The gap dividing large metros from small towns and rural areas tends to be significant everywhere, and politics represent only a small slice of significant differences that encompass both attitudes and way of life.
This is particularly true if you look beyond Western Europe and Japan, and even more true when you acknowledge that not every part of the United States shares the rural-urban continuum that defines certain parts of the American South. To talk about the rural United States is to talk about areas that vary substantially in their present ethnic and religious makeups, settlement histories, proximity to urban centers, and sources of wealth.
Many of the claims made about rural America in this thread are flat-out untrue: OP's portrait of religiosity owes more to the neuroses of Southern suburbia than it does to the countryside, and while rural households are more likely to own a gun, the fetishization of "modern sporting rifles" that inspires dumb young guys to walk into Starbucks carrying AR-15s is hardly a product of small town America.
Yes. Our very own RealisticIdealist has found that church attendance is generally a suburban affair
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