The first church in Tell City was a Catholic Church, followed soon after by a Evangelical Church. The Methodists did not have a church until 1893.
Perry, OTOH, in 1980 was 33% Catholic, 24$ Protestant (very few Lutherans
In the rural Midwest the combination of German or Swiss ancestry with Protestant denominations that are non-Lutheran and would appear from the outside to be WASP churches usually indicates a history of Evangelical or Reformed settlement. What "Evangelical" refers to in the 19th Century German and German-American context is a movement to unify the Lutheran and Reformed (i.e. Calvinist) churches. Now the history of denominational mergers and splits gets a bit bewildering due to a combination of ecumenical commitment with schismatic practice, but basically - in the late 19C in the US the bulk of Evangelicals in this sense merged with the bulk of Reformed (i.e. Dutch and German Calvinists) to form the Evangelical and Reformed Synod. But some in each category stayed out. The ERS, meanwhile, later merged with the Congregationalists to form the United Church of Christ, while the Evangelicals who didn't merge eventually made it into the United Methodist Church.
The point of all this though is that all this crowd, just like the Yankees in New England, were into combining Protestantism with respect for education and personal uplift in a way that has meant that their descendants have ended up pretty liberal. In small towns in the Midwest the UCC is (unlike in New England) a mostly German church but still liberal, even more than the ELCA (and definitely more than Lutherans in general). And this often shows up particularly in Swiss areas. Just southwest of Madison for example Green County WI is a big outlier for both Swiss ancestry and UCC affiliation, and it is strongly Dem.
Perry County IN, compared to the surrounding area, shows up in the ARDA as higher UCC, higher Methodist, and lower in most other Protestant denominations. And various other points in this thread point to it having a likely history of this tradition. Now, the religious figures aren't that high, and it's still by far plurality Catholic, so I don't want to overstate this. But I do suspect that this may be a factor as Frankenburger is suggesting, even though I think he is wrong about the broader German case. (And perhaps in an indirect way - even if the factory workers don't themselves have a liberal-Protestant moralistic outlook, they might be less pulled away from economic voting if social conservatism isn't in the air so much).
