theory of general relativity. But this data had been obtained before the theory was formulated, thereby counting as old evidence.

Bible Belt

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_Belt 

Bible Belt
Cultural region of the United States
The area roughly considered to constitute the United States Bible Belt
Country	United States
States	Alabama  Arkansas  Georgia  Kentucky  Louisiana  Mississippi  North Carolina  Oklahoma  South Carolina  Tennessee  Texas  Virginia  West Virginia and parts of:  Florida  Illinois  Iowa  Indiana  Kansas  Missouri  New Mexico  Ohio

The Bible Belt is a region of the Southern United States in which socially conservative Christianity plays a strong role in society and politics, and church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. The region contrasts with the religiously diverse Midwest and Great Lakes, and the Mormon Corridor in Utah and southern Idaho.

Whereas the states with the highest percentage of residents identifying as non-religious are in the West and New England regions of the United States (with Vermont at 37%, ranking the highest), in the Bible Belt state of Alabama it is just 12%, and Tennessee has the highest proportion of evangelical Protestants, at 52%. The evangelical influence is strongest in northern Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, southern and western Virginia, West Virginia, the Upstate region of South Carolina, and East Texas.

The earliest known usage of the term "Bible Belt" was by American journalist and social commentator H. L. Mencken, who in 1924 wrote in the Chicago Daily Tribune: "The old game, I suspect, is beginning to play out in the Bible Belt." In 1927, Mencken claimed the term as his invention. The term is now also used in other countries for regions with higher religious doctrine adoption.

In the United States

Geography

The name "Bible Belt" has been applied historically to the South and parts of the Midwest, but is more commonly identified with the South. In a 1961 study, Wilbur Zelinsky delineated the region as the area in which Protestant denominations, especially Southern Baptist, Methodist, and evangelical, are the predominant religious affiliations. The region thus defined included most of the Southern United States, including most of Texas and Oklahoma, and in the states south of the Ohio River, and extending east to include central West Virginia and Virginia, from the Shenandoah Valley southward into Southside Virginia and North Carolina. In addition, the Bible Belt covers most of Missouri and Kentucky and southern parts of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. On the other hand, areas in the South which are not considered part of the Bible Belt include heavily Catholic Southern Louisiana, central and southern Florida, which have been settled mainly by immigrants and Americans from elsewhere in the country, and overwhelmingly Hispanic South Texas. A 1978 study by Charles Heatwole identified the Bible Belt as the region dominated by 24 fundamentalist Protestant denominations, corresponding to essentially the same area mapped by Zelinsky.

According to Stephen W. Tweedie, an Associate Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography at Oklahoma State University, the Bible Belt is now viewed in terms of numerical concentration of the audience for religious television. He finds two belts: one more eastern that stretches from Florida, (excluding Miami, Tampa and South Florida), through Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, the Carolinas, and into Southside Virginia; and another concentrated in Texas (excluding El Paso, and South Texas), Arkansas, Louisiana, (excluding New Orleans and Acadiana), Oklahoma, Missouri (excluding St. Louis), Kansas, and Mississippi. "[H]is research also broke the Bible Belt into two core regions, a western region and an eastern region. Tweedie's western Bible Belt was focused on a core that extended from Little Rock, Arkansas to Tulsa, Oklahoma. His eastern Bible Belt was focused on a core that included the major population centers of Virginia and North Carolina.

Bible-minded cities map

A study was commissioned by the American Bible Society to survey the importance of the Bible in the metropolitan areas of the United States. The report was based on 42,855 interviews conducted between 2005 and 2012. It determined the 10 most "Bible-minded" cities were Knoxville, Tennessee; Shreveport, Louisiana; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Birmingham, Alabama; Jackson, Mississippi; Springfield, Missouri; Charlotte, North Carolina; Lynchburg, Virginia; Huntsville-Decatur, Alabama; and Charleston, West Virginia.

By state

Percentage of respondents in the USA stating that religion is "Very important" or "Somewhat important" in their lives, 2014

 

Proportion of Evangelical Protestants per state in the American South

State	Baptist	Pentecostal	Restorationist	Presbyterian	Other	Total		Share indicating religion is "Very Important"
Alabama	31%	5%	3%	2%	8%	49%		77%
Arkansas	25%	5%	5%	2%	9%	46%		70%
Delaware	7%	1%	3%	1%	3%	15%		46%
Washington, D.C.	2%	1%	1%	1%	3%	8%		50%
Florida	8%	4%	2%	1%	9%	24%		53%
Georgia	21%	4%	2%	1%	10%	38%		64%
Kentucky	29%	7%	3%	1%	9%	49%		63%
Louisiana	16%	3%	1%	<1%	7%	27%		71%
Maryland	5%	3%	1%	<1%	9%	18%		50%
Mississippi	26%	4%	2%	1%	8%	41%		74%
Missouri	15%	6%	3%	1%	11%	36%		56%
North Carolina	20%	4%	1%	1%	9%	35%		62%
Oklahoma	23%	6%	4%	<1%	14%	47%		64%
South Carolina	22%	4%	1%	1%	7%	35%		69%
Tennessee	33%	4%	6%	2%	7%	52%		71%
Texas	14%	4%	2%	<1%	11%	31%		63%
Virginia	15%	5%	<1%	1%	9%	30%		60%
West Virginia	19%	7%	2%	<1%	11%	39%		64%

Other Bible Belts in the United States

In addition to the South, there is a smaller Bible Belt in West Michigan, centered on the heavily Dutch-influenced cities of Holland and Grand Rapids. Christian colleges in that region include Calvin College, Hope College, Cornerstone University, Grace Bible College, and Kuyper College. Much like the South, West Michigan is generally fiscally and socially conservative.

There is also a Bible Belt in the western suburbs of Chicago (especially in DuPage County), centered on Wheaton. Christian colleges in that region include Wheaton College, North Central College, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Elmhurst College. Christian publishing houses in that region include Good News Publishers, Intervarsity Press, and Tyndale House. Carol Stream is home to the headquarters of Christianity Today. DuPage County has historically been a fiscally and socially conservative Republican stronghold, though in recent years has become more politically moderate especially on issues of race and immigration, and in 2016 Donald Trump was the first Republican nominee for president since 1912 to get less than 40% of the vote. Many DuPage County communities which normally vote Republican did not support Donald Trump in 2016. In December 2019, shortly after the U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach Donald Trump, Christianity Today published a controversial editorial calling for the removal of Trump from office, citing the need to hold him to the same standards to which they held Bill Clinton in the 1990s (who was the last Democratic nominee for president to get less than 40% of the DuPage County vote).

History

During the colonial period (1607–1776), the South was a stronghold of the Anglican church. Its transition to a stronghold of non-Anglican Protestantism occurred gradually over the next century as a series of religious revival movements, many associated with the Baptist denomination, gained great popularity in the region.

The northern colonial Bible Belt (especially New England with its Puritan heritage) frequently performed missionary work in the South. "The centre of Particular Baptist activity in early America was in the Middle Colonies. In 1707 five churches in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware were united to form the Philadelphia Baptist Association, and through the association they embarked upon vigorous missionary activity. By 1760 the Philadelphia association included churches located in the present states of Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, and West Virginia; and by 1767 further multiplication of churches had necessitated the formation of two subsidiary associations, the Warren in New England and the Ketochton in Virginia. The Philadelphia association also provided leadership in organizing the Charleston Association in the Carolinas in 1751."

An influential figure was Shubal Stearns: "Shubael Stearns, a New England Separate Baptist, migrated to Sandy Creek, North Carolina, in 1755 and initiated a revival that quickly penetrated the entire Piedmont region. The churches he organized were brought together in 1758 to form the Sandy Creek Association". Stearns was brother-in-law of Daniel Marshall, who was born in Windsor, Connecticut and "is generally considered the first great Baptist leader in Georgia. He founded Kiokee Baptist Church, the oldest continuing Baptist congregation in the state". Also, Wait Palmer, of Toland, Connecticut, may have influenced African American Christianity in the South: "The Silver Bluff, South Carolina, revival was a seminal development, whose role among blacks rivalled that played by the Sandy Creek revival of the Separate Baptists, to which it was indirectly related. It was probably the same Wait Palmer who had baptized Shubal Stearns in 1751 who came to Silver Bluff in 1775, baptizing and constituting a church. Abraham Marshall, who encouraged the later offshoots, was a Separate Baptist of the Sandy Creek school. The revival at the Silver Bluff plantation of George Galphin (some twelve miles from Augusta, Georgia) had brought David George to the Afro-Baptist faith and had provided a ministry for George Liele".

According to Thomas S. Kidd, "As early as 1758, Sandy Creek missionaries helped organize a slave congregation, the Bluestone Church, on the plantation of William Byrd III, which may have been the first independently functioning African American church in North America. The church did not last long, but it reflected the Baptists' commitment to evangelizing African Americans". According to Gayraud S. Wilmore, "The preaching of New England Congregationalists such as Jonathan Edwards about the coming millennium, and his conviction that Christians were called to prepare for it, reached the slaves through the far-ranging missionary work of white evangelists such as Shubal Stearns, Wait Palmer, and Matthew Moore - all of whom left Congregationalism and became Separatist Baptist preachers in the plantation country of Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia".

Buckle

A billboard near the centre of Alabama

Several locations are occasionally referred to as "the Buckle of the Bible Belt":

• Abilene, Texas, a city of 117,000, is home to three Protestant universities: the Baptist affiliated Hardin-Simmons University, the Church of Christ's Abilene Christian University, and Methodist founded McMurry University.
• Nashville, Tennessee, sometimes referred to as "the Protestant Vatican", has over 700 churches, several seminaries, and a number of Christian schools, colleges and universities, including Belmont University, Trevecca Nazarene University, Lipscomb University, Free Will Baptist Bible College and American Baptist College. Nashville is the seat of the National Baptist Convention, USA, the headquarters of the Southern Baptist Convention, the National Association of Free Will Baptists, the Gideons International, the Gospel Music Association, and Thomas Nelson, the world's largest producer of Bibles.
• Tulsa, Oklahoma, is a city where Protestant and, in particular, Southern Baptist and other evangelical Christian traditions are very prominent. Tulsa is home to Oral Roberts University, Phillips Theological Seminary, and RHEMA Bible Training College (in the suburb of Broken Arrow). A number of prominent Protestant Christians have lived or studied in Tulsa, including Joel Osteen, Kenneth E. Hagin, Carlton Pearson, Kenneth Copeland, Billy Joe Daugherty, Smokie Norful and Billy James Hargis. Tulsa is also home to a number of vibrant Mainline Protestant congregations. Some of these congregations were founded during the oil boom of the early twentieth century and their facilities are noted for striking architecture, such as the art deco Boston Avenue Methodist Church and First Presbyterian Church of Tulsa. The metropolitan area has at least four religious radio stations (KCFO, KNYD, KXOJ, & KPIM), and at least two religious TV stations (KWHB & KGEB).
• Greenville, South Carolina, is a city where many Baptist churches, particularly Independent Baptist, are located. There are more than one hundred Baptist churches in the Greenville area, as well as Bob Jones University. It also is the home of WTBI radio station which plays old-fashioned Christian music and preaching 24 hours a day.

Political and cultural context

There has been research that links evangelical Protestantism with social conservatism. In 1950, President Harry S. Truman told Catholic leaders he wanted to send an ambassador to the Vatican. Truman said the leading Democrats in Congress approved, but they warned him, "it would defeat Democratic Senators and Congressmen in the Bible Belt."

In presidential elections, the Bible Belt states of Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas have voted for the Republican candidate in all elections since 1980; Oklahoma has supported the Republican presidential candidate in every election since 1968, with Republicans having carried every county in the state in all presidential elections since 2004. Other Bible Belt states have voted for the Republican presidential candidate in the majority of elections since 1980, but have gone to the Democratic candidate either once or twice since then. However, with the exception of Mississippi, historical geographer Barry Vann shows that counties in the upland areas of the Appalachians and the Ozarks have a more conservative voting pattern than the counties located in the coastal plains.

Outside the United States

Australia

In Australia, the term "Bible Belt" has been used to refer to areas within individual cities, which have a high concentration of Christian residents usually centralized around a megachurch, for example:

• Formerly, the northwestern suburbs of Sydney focusing on The Hills District were traditionally known as the "bible belt", where Hillsong Church is located. Between the 2011 and 2016 census, however, the Christian population of The Hills district got reduced by 18.5% and those without a religion grew from 1 in 8 in 2006 to 1 in 5 in the 2016 census.
• The Greater Western Sydney area, typically in the City of Fairfield area, in the suburbs between Fairfield and Horsley Park, where the megachurches are St Hurmizd Church, an Assyrian Church of the East and the Apostle Chaldean Catholic Church, a Chaldean Catholic church. Other bible belts include those with high Anglo-Saxon Protestant populations found in the Sutherland Shire, parts of City of Penrith, Camden Council and the Wollondilly Shire.
• The outer-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, where CityLife Church, Crossway Baptist Church, Stairway Church and Discovery Church are located.
• The northeastern suburbs of Adelaide focusing on Paradise, Modbury and Golden Grove, where Influencers Church is located
• The southeastern region of Queensland comprising the towns of Laidley, Gatton and Toowoomba.
• The Brisbane southern suburbs of Mansfield, Springwood, Carindale and Mount Gravatt. Garden City Assembly of God church, Citipointe Church, Clark Taylor's Worship Centre, and Brisbane Hillsong are notable megachurches in this area.
• More recently, the far northern suburbs of Perth are forming this reputation, with the focus being on One Church and Globalheart in the suburbs of Merriwa and Joondalup respectively.

Toowoomba city in Queensland has long been regarded as fertile ground for Christian fundamentalist right-wing movements  that adhere to biblical literalism, particularly those within the Pentecostal and charismatic stream of Christianity. This was exemplified by the highly publicised rise and subsequent fall of Howard Carter and the Logos Foundation in the 1980s. The Logos Foundation and other similar movements that have followed it, operate in a controlling, authoritarian and almost cultish manner, contributing to their notoriety. Other similarly conservative Pentecostal churches within the city have, since that time, banded together into a loose federation known as the Toowoomba Christian Leaders' Network. (note - most traditional church denominations have their own, separate ecumenical group) This network views itself as having a divine mission to 'take the city for the Lord' and as such, endorses elements of religious right-wing political advocacy, such as the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL).

ACL's former managing director who was raised in the Logos Foundation and is a former Toowoomba City councillor is Lyle Shelton. These church groups are strongly associated with North American trends such as the New Apostolic Reformation, Dominion theology, Five-fold ministry thinking, Kingdom Now theology and revivalism. They support the achievement of a type of theocratic society where conservative and literal interpretations of the bible are the dominant drivers of government, education, the Arts, the media and entertainment. Churches involved in this group currently include the successor organization to the Logos Foundation, the Toowoomba City Church, along with the Range Christian Fellowship, Spring Street Assembly of God, Christian Outreach Centre, Hume Ridge Church of Christ, Revival Ministries of Australia Shiloh Centre, the Edge Christian Centre and many others.

Queensland, just like the American Deep South, is considered to be a major centre for not just biblical groups, but also the homeland of a disproportionate amount of Australia's right-wing and far-right leaning politicians, including but not limited to, Fraser Anning, Pauline Hanson, and Clive Palmer.

Canada

The province of Saskatchewan has been referred to as Canada's Bible Belt with a significant Catholic, Anabaptist population and other Protestants. Certain areas of Canada's east coast region, such as the province of New Brunswick, also contain significant populations of Catholic, Baptist, Anglican and United faith adherents, up to 85% overall.

Denmark

In Denmark, rural western Jutland in particular is considered to be the Bible Belt. This is due to the higher number of citizens who are associated (in this particular area) with conservative Lutheran Christian organisations such as the Church Association for the Inner Mission in Denmark, which traditionally have had a very strong resistance to abortion and LGBT rights.

Estonia

Census results show religious belief in the country is more prevalent in the east running from north to south along the border with Russia, particularly in those areas with large populations of Russian Orthodox, Estonian Orthodox and Orthodox Old Believers.

Finland

Conservative Laestadianism, a Finnish Lutheran revival, is widespread in northern (Northern Ostrobothnia and Lapland (Finland)) and central parts (Northern Savonia) of Finland.

Germany

Rural portions of Bavaria, approximately stretching from Franconia into Württemberg, constitute Germany's Bible Belt with mostly Catholics, some Lutherans and Reformed Protestants. An area in Erzgebirge in Saxony has been described also as the "Saxon Bible Belt" with a notable evangelical Protestant/Christian fundamentalist/free church community, as well as some conservative Lutheran parishes that are opposed to same-sex marriage. Nevertheless, the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Saxony approved church resolutions regarding the issue regardless of opinions within those parishes.

Lithuania

Among its Baltic neighbors Lithuania is in general much more religious, but even in this context, Vilnius with its many churches and adjacent region (Vilnius district and Šalčininkai district municipalities) with larger number of Lithuanian Poles is the most religious region of Lithuania. Both Šalčininkai and Vilnius district municipalities by the ruling Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania – Christian Families Alliance were declared as guarded and ruled by Jesus Christ.

Mexico

In Mexico, there is what is known as the Rosary Belt (Spanish: Cinturón del Rosario). The term, created by journalist and writer Carlos Monsiváis in 1999, refers to a region comprising the states of Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Querétaro and, in more recent years, Zacatecas, where 90% of the population professes Roman Catholicism, which has a notable influence on local politics and society. Guanajuato, for example, is one of the most important electoral strongholds of the National Action Party, of Christian Democrat tradition, mostly inspired by the Social Doctrine of the Church, and with strong conservative ideals. It was in this region where the first uprisings against the government took place during the Cristero War, demanding an end to the persecution of Catholics in the country as a result of the promulgation of the so-called Calles Law, which restricted Catholic worship in Mexico.

Netherlands

The Bible Belt of the Netherlands (Dutch: Bijbelgordel) stretches from Zeeland, through the West-Betuwe and Veluwe, to the northern parts of the province Overijssel. In this region, orthodox Calvinists prevail.

New Zealand

In New Zealand, Mount Roskill, Auckland, contains the highest number of churches per capita in the country, and is the home of several Christian political candidates. The electorate was one of the last in the country to go "wet", in 1999, having formerly been a dry area where the selling of alcohol was prohibited.

At the 2013 New Zealand census, the Mangere–Otahuhu local board area of Auckland had the highest concentration of Christians in New Zealand, with 67.7 percent of the local board's 71,000 residents identifying as such.

In contrast to other bible belts, both areas tend to vote for left-wing candidates and are both currently represented in parliament by the governing centre-left Labour Party.

Norway

The Bible Belt of Norway is located mainly in the western and southern parts of the country, and contains numerous devout Lutherans.

Poland

South and East parts of Poland are much more religious than North and West. See Poland A and B.

Soviet Union

Before its independence, Soviet Ukraine was known as the Bible Belt of the Soviet Union, with a significant proportion of Baptists.

Sweden

The area normally called the Bible Belt of Sweden is centered on Jönköping in southern Sweden and contains numerous free churches. There are also numerous conservative Lutheran Laestadians in the Torne valley area in the far north of the country.

United Kingdom

In Northern Ireland, the area in County Antrim stretching from roughly Ballymoney to Larne and centred in the area of Ballymena is often referred to as a Bible Belt. This is because the area is heavily Protestant with a large evangelical community. From 1970 to 2010, the MP for North Antrim was Ian Paisley, a Free Presbyterian minister well known for his theological fundamentalism. The town of Ballymena, the largest town in the constituency, is often referred to as the "buckle" of the Bible Belt.