Children are naïve -- they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you're asking for trouble.
The other factor that people forget about the southern region is the amount of inter-marriage that has already occurred there, and so there are certain genetic defects come to the fore when you have a large inter-marriage population. That means regression .... And in fact Utah is another state, which is basically owned by the Mormon church, which also has a lot of inter-marriage and because this type of inter-marriage there is a large proportion of blind people in Utah. That's why when you go across the street, instead of just a stop light that you can see, they have stop lights that make a coo-coo noise to tell you when to cross the street- that's true!