Scoville, your description of Texas immediately brought to mind the experience of my oldest sister. Up here in Montana there is a mix of religions that the homesteaders, miners, railroad workers and other settlers brought to the state, but above all, they were mostly INDEPENDENT people, so the culture here was live and let live for the most part. There are pockets of small religious settlements, like the Dutch Reformed in Amsterdam and Churchill, MT, and the Hutterites, but nothing like the bible belt of the south. Well, we were raised in an Irish Catholic immigrant family, and my oldest sister married a Texan in the late 1950's. She moved to Texas with her husband and found that the mother-in-law hates Catholics and ruled the family. The loathing that his family had for a Catholic non-Texan was so extreme she could not live with it. In her 70's, telling me about her abyss of depression at age 20, she said they didn't want her to raise her two children - the mother in law basically thought Catholics were evil, so they were divorced and she returned to Montana without her children. My sister is in her 70's now, and she is still pained by that experience.