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States & Territories

Tennessee

South

Nashville's density of Southern Baptist, Church of Christ and gospel music publishing houses earned it the nickname the buckle of the Bible Belt, anchored by the Southern Baptist Convention's longtime headquarters and the Gospel Music Association. The Scopes Trial of 1925, held in Dayton over a state law banning the teaching of evolution, became the twentieth century's defining courtroom clash between fundamentalist Christianity and scientific modernism. East Tennessee's Appalachian hollows also produced the serpent handling Holiness tradition, a small and controversial Pentecostal practice still followed by a handful of rural congregations.

Facts
Religion
Leading Religious Affiliation
Evangelical Protestant 2
Tennessee: Evangelical Protestant is 45% of adults, ahead of Mainline Protestant at 12%. Margin of error plus or minus 4.4 points. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/state/tennessee/
Geography
Census Region
South 1
Law and State
Establishment Status
No Establishment 1
Tennessee has had no established church since its admission as a state in 1796.
Identity
Jurisdiction Status
U.S. state 1
Origins
Origin of the Name
From Tanasi, a Cherokee town on the Little Tennessee River whose own original meaning is not established. 1
Learn More
The Buckle of the Bible Belt and the Trial That Tested It

Nashville earned the nickname the buckle of the Bible Belt from the sheer density of religious institutions headquartered there, anchored for most of the twentieth century by the Southern Baptist Convention and a cluster of gospel music publishing houses that made the city a center of both Protestant organization and Christian popular culture at once. That institutional weight made Tennessee a natural stage for one of the century's defining confrontations between conservative Protestantism and scientific modernism. The Scopes Trial, held in the small town of Dayton in 1925 over a state law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools, pitted the celebrated orator and three time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution against the defense attorney Clarence Darrow, and the trial's national newspaper coverage turned a local test case into a referendum on how far a state could go in legislating what science teachers could say.

Scopes was convicted, a verdict later overturned on a technicality rather than on the constitutional question itself, so the case settled less in the courtroom than in public memory, where it became the standard reference point for the fundamentalist versus modernist divide in American Protestantism for the rest of the century. Tennessee's religious landscape also holds a much smaller and more controversial tradition entirely apart from that mainstream fight. In the Appalachian hollows of the state's east, a Holiness practice of serpent handling, taking up venomous snakes during worship as a literal enactment of a New Testament promise, survives in a small number of rural congregations, a tradition scholars describe as marginal even within Pentecostalism but continuously practiced since the early twentieth century.

Connections

Associated With

15th GMA Dove Awards (Wikipedia), Sources

This source names Tennessee directly: "Awards, held in 1984 in Nashville, Tennessee, honoring music from 1983, the first Dove Awards ceremony to be televised, broadcast on the Christian Broadcasting Network."

Source 15th GMA Dove Awards (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Baptist, Denominations

This source names Baptist directly: "Nashville's density of Southern Baptist, Church of Christ and gospel music publishing houses earned it the nickname the buckle of the Bible Belt, anchored by the Southern Baptist Convention's..."

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors
First Amendment Encyclopedia: Blasphemy, Sources

This source names Tennessee directly: "of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, an academic center devoted to First Amendment research and education, covering the history and current legal status of blasphemy law..."

Source First Amendment Encyclopedia: Blasphemy
On Civil Government (David Lipscomb), Sources

This source names Tennessee directly: "for 47 years, and is credited by the Tennessee Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement with leading the tradition's more conservative wing toward the formal separation..."

Source On Civil Government (David Lipscomb)David Lipscomb
The Articles of Religion of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, Creeds & Confessions

This source names Tennessee directly: "was organized in 1870 in Jackson, Tennessee, by formerly enslaved members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and it carried this same Wesleyan doctrinal standard forward as its own confession..."

Source Articles of Religion, What We Believe, The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (thecmechurch.org)The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church
The Memphis Miracle (International Pentecostal Holiness Church), Sources

This source names Tennessee directly: "of North America at Memphis, Tennessee, Don Evans's act of contrition toward Bishop Ithiel Clemmons, and the reconciliation that followed among the founding leaders of the Pentecostal/Charismatic..."

Source The Memphis Miracle (International Pentecostal Holiness Church)
The Memphis Miracle Founds the Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches of North America, Spread Events

This source names Tennessee directly: "Partners conference at Memphis, Tennessee, delegates of the all white Pentecostal Fellowship of North America, founded in 1948, voted to dissolve the organization, decades after the movement's first..."

Source The Memphis Miracle (International Pentecostal Holiness Church)
Thousands of Church Employees and Retirees Who Lost Retirement Funds to Receive Financial Relief Under Contingent Court Settlement (AARP, 2024), Sources

This source names Tennessee directly: "Court for the Western District of Tennessee, in which the African Methodist Episcopal Church and codefendants agreed to begin restoring nearly 90 million dollars in retirement funds to about 5,000..."

Source Thousands of Church Employees and Retirees Who Lost Retirement Funds to Receive Financial Relief Under Contingent Court Settlement (AARP, 2024)

Regions Where This Is Principal

Evangelicalism, Denominations

Plurality religious identification among the state's adults per the source's survey.

Source Pew Research Center: 2023-24 Religious Landscape StudyPew Research Center
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
2. Pew Research Center: 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study
Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 2025View the Source
Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion
Edward J. Larson, Basic Books, 1997View the Source
A Religious History of the American People
Sydney E. Ahlstrom, Yale University Press, 1972View the Source
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