Asheville often doesn’t feel particularly southern. When folks ask me what it’s like living below the Mason-Dixon, that’s usually my retort. Asheville doesn’t feel so southern (with the exception fo the driving…), and in fact, you’re probably just as likely to see a confederate flag, tee shirt, or vanity plate in the rural area of PA I grew up in as you are in Asheville proper (some of the regions outside Asheville area are a very different story — I recently was hiking out on the TN border and stars and bars abounded), and similarly, where I grew up is both much more conservative and religious.
While there are quite a few megachurches of the type we don’t get up north, dotting the Ashevillian landscape—my gym shares a parking lot with The Biltmore Church, which gave us my nemesis: Madison Cawthorn—it’s pretty nice how little strangers attempt to save me for various reasons in my day-to-day Ashevillian existence.
And yet…North Carolina is firmly in the Bible belt, a fact that sometimes—and in this case, very peculiarly—decides to rear its head.
Example #1: This past Friday night, I drove to an Ingles store I rarely visit because it has an attached gas station, and I was looking to redeem some fuel points. Maybe it was because it wasn’t my go-to gas station, or perhaps because it was Friday after a long week, but for whatever reason, I didn’t pull into the gas spot correctly, with my tank on the opposite side of the pump. I reversed course and pulled into another place, only to realize I’d done the same thing.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered to myself, not talking to anyone but me about my stupidity.
“What did you just say?” A woman at the neighboring pump said to me.
“I was just talking to myself,” I answered.
“I don’t like when people use the lord’s name in vain,” she said, glaring at me. “That’s a sin.”
“Sorry to offend,” I muttered, uninterested in starting any kind of dialogue with this woman.
“You don’t need to apologize to me,” she said, “but him,” nodding upward, a shit-eating grin on her face. I just smiled, got back into my car, and there in that safety, let out a string of non-Christ-approved expletives directed her way.
Example #2: Yesterday I went to the eye doctor’s for my annual check-up. Not one, not two, but three different men were wearing tee shirts from the Creation Museum, a museum in Kentucky that disputes evolution and features displays of animatronic people and dinosaurs coexisting…
I’m not alone in sometimes forgetting that North Carolina is deep in bible-belt country. Only 29% of Americans think that all of North Carolina is considered part of the bible belt (50% say all of Mississippi and Alabama are, for context).
That said, local news station WLOS just reported today that a “new study” named North Carolina the 6th most religious state in the U.S. for 2025, citing “the most religious establishments per capita” and “the highest share of adults who are ‘very religious.’”
I bet the woman who confronted me at the gas station considers herself “very religious,” and I bet she’s never met a neighbor she’s loved. She also—shockingly—had a sticker on her car idolizing a man who is not the god, but certainly has a god complex just about as big as his daddy issues.
AshevilleExplorer 