Religious Orthodoxy in the Old South

I've continued reading the Southern essays by Richard Weaver. "The Older Religiousness in the South" has some interesting thoughts about religion in the South:

It is plain that just as there was much in the economic and social structure of the Old South to suggest Europe before the Great Plague and the peasant rebellions, so there was much in its religious attitude to recall the period before the Reformation. For although the South was heavily Protestant, its attitude toward religion was essentially the attitude of orthodoxy: it was a simple acceptance of a body of belief, an innocence of protest and schism by which religion was left one of the unquestioned and unquestionable supports of the general settlement under which men live. One might press the matter further and say that it was a doctrinal innocence, for the average Southern knew little and probably cared less about casuistical theology: what he recognized was the acknowledgement, the submissiveness of the will, and that general respect for order, natural and institutional, which is piety.

He takes some swipes at New England:

New England, acting out of that intellectual pride which has always characterized her people, allowed religion to become primarily a matter for analysis and debate, if we take here the point of view of the conservative religionist. Instead of insisting upon a simple grammar of assent, which a proper regard for the mysteries would dictate, they conceived it their duty to explore principles, and when they completed the exploration, they came out, not with a secured faith, but with an ethical philosophy, which illuminated much, but which had none of the binding power of the older creed.

There is also an essay that I would like to reflect on later, that treats the topic of what it means to be a gentleman. Weaver sets up the gentleman and the self-made man as antipodes, and associates the gentleman with the South and tradition/aristocracy, and the self-made man with the North and modernism/the bourgeoisie.