Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern ReligionMaking the Bible Belt upends notions of a longstanding, stable marriage between political religion and the American South. H. L. Mencken coined the term the Bible Belt in the 1920s to capture the peculiar alliance of religion and public life in the South, but the reality he described was only the closing chapter of a long historical process. Into the twentieth century, a robust anticlerical tradition still challenged religious forays into southern