Say what you will about the guy, but last week Donald Trump accomplished something that Tennessee politicians have been trying and failing at for a couple of centuries now. He also spoiled one of my favorite proofs of the relevance of distant history.

For years, really since before the Civil War—and some have traced it all the way back to the spat between East Tennessean John Sevier and Middle Tennessean Andrew Jackson in 1803—East Tennessee had voted differently from the rest of the state. The divide was sharpest in 1861, when several counties of East Tennessee considered seceding from Tennessee, because Tennessee was seceding from the Union.

Appomattox didn’t end the rift. Immediately after the Civil War, and for more than a century, East Tennessee was Republican, Middle and West Tennessee Democratic. Here it wasn’t always a liberal-versus-conservative split. Sometimes, especially during the early days of civil rights, the conservationist movement, progressive federal regulations, and a tendency to steer clear of foreign wars, it was the Republicans who were analogous to modern liberals. East Tennessee has always liked its Republicans both ways.

In my youth, the only predictably Republican parts of Tennessee were the old Unionist parts. The Democratic counties were the old Confederate counties. That membrane seemed to erode with Reagan’s election, when Tennessee started tilting Republican. However, if you paid closer attention to the returns, during the Republican primaries every four years, old Unionist East Tennessee was often still distinct. In 2008, the old Unionist counties favored McCain, the low-key fiscally careful Republican, while the old Confederate counties favored Huckabee, the fellow who preferred to talk about banning abortion and gay marriage.

It was fascinating to me. The 2008 Republican primary map was a ghost image of the Civil War, a demographic fossil. It was less obvious in 2012, when Tennessee as a whole favored Santorum, the values Republican, over Romney, the old-school conservative. Most of East Tennessee liked Santorum, but it was closer. Romney did better here than in most Middle and West Tennessee counties.

Last week, though, even on the Republican primary level, it’s hard to tell the grand divisions of Tennessee apart by how we voted. Tennessee loves Donald Trump.

Knox County offered one of the state’s lowest portions for Trump, at 32.4 percent. The more urban counties liked him less: Nashville’s Davidson, at 31 percent, and Memphis’s Shelby, at 29.9 percent. Chattanooga’s Hamilton, which is next in line in density, is also less Trumpish than most, at 32.9 percent. The more rural counties of Tennessee favor Trump with percentages of 40 or more. Are city folks by nature less impressed with big-city folks than country folks are?

Last week only one Tennessee county preferred someone else to the Donald: Affluent, educated Williamson County, part of suburban Nashville, picked Rubio over Trump, who got only 27.4 percent of the vote there. It’s not an urban county, but it’s a rich one. Maybe multi-millionaires are less impressive to other multi-millionaires than they are to non-multi-millionaires.

Most of East Tennessee likes Trump just fine. In fact, in a few familiar counties, like Union, Grainger, Campbell, and Claiborne, more than half of Republican voters picked Trump over all other GOP contenders combined. It looks like rural Middle and West Tennessee, where some places like Lake and Grundy Counties offered him more than 55 percent, may be just a shade more enthusiastic about the short-fingered vulgarian than East Tennessee is, but basically it appears that Donald Trump is unifying Tennessee in ways that many Tennesseans tried and failed.

Why Trump, a New Yorker’s New Yorker, moreover one who’s not much of a churchgoer, has a stronger appeal in the more rural areas of Tennessee than in the cities will puzzle historians for years to come.

No major-party nominee in history has been married as often. (Approaching his 70th birthday, Trump doesn’t know what it’s like to be married to a woman older than 45.) He’s profited from casinos and strip clubs. He’s a rude showoff who boasts about the size of his penis. Trump is the embodiment of the South’s unfairest stereotype of a Yankee.

He doesn’t evoke the family values Republican that rural Middle and West Tennessee recently favored. He doesn’t suggest the low-key fiscal conservative Republican that East Tennessee used to prefer.

His appeal comes from somewhere else. And it may undermine some of our longstanding assumptions about ourselves.

Last week I heard a poignant radio interview with a Southern evangelical who sees in Trump’s triumphs reasons to doubt whether self-identified Southern evangelicals are even Christians. He questioned, before a national audience, whether his flock was nearly as big as he’d assumed it was all these years.

The Bible Belt is a concept created in the 1920s by Baltimore editor H.L. Mencken to ridicule the South. The term, if it’s useful at all, requires multiple footnotes. Surveys indicate Southerners go to church more regularly than say, Midwesterners, but only by a few percentage points. Not always mentioned is the fact that a big part of that difference is the traditional centrality of the church to the South’s black community. And the same polls used to make the South appear distinctly religious also point out that most Southerners don’t attend church regularly (58 percent of Tennesseans don’t, according to a 2015 Gallup poll). In each of the 50 states, church attendees constitute a large two-digit minority (except in Utah, where they’re a slim majority).

Of course, church attendance isn’t the same thing as faith. I’ve often suspected that the South has learned to use religion as a sort of cosmetic to make common ugly opinions look righteous.

A faith that warns its followers about material possessions and boastfulness, about judging not lest ye be judged, would seem unlikely to lead voters to Donald Trump.

But maybe organized religion and Trump both appeal to a certain personality type characterized by an attraction to rules and certainty and authority figures and the thrill of sweeping denunciation. They may want God, but when God is elusive, they settle for Trump.

Jack Neely

Jack Neely is the director of the Knoxville History Project, a nonprofit devoted to exploring, disseminating, and celebrating Knoxville's cultural heritage. He’s also one of the most popular and influential writers in the area, known for his books and columns. The Scruffy Citizen surveys the city of Knoxville's life and culture in the context of its history, with emphasis on what makes it unique and how its past continues to affect and inform its future.