Rylan Hoots “fears God” and “keeps his commands” — but mostly he just loves his neighbours. Kitted out in boots, jeans and camo fleece, “How Great Thou Art” blaring from his boombox, the pastor waves at passing cars, pointing out the signs he’s hung nearby. “Jesus Christ,” says one. “This is the true God, and eternal life.” Together with a helper, flanked by a McDonald’s and a four-lane road, Hoots says he hopes to inspire what the ancient Greeks called agape: sacrificial love for your fellow man.
I meet Hoots by an intersection in Greenfield, an impoverished town in Weakley County, Tennessee. The motorists this chilly weekend morning don’t seem particularly interested — beyond the rough weather, the evangelists also face a few obscene gestures — but there’s plenty of agape to go round. That’s partly of the Christian variety: open-air ministries like this thrive all over the state’s western fringe, where Tennessee hits Kentucky. Yet time and again, over my time in Weakley, I saw agape of a different kind, with many here willing to make vast sacrifices for their blond-haired messiah.
In 2016, Donald Trump secured over almost three quarters of Weakley votes. Yet the President’s 2018 tariffs cost farmers billions, with bankruptcies spiralling by a fifth and Tennessee’s lucrative soybean markets ceded to competition abroad. In 2024, meanwhile, Trump pledged school vouchers, inevitably shutting country schools. But despite the hurt, both promised and delivered, Trump again won four-fifths of locals. Nor is this just a Weakley phenomenon. As I learnt, what happens here speaks poignantly to the republic’s rising tribalism, as Americans increasingly use politics as a badge of identity, even if they suffer the impact themselves.
For rural Tennesseans, backing Trump has become something of a tradition. Beyond Weakley, the President won at least 75% of the vote in nearly every one of the state’s back-country counties. It’s a similar story nationwide: in both 2016 and 2024, Trump secured the backing of 62% of rural Americans. On the ground, too, this affection shines through. As I crisscrossed Weakley County, I met dozens of people who see Trump as somewhere between a protector and a profit. “You Can’t Fix Stupid, But You Can Vote it Out” read the pro-Trump signs that line the roads. “Democrats kill babies and let the immigrants enter,” one local Republican told me. “You can’t possibly be a Democrat because you are a Christian.”
To an extent, this enthusiasm can be understood in policy terms. In a county that has the state’s second-highest rate of sexual assaults against minors, the President’s promise to “protect kids” is popular in Weakley. Tariffs doubtless hit farmers — but they could also boost auto production at Blue Oval City, an upcoming $5.6 billion Ford factory a few counties over. “Trump is addressing issues that have animated Tennessee’s rural voters for a great deal of time,” says Daryl Carter, a history professor at East Tennessee State University. “These rural areas have been hollowed out. Jobs gone. Hospitals closed. Opioid abuse. They have a lot of reasons to be pessimistic about America.”
Yet if Trump, the man, is popular, and his rhetoric is too, it’s also clear that his actions are unwelcome in spots like Weakley. One good example is education. In January, the President tweeted support for a Tennessee school voucher scheme. The bill extends 20,000 vouchers to rural and urban school districts, encompassing both private and public institutions. It’s also opposed by 77% of rural Tennesseans, who fear losing students, and public money, to private schools. Yet these reservations didn’t deter state Republicans. In a hastily convened special legislative session, the party rammed through the so-called Education Freedom Act, which Governor Bill Lee duly signed into law in February. Local Republicans are far from pleased. “It was a mean trick to railroad the bill through before folks could learn about it,” says Steven Vantrease, a conservative member of the Weakley County school board.
At root, the furore suggests the Tennessee GOP is willing to betray its rural base — if it can secure more votes statewide. In the past, conservatives traditionally aimed vouchers at low-income parents, often racial minorities in big cities, offering them added flexibility in picking quality charter schools for their children. But with rising fears around “woke” curriculums, there’s an electoral incentive to expand the scheme statewide. The problem for rural voters, typified by their broad opposition to the plan, is that added choice can wreck local education. With kids increasingly scarce in places like Weakley, added choice can close small town schools that rely on a handful of students.
It’s an issue that transcends brick-and-mortar buildings. “School consolidation is a small-town killer,” says Dale Hutcherson, a handsome 31 year old, and Weakley County’s Republican mayor. “If a school dies, then the heart and soul of a community dies.” As Hutcherson explains, hometown teachers go to all the football games, supervise clubs, and keep tabs on their kids beyond class. In rural Tennessee, it really does take a village. No wonder defending public schools is an issue that crosses political boundaries. A case in point is Nicolle Gallagher, former chair of the Weakley County Democrats, who calls them “the pride and joy” of a local community. Fair enough: ranked sixth in the state, students here score in the top 25 counties nationwide in maths, science and social studies.
That begs the question: with bipartisan opposition, why aren’t Tennessee Republicans reaping an electoral whirlwind for their cynicism? For Gallagher, the answer begins not in policy but in place. “Politics,” she says, “is about tribal belonging” — and I certainly got that sense during my time in Weakley. I’m told that Martin, home to the University of Tennessee branch campus, is “where all the liberals live.” But even here, Trump wins in a landslide and locals flew upside-down American flags during the Biden era. As one Martin Republican says: “It is us versus them.”
“Politics is about tribal belonging”
Being outside the tent can be painful. In these small, tight-knit communities, voting blue can bring a form of social death. Friends from high school no longer acknowledge you. Meanwhile, no one new moves to town — so who will you befriend? “People will know you are a Democrat,” Gallagher says. “It can hurt you personally and professionally.” As she continues, that can bring more than loneliness, noting that Weakley County no longer has any actively Democratic teachers. Amazed, I ask Jess Piper, a former educator and a rural Democratic organiser for the Blue Missouri campaign group. She guffaws at my question, before telling me that her politics meant she lost her career. “I got my husband fired,” she adds. “He was a teacher too.” Though certainly illegal, such discrimination is nearly impossible to prove without costly lawyers who anyway live miles away.
Tribalism can be nasty even if you’re apolitical. Shannon Taylor, who lives in Dresden, the Weakley County seat, tells me that face-to-face encounters are pleasant enough. Locals embrace the lesbian bartender at the American Legion. Momz Honky Tonk, in nearby Cumberland, hosts a monthly drag show, and no one blinks an eye. Online, though, some locals express their ire at those who trespass what Taylor calls their group mentality. “They care about their community and care so much that they spew hateful rhetoric,” she says. “They think they are protecting their communities.”
It didn’t used to be like this. As recently as 2008, Weakley County, like much of western Tennessee, was a Democratic stronghold. Democrats occupied every local office. But when it moved blue to red, the transformation was devastating. In 2006, Tennessee Democrats controlled the governorship, congressional delegation, and both general assembly chambers. But by 2013, everything had changed. Once in the minority, the GOP now dominated both houses of the Volunteer State’s legislature. Democratic state senate leader Reginal Tate put it best: “Man, we could have caucus meetings in my car.” Today, no Weakley Democrat inhabits a local office. What happened here was a national phenomenon too. From 2008 to 2016, Democrats lost 13 seats in the Senate and 69 in the House, as well as 11 governorships, 913 state legislative seats and 30 state legislative chambers. Weakley, then, was merely a microcosm of a national political earthquake. “I knew that was the end of the Democratic Party around here,” Gallagher admits. “It was like the lights went out.”
As the timeline implies, this shift can partly be understood by the Obama effect. Yet if there’s surely a racial element here, Carter stresses that isn’t the whole story. In 2008, after all, Obama invested heavily in rural America. On election day, he made small yet significant inroads with rural voters from Montana to Virginia. Even in those states he lost, his efforts helped Democrats win seats nationwide. Yet eight years on, the bottom collapsed, giving Trump the White House and both houses of Congress. Why? Because, insiders say, the party got drunk on “yes, we can” and rested on its laurels. Carter witnessed this duality in rural Tennessee. Obama, he says, “scared the bejesus out of people” — but was also a “piss-poor party leader.” Without inspiring candidates or local organisation, Tennessee Republicans had a free hand, branding Democrats the “them” and conservatives the “us.”
Carolyn Ideus, a Democratic official in Weakley County, says the Republican wave created “huge social pressure” to join the “us” party. And quite aside from all that small-town browbeating, some experts suggest rural Americans are especially prone to partisanship. “Rurality is an identity and worldview that transcends income and education,” argues Nick Jacobs, a political scientist and co-author of The Rural Voter. “A rural worldview is classed by geography not occupation.” Once more, it’s something I witnessed firsthand. On Martin’s main drag, a giant Donald Trump cardboard cut-out stands in the window of the GOP headquarters. A local Republican, who asks to stay anonymous, laments that even school board elections are now increasingly partisan.
Little wonder, then, that Carter says the Trump movement is much bigger than bickering over charter schools, especially when bias in big cities only fuels the reaction in places like Weakley. “There are perverse incentives to malign Trump voters,” is how Lisa Peruitt, a professor at UC-Davis puts it. “It helps accrue social capital.” That’s especially when the man himself cheerfully bashes powerful corporations, media elites and East Coast political dynasties like the Clintons. These, Peruitt says, are the exact people Trump says “rigged the system for their benefit [and] will do anything and say anything to keep things exactly the way they are.”
Either way, there’s obviously far more to Weakley County Republicans than simply being deluded by “false consciousness” to vote against their own interests. With a fight for America’s soul on their hands, it’s little wonder that Jake Bynum, a former county mayor, should argue that “love of country and perceived way of life” naturally outweigh “pocketbook issues” — charter schools or soybean exports be damned. Nor should progressives really be surprised here either: there’s little Upper West Side liberals love more than sacrificing their paychecks for the poor. Agape, it seems, remains a bipartisan affair.
