Bewildering

"The people of the United States are a strange and occasionally bewildering mixture of the enlightened, the superstitious, and the plain ignorant. In certain backward sections, notably but not exclusively in the Southern states, a form of religious dogmatism has perpetuated doctrines and prejudices which other sections, on a higher intellectual level, have rejected as no longer tenable by intelligent minds. In this 'Bible Belt,' as it is called, where the Bible is still interpreted literally and any conception contrary to such a literal interpretation is regarded as blasphemous, the Darwinian theory is anathema." ~Hermann Hagedorn, in Americans: A Book of Lives ©1946.

I didn't realize how long the South has been noted as a singularly backward area of the country.