<Snipped quote by WhyNoGenocide>
Haha, whoops. Well you'd have to talk to RisenDead to iron out the details. Since they're the Catholic ones; I still haven't quite decided on New England's religion.
If it helps at all, New England has since it's founding been largely the home of radical Lutherans/Protestant, the Puritans. While Puritanicalism may have waned to the side the general spirit of the hard anti-authority and strict-moralism of the New England Lutheran and Protestant churches which sort of became the basis of Christian religion throughout America, but has always had a strong fortress in New England (Yale and Harvard were the collegiate fortresses of the churches in America and served as a sort of defacto Vatican for either, with Yale being the most intensely militant).
These are the sorts of churches too that actively abhorred anything "fun" in their 19th century history and up until the 20's and 30's strongly supported the temperance movement. They were also the most active in missionary work with them founding missions into the mid-west to teach not only the Native Americans all about the fire and brimstone of God, but also how to farm (sedentary agriculture was a huge theme in Jacksonian Democracy and the entire concept of being civilized according to early Americans).
Most of that though would have died away by the mid-20th century when temperance fell out of vogue but it'd be very safe to assume that the influence still seeps deep into the regional psyche. It's just not as crazy in the post-50's age of science in the modern world. But kill modern science and literacy and it'll come back.
There'd be Catholics there too, mostly invested in the Italians and the strong Irish population in Boston. And the French Acadians in back-water Maine (a pretty sizable 15% of New England is French/French-Canadian/Acadian).
The idea that the West would revert back to tribal Nomads isn't accurate I don't think. Just because we don't have 20th Century tech doesn't mean we don't have other tech that would allow people to survive and thrive. The folks that settled the plains really didn't have any tech the romans didn't have, save for steam and things that go "bang". They would still know how to channel water, build decent buildings, etc. Ranching is still largely unchanged. If the Persians and Moors can build Empires in a desert we can sure get a couple on fertile prairie soil.
Not necessarily true, and settling the west wasn't a big agricultural boom as it is now, or as pictured on the east-side of the country. What made the west as much of an agricultural hub is that we became able to pump an industrial-scale amount of water into the region from outside of it. The west - from north to south - can actually be a rather dry or unpredictable region. South Dakota for instance regularly has freezing, very dry winters and it isn't unusual for the state to suffer hot dry summers which'd make actually farming on a regular basis up there very difficult without irrigation.
Texas and Oklahoma can be much the same way, with regular histories of the area going so bone-dry it's
gone fucking black.
The only regular form of agriculture in those areas during the 19th and early 20th centuries when all we had were shotguns, dynamite, steam engines was cattle ranching, which was a semi-nomadic industry at the best. Probably the only reason it never went full-nomadism with it is because of the concept of land-laws and cattle ranchers/barons having to keep their herds in confined areas or they'd be trespassing; enforced at least in name by the full weight of the US legal system. And these herds would regularly need to be driven hundreds - if not thousands - of miles away to cities like Kansas City or St. Louis to be industrially processed and shipped out across the country and cured meats by the way of train; the west just simply lacked that infrastructure, and with St Louis and Kansas City being both industrially dead today: it's not going to be there anymore.
Town in the west would have been like towns in the Arab empire, trading posts along regularly used nomad and trading paths for people to exchange goods and money for more goods or money to keep living. Just because the Ummayad held all of the Middle East and North Africa as an Empire doesn't mean either that all of that was well built up. And really most of that was already established before hand and they didn't have to build anything; Persia was conquered as-is as well as Egypt and the once Greek-built levant.
But back to the Americas: the stuff we farm doesn't usually have the root systems the same as prairie grasses and the constant turning of the soil has a bad-effect of exposing that shit to the wind and the rain which can accelerate erosion brought about by aggressive unprotected farming. As was the case in the Dust Bowl. And with the native soils so cut up by mechanical plows (older plows don't usually work in prairie soil, it took specially designed metal plows to cut through the thick root-choke soul and last I checked there's no steel industry in the American west). But that's even if there's anything left TO plow when all those crops had to die away when the sprinklers irrigating them stopped working and the area aquifers could no longer be pumped.
Modern agriculture in the area is basically dead and the most stable life anyone left there would be in animal husbandry and nomadic ranching.
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