Editors Note: This article is the first of a two part series. Read part two here.

Four years in the Bible Belt will teach even a thick-headed Catholic of Irish-Mexican descent a few things. It's here among the steeples jutting from little brick buildings and the megachurches that meet in converted warehouses that I came to realize how most southerners like their tea sweetened, their pork pulled, and their religious doctrine uncluttered.

The last of these preferences sometimes makes for awkwardness between evangelical Protestants and their Catholic neighbors. Anyone familiar with the demographics of the American South understands that Baptists and Presbyterians outnumber Catholics in this area. Fewer people have written about what it means to be a religious minority in a tolerant context.

If my own behavior as a Catholic whose children attend a nondenominational Christian school is anything to go by, some of us are cowards. We inadvertently feed the curiosity of non-Catholics by downplaying devotional practices that seem exotic below the Mason-Dixon Line, even when those practices are commonplace along the California Missions Trail and within majority Catholic populations elsewhere. As a result, the evangelical Christians with whom we interact may perceive a few differences between the Catholic vocabulary of faith and their own, but interdenominational friendships do not shed light on things like Eucharistic Adoration or the Stations of the Cross.

At the school my children attend, the Westminster Confession of Faith (A.D. 1646) trumps the Nicene Creed (A.D. 325). Not surprisingly, the preferred Bible translation contains only 66 books, and history teachers there applaud William Tyndale more than his sometime adversary, Thomas More.

Among parents who help chaperon annual class visits to a Civil War battlefield, I might be the only one who grew up hearing "Our Lady of the Highway, pray for us" whenever my mother backed out of parking spaces (Why Catholic devotion to the mother of Jesus ought not raise Protestant eyebrows is something I'll address in part two of this essay).

Times and locations have changed since my childhood. Rocky Balboa never had to explain the Sign of the Cross, and never had to shout "Yo, Adrian! What's a sacramental?" because the Italian Baptist community in Philadelphia has nothing like the cultural footprint enjoyed by the Italian Catholic community there. In the Carolinas, on the other hand, the most common way to start any prayer is with downcast eyes, and the ubiquity of that practice has slowed a reflex that once sent fingertips to my forehead, chest, and shoulders before all but the briefest of audiences with the King of Kings. Catholics sensitive to differences between Raleigh and Rome or Savannah and San Juan Capistrano notice these things.

Theology impacts prayer posture, too. Thanks to different interpretations of passages like the "Bread of Life" discourse in the gospel according to Saint John, Catholics kneel in church and Baptists do not. Yet the Catholics I know seldom talk with other Christians about the Holy Eucharist. Why be parochial when you can be ecumenical? All goes swimmingly until it dawns on some of us that there is a big difference between provoking people who worship the same God a little differently and piquing their interest to good effect.