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A woman holds her hand up in the air as she prays and takes part in the morning service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, June 21, 2015.CARLO ALLEGRI/Reuters

Setting off on a road trip across the southern United States this summer, I hatched a little plan. Just for fun, I would stop at every church I passed and snap a picture with my phone. As anyone who had visited the South before would have known, this was sheer folly. If I had followed through with my plan, a trip that was supposed to take a week would have stretched into a year.

It should have come as no surprise that the southern United States boasts a whole lot of churches. This isn't called the Bible Belt for nothing. A 2013 Gallup poll showed that seven of the 10 most religious states were southern. (Mississippi was tops, Alabama was third and Louisiana fourth. Utah, with its Mormon tradition, came second.) Even so, a visitor from relatively secular Canada can't fail to gape in wonder at the profusion and variety of churches in this churchiest of U.S. regions. I passed big churches and little churches, old churches and new churches, grand churches and plain churches, rich churches and shabby churches. I saw huge megachurches with vast parking lots and quaint, little clapboard churches next to mossy graveyards.

Southern churches come in a galaxy of denominations. The Southern Baptist Convention, a huge Protestant grouping, is mainly white; the African Methodist Episcopal, or AME, churches, like the one attacked in Charleston, S.C., in June, mainly black. Alongside them are Presbyterian churches, United Methodist churches, Missionary Baptist churches, Christian Methodist Episcopal churches, Mt. Olive Ministries churches and others too many to list.

Like a birdwatcher adding to his life list, I paused as often as I could to record the names and identifying marks of the churches I saw: The Cornerstone Church, which offered "ministry for soul, spirit & body," was a pristine white affair with grey metal roof; the New Birth Pentecostal Church, Inc., (why the "Inc.", I never discovered), a barn-like brick structure with pink trim; the Liberty Hill Presbyterian Church (built in 1880) a classic old wood church with diagonal siding and an open spire for its church bell; the Trinity Free Will Baptist Church was little more than a shack by the road with a rubber mat at the door.

Some, like that one, are obscure; others played important parts in southern history. I stopped at the church in Selma, Ala., where Martin Luther King, Jr., set off on his famous civil-rights march and the church in Greenville, S.C., where a young Jesse Jackson preached some of his first sermons.

With so many places to worship, competition for parishioners can be tough, and southern churches seem to vie to outdo each other for cleverest, peppiest slogan.

The sign outside the Calvary Baptist Church said "Get all excited. Go tell everybody that Jesus Christ is king!" The one at Travelers Rest Church of God said: "Let God light up your life like a firework." (It was the Fourth of July that day.) Some slogans struck a patriotic note. "American liberty is surely great. Greater is liberty in Jesus," said the Lockhart Free Will Baptist Church.

Others played on words. "Need a new look? Get a faith lift," winked the sign at Faith Chapel Baptist, while Pleasant Ridge Assembly of God advised: "Exposure to the Son prevents burning."

The style of worship in southern churches comes in as many varieties of the architecture. In the course of a reporting assignment, I visited two Sunday services in Travelers Rest, S.C. First, I took a seat in a back pew at Calvary Baptist Church, a simple structure with broadloom on the floor, ceiling fans above and a white cross at the front draped with a cloak and crown of thorns. After hymns and prayers, a missionary just back from India told the congregation of around three dozen souls about his successes over there. At first, he said, Hindu Indians were skeptical about a religion with a single God, asking him: "Where's all y'all's gods at?" But they were coming around, he said. After the service, pastor Chad Watson answered my questions then thrust a Bible in my hand as I made to go.

A few blocks away and a few minutes later, I ducked into the Resurrection Power Ministries church, a simple room with lines of folding chairs in a storefront on a main street. There, pastor Rosie Bonner, a young woman in high heels, was going from person to person, putting her hand to the forehead of each, speaking in tongues and crying: "God, I need you to move right now." Parishioners would double over and weep as they felt the power of the Holy Spirit. Unlike Calvary's congregation, which was mostly white, this one was multiracial, with blacks, whites and Hispanics worshiping together.

The United States, like other Western countries, is seeing religious observance decline. A study by the Pew Research Centre in the spring said that the Christian share of the population continued to fall and the number of Americans listing no religion at all continued to grow. That was true of all regions, including the South.

You wouldn't know it from all the churches, here, there and everywhere, that populate the southern landscape. Even southerners lose count of them.

In one sermon I watched in July, a leading minister told his congregation that there are no fewer than 300 churches in Charleston, known as the Holy City for obvious reasons. When I asked the pastor at the church next door if he knew whether that figure was right, he said he had no idea.

One day, I met a man who volunteered at his Baptist church in Conover, N.C. I asked how many churches there were in his town. He shook his head and laughed: "It's the South, buddy. There's one on every corner."

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