While I think the Church Lady demographic tends to align predominantly with being African American in the less affluent classes, you see many of the very same patterns of what I'd call "social piety" in affluent white Church Ladies in wealthy suburbs.

I feel like for a great number of people, religion isn't about the credo as dictated by holy books and venerated historical figures so much as it is about your community and what it believes. Except when you say you believe so-and-so because of your religion it suddenly becomes a more powerful line than "because my father thought so."