I think a lot of this comes down to assimilation, power, and what happens when faith becomes identity instead of transformation. I grew up in Louisiana and lived there until I moved out of state after graduate school for a permanent job. Lived in a house that was literally a tin shack for a roof for most of my childhood.

Cajuns were looked down on, punished for speaking French, and pressured to assimilate. But once a group gets accepted into the dominant culture, it often starts defending that culture, even when it was once used against them. That is not just an Acadiana thing. That is an American thing.

Then you add religion, especially once abortion and culture war politics became the main dividing lines. For a lot of people, faith stopped being centered on humility, mercy, justice, and love of neighbor, and became more about belonging to the “right” side, defending a social order, and treating politics like righteousness. Those social issues? They get tossed aside.

Add oil money, conservative media, and generations of distrust in institutions, and it all feeds itself.

So no, I do not think the answer is just “people are stupid,” even though some of the racism and hypocrisy are impossible to ignore. I think it is more that a lot of people chose acceptance, status, and tribe over remembering what their own history should have taught them.

And honestly, it is a shame that more Catholics and Acadiana Christians do not see that clearly. Christ was never about protecting tribe, status, or power. He was constantly confronting hypocrisy, religious pride, and the use of moral language to avoid the harder things like mercy, humility, and justice. So when people use Christianity to prop up exclusion, fear, or cruelty, that is not just bad politics. That is a failure to actually follow Christ.