Take a look at yourself.

I have lived in the South all my life. Though I love it, I hate it. I love the beauty of the South, I love some ideals of the Southern Culture, but everything isn't always as it seems. I've never been an overly religious person--I suppose I fall into the "I'm not religious, I'm spiritual" category. Of course, as we all know, that's a completely different subject. Though my parents and I never went to church together, I would go with my Southern Baptist grandparents on occasion. They were always pushing me to go to a Baptist church, etc. Unlike most children who sit in church,  I would listen to the sermons. I found what they were preaching ridiculous. I know that's an extreme way of saying it, but I didn't understand how they could hate so many different people and still call themselves Christians. It seemed like a huge contradiction to me.
I was raised to treat everyone equally. I never really understood why people would use religion as a reason to hate someone. I witnessed people from my grandparents church using the Bible to demean African-Americans or hate homosexuals. It's absurd. You can't preach one thing and then go and do the exact opposite. Like we were talking about in class, religions in the South seem to be some of the most close-minded and judgmental. They criticize others for being different from them, and therefore, wrong. Instead of learning to accept people's differences, they hate people for it. I think that if they looked at it objectively, they would understand that despite a few differences most everybody lives by the same "law" of human decency. I know that this hypocrisy isn't central to the Southern Baptists, but I have experienced it most with them. You have to "make the strange familiar and the familiar strange." We have to learn how to understand differences. We don't have to necessarily agree with them, but we don't need to hate them for it either.