“Look No Further!” a billboard on the side of the highway beckons, drawing my gaze toward the red cover of a Bible. “You Are Worthy of Redemption!”

Not far away, another sign urges me to “Keep Christ in Christmas.” Then farther down the road a third appears: “Jesus: COMING SOON” its bright colors announce.

Signs like these are familiar to me: I’m a historian who studies the U.S. South and lives in it. I know how easily they can evoke the South – or, I should say, a certain image of it. As that image pictures it, the South is “the Bible Belt”: a place where people are really religious, and, as a result, socially and politically conservative. Indeed, in this year of midterm elections, you’re almost certain to hear pundits invoke “the Bible Belt” as shorthand explanation for Southern political behavior.

The phrase has been around for a century. Its endurance, however – and the “evidence” behind it today – could use some serious scrutiny. I spotted those roadside signs, for example, in Ontario, Canada, a thousand miles from what anybody would think of as the South.

Of the many things said about the South over the years, “Bible Belt” is the cliché that just won’t die.

“Bible Belt” entered the lexicon in 1924, in the pages of The American Mercury, a magazine co-founded by H.L. Mencken. Based in Baltimore, at the upper edge of the South, Mencken was one of the nation’s most prominent journalists in the decades between the world wars.

The acerbic satirist had skewered the South in his much-discussed 1919 essay “The Sahara of the Bozart,” depicting it as a vast cultural wasteland. In 1925, he closely covered the Dayton, Tennessee, trial of biology teacher John T. Scopes, who had been charged with violating the state’s law........

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