An Accidental Foray into the Newfoundland Bible Belt

SHOW NOTES

I unknowingly happen to rent an Airbnb place in the heart of Pentecostal Newfoundland.

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Sources

›››  “Bible Belt,” Wikipedia, June 11, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_Belt ››› | 

››› Drew Brown, “Newfoundland Needs to Chill the Fuck Out,” Vice, May 16, 2018, https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/society/salvation-army.php ››› | 

››› Patrick Butler, “The Hidden Abortions of Newfoundland’s ‘Bible Belt,’” CBC News, October 20, 2023, https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/mobile-abortion-clinic-newfoundland-bible-belt ››› | 

››› Get REAL, “About Us,” The Get Real Movement, https://www.thegetrealmovement.com/aboutus ››› | 

››› “Lewisporte,” Wikipedia, March 19, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewisporte ››› | 

››› Liza Piper, “The Salvation Army,” Heritage Newfoundland & Labrador, 2000, https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/society/salvation-army.php ››› |

››› Hans Rollman, “Religion in Newfoundland and Labrador,” Heritage Newfoundland & Labrador, October 2016, https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/society/religion.php ››› | 

››› Statistics Canada, Distribution (in Percentage) of Religious Groups, Newfoundland and Labrador, 2011 and 2021, December 16, 2022, https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/as-sa/fogs-spg/alternative.cfm?topic=10&lang=E&dguid=2021A000210&objectId=2 ››› | 

››› Statistics Canada, Focus on Geography Series, 2021 Census of Population Newfoundland and Labrador, Province, December 16, 2022,  https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/as-sa/fogs-spg/page.cfm?topic=10&lang=E&dguid=2021A000210 ››› | 

››› Statistics Canada, Distribution (in Percentage) of Religious Groups, Canada, 2011 and 2021, December 16, 2022, https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/as-sa/fogs-spg/alternative.cfm?topic=10&lang=e&dguid=2021A000011124&objectId=2 ››› | 

Transcript

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Newfoundland Boy, a podcast about the Canadian province of Newfoundland. This is episode 36: “An Accidental Foray into the Newfoundland Bible Belt.”

I didn’t even know there was such as thing as a Bible Belt in Newfoundland until I happened to rent an Airbnb place last week near a town that turns out to be right in the middle of it. The town is called Lewisporte and it’s located on the northern shore of central Newfoundland, specifically on Burnt Bay which itself opens into the Bay of Exploits. It has a population of about 3,000.

The Bible Belt that most of us are familiar with, the one in the United States, covers about twenty states (or parts of them) in the southeastern part of the country. The American Bible Belt is dominated by Baptists, with Pentecostals coming in a distant second, but there are many other protestant denominations that comprise it as well. I’m not sure of the proportions among the three, but the Newfoundland Bible Belt is composed of Pentecostals, Catholics, and Salvation Army adherents. Newfoundland and Labrador as a whole has the largest proportion of Salvation Army adherents than any other province. It has about the same proportion of Catholics as the rest of Canada (around thirty percent). But it has more than five times the proportion of Pentecostals (5.7 vs. 1.1 percent).

Before I tell my own story of how a secular boy inadvertently ended up straying into God’s country, I want to talk about some of the real effects of religion and the Bible Belt, not all of them pretty and not just a difference of opinion on how the universe got created. The CBC, that is, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the nationally funded broadcaster in the country, did a story a couple of years ago called “The Hidden Abortions of Newfoundland’s ‘Bible Belt.’” It’s about a nurse named Rolanda Ryan who operates a mobile abortion clinic for women who would have no convenient access to this procedure otherwise. She keeps her location secret, in order to avoid as much as possible the protestors and other trouble. It reminds me of the stories I heard when I was growing up in Newfoundland, about Catholic parents who would “send their daughter away” if she got pregnant before she got married (often teenagers), and the fate of the fetus or the baby could be either that it was aborted, or put up for adoption, or arrangements were made for it to be raised by a relative, among many other options of hiding this “secret shame” that the family would otherwise experience.

In an article in Vice magazine about seven years ago, Drew Brown (who grew up “in a small rural town in Newfoundland dominated by Christian fundamentalists”) wrote about the homophobia of the Bible Belt. He cites the town of Middle Arm, northwest of Lewisporte, where a school event by a 2SLGBTQ+ anti-discrimination organization called Get REAL was effectively boycotted by most of the parents in Middle Arm, who didn’t send their kids to school that day. Brown calls the boycott “heinously backward” and jokingly mocks the parents for avoiding “a government-subsidized ‘gay class’ [that] was coming to brainwash their kids into trans lesbian communists.” I find these kinds of attitudes both frightening and ridiculous, which is why I haven’t been a Christian since I became a “backslider” from Pentecostalism when I was about fifteen (that’s now fifty years ago and I’m still holding).

So. My story about how I ended up in an Airbnb in the Bible Belt…. As I mentioned, I hadn’t even known there was any such thing in Newfoundland. I knew there were churches in pretty much all the communities I visited, and there certainly were many in Corner Brook when I grew up there, but it was after I’d turned off the Trans-Canada Highway onto Route 340 and started to get near Lewisporte that I noticed the Pentecostal churches. The giant Philadelphia Tabernacle is right on Main Street. There’s also a sign for the Emmanuel Convention Centre on a turnoff on the left. I hadn’t noticed, but there’s also the famous, even infamous, Holy Ghost Miracle Temple at the place where you turn off the highway. Its claim to fame and celebrity is the large “Hey! Why Burn?” banner on an outside wall. And there’s also the Maranatha Pentecostal Tabernacle in a town called Brown’s Arm just outside Lewisporte.

I finally arrived at my Airbnb. The place itself was very clean, but another hint of the religiosity was one of the wall hangings, among the generic ones about family and friends, that added another word, and in this order: Faith, Family, Friends. This one was right above the head of my bed. I was also not safe in the bathroom. Nice shower, lovely fluffy towels, but also a strategically placed stone reminding me to “Believe.”

Everything went fine. I slept well. And I did not bring on the Rapture. But there was a curious exchange with the owner after I’d checked out the next morning. She acknowledged that this Airbnb was a new business venture for them and she asked if I had any comments. I had to tell the truth. The place was great but the religious signage made it feel like she was trying to convert me. She thanked me for my honesty and said she would remove the signs. And then a weird thing happened: her page on Airbnb disappeared. When it was down for a couple of days, I thought, Great, she’s also going to remove the pictures online as well. But it’s been a week now and the page is still not back. I’d mentioned in my reply to her that having beliefs is fine but that those shouldn’t mix with business, and I joked that removing the signs would be better for a “secular” person like me. Maybe she didn’t know that word. Or maybe she does, and she doesn’t want any of the evil rituals of secularism going on in a small bachelor apartment that’s attached to her own house (does eating spicy chips count as something bad?).

I’m still puzzled.

And that’s all for this episode. Thanks for listening. And please join me again next Saturday.