Why are the Berkshires in Mass so liberal?

[Ptk80]

I think there are a lot of reasons why Western Mass is so liberal, but one that has been left out in the discussion so far is that the region is very non-religious. It's very similar to Vermont in that sense. White, middle- and working-class people in more religious and specifically evangelical parts of the country tend to vote Republican for a whole host of reasons. They are anti-gay rights, anti-women's rights, and so social issues are big, but evangelical religion also tilts economic stances in a very conservative fashion as well in that they believe in personal salvation and that you, alone, or perhaps you and your family are solely responsible for your spiritual fate, and that then gets intermingled with social and economic well being, specifically that government programs take away from personal progress. I know it sounds goofy, but if you are interested, Max Blumenthal, goes into this in depth in his book. It's a weird theology that is actually very antithetical to church history in that traditional religion is very communitarian which in many areas in Europe actually facilitated the rise of socialism.  But these new evangelicals and fundamentalists are in these mega-churches and in these new non-denominational churches which have no sense of history or actual traditional church teaching.  They call themselves traditional, but they are not traditional - they are ultra-conservative reactionaries. This is not the culture that Vermont and Western Massachusetts have had historically. The people there aren't persuaded by the evangelical bullsh**t. The old Republicans in these regions were never evangelicals and as the Republican Party went off into fundamentalism in the 1980s these people became Independents and Democrats.