This is an opinion column.

I had this Bible Belt thing all wrong.

I used to think it was just a swath of Southern land where churches outnumbered liquor stores, where people read that Book and sought, in public or on their better days, at least, to live like the protagonist of its last chapters.

But no. Turns out the Bible Belt is a real thing.

It’s a strap pious folks wear around their waists. Until they whip it off to flog others in the name of their God.

Don’t mistake this for a column about religion. That’s not what it is. I don’t care who or what or if you worship. I may have been brought up immersed in the ideals of the Christian church, but I was also washed in that grand American notion that religious freedom means what you believe is none of my beeswax. And vice versa.

So I’m not interested in what you believe, Alabama. I’m just starting to believe that you don’t really believe it as much as you talk about it.

I mean, pretty much any reputable religion abhors the kind of stuff Alabama does on a routine basis.

Buddhists deplore the notion of suffering, and say no one is beyond redemption. Hindus warn that if you hurt each other or the planet herself you’ll face your own karmic comeuppance. The Qu’ran condemns shameful deeds and injustice, and unequal treatment handed out on the basis of wealth or status.

And Christians and Jews have much to agree on. A Proverb tells them to “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.”

In the New Testament – the part of the Bible thumped by most Alabamians – you could throw a dart and hit a problematic line, if such a thing were not heretical.

“Remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison,” it says in the Epistle to the Hebrews, “and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.”

Shoot. Jesus himself laid out in parable the things that were important to his brand of salvation, the things on which one might be judged. The hungry, the sick, the stranger, the imprisoned.

“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me,” He said.

And Alabama said “Amen.” And then it said mercy is overrated, strangers are strange and the hungry are really just lazy.

I’m worried about us.

This is a state where 6,800 of its highest security inmates are stuffed into space designed to hold 4,800, where, according to Alabama Appleseed, 266 people died in prison last year. It is a place where the attorney general sends people to argue against almost every parole, where the governor’s answer is to build more prisons, and to use COVID relief money to do it.

Paroles have all but stopped since Leigh Gwathney became chair of the parole board. The percentage of eligible prisoners granted parole fell from 54 percent in 2017 to 10 percent last year. Since 2020, 13 percent were granted, and of course there was a racial disparity, with 8% of Black people and 18% of whites granted parole.

Alabama robs its prisoners of any kind of hope, and executes them eagerly and ham handedly. Attorney General Steve Marshall has quibbled over a brief moratorium to pause executions, even as Alabama’s last three attempted executions turned macabre.

The Alabama Supreme Court responded to those bungled executions — two of which were called off after it took so much time to find a vein the state feared the hour of execution would pass — by giving the governor the power to set a time range, instead of a date, to order death. No other state allows for an unspecified period of time.

The court, in a state that has been notoriously eager to kill, also removed an automatic review of constitutional violations the condemned may have received at trial, making it easier to kill people, but harder to be sure they are guilty.

Over and over again we put dollars and politics over people. Gov. Kay Ivey let a fire burn in a Moody landfill for seven weeks, spewing carcinogens in the air, we now know, before calling in the EPA — an agency her party has vilified for political points — to put it out.

This is a state that has refused to expand Medicaid, a move that would help its poorest, sickest people. So Alabama remains near the bottom of all sorts of health and poverty rankings.

Alabama is reluctant to tax its rich, but towns like Valley incarcerate its poorest for failure to pay trash bills. The state is not willing to raise enough money to provide adequate services, so it builds police departments to serve as revenue collectors. And to jail those who cannot pay, or fight the charges,

I don’t care who you worship, Alabama, besides guns and money and your chosen political party.

But it might be time to get right with your maker.

John Archibald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for AL.com.