JOSH McKOON feels misunderstood. A state senator for a prosperous, very Republican part of western Georgia, he has twice sponsored a state bill to protect religious folk from coercion by the government. Explaining its purpose, he cites a pair of recent controversies combining two Southern institutions, faith and American football: rows over an on-field baptism of a high-school coach and players, and about a school band playing “Amazing Grace” at half-time. The bill, Mr McKoon says in Columbus, a pretty riverside city in his district, is modelled on a federal law of 1993. It is not, repeat not, meant to enable discrimination against gay people, or as a form of resistance to same-sex marriage.

Mr McKoon has an unlikely alibi: Kim Davis, the clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, who repeatedly refused to issue same-sex marriage licences and was briefly jailed for contempt of court; she was released on September 8th. Kentucky is one of 21 states that already have religious-freedom laws like the one Mr McKoon proposes. It didn’t help her. Yet some in Georgia detect a whiff of bigotry in the rhetoric accompanying the bill, if not in its boilerplate wording (which requires the authorities to demonstrate a “compelling government interest” if they are to “substantially burden” the exercise of religion).

Partly the trouble is timing: at the moment, any promotion of religious rights is liable to be seen as a retort to the Supreme Court’s advancement of gay ones. That is how Mr McKoon’s critics view his initiative. Bryan Long of Better Georgia, a lobby group, believes it would be “a sword not a shield”. Since Georgia is one of 28 states that lack laws against homophobic discrimination, its devout bridal florists and bakers (the largely apocryphal focus of much conservative angst) do not need a new law to turn away gay customers: they already can. But Eunice Rho, of the American Civil Liberties Union, says religious-freedom statutes could be used to challenge city-level anti-discrimination rules. Such efforts would fail, replies Mr McKoon.

This stand-off, involving mutual outrage and spectral fears, exemplifies two important divides. The most obvious is between liberals and religious conservatives. Mr McKoon’s bill is one of many opportunities for conflict between them in an incipient arms race of mostly pointless legislation. A stew of new laws tabled in Georgia and elsewhere would protect pastors from forcible involvement in gay weddings (they are already exempt), or excuse civil officials like Ms Davis from facilitating them. In Washington some congressmen think (with some reason) that the tax-exempt status of religious organisations will be jeopardised by the gay-marriage ruling.

But the really problematic rupture that the dispute highlights—at least so far as Mr McKoon is concerned—is not between the gay lobby and religious conservatives, but between religious conservatives and big business. In response to his bill, many of Georgia’s largest companies, including Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola, along with the state’s Chamber of Commerce, have pointedly spoken up for diversity and decried discrimination. “To the extent their concern is genuine,” Mr McKoon says, “I think it is misplaced.” But mainly he reckons their interventions are PR stunts. At a recent political meeting he denounced the “far-left cultural norms” that executives were trying to impose. Next, he warns, they will come after Georgians’ guns.

This is a grudge match, too. Threats of boycotts recently led to a fiasco in Indiana over its own religious-freedom law. In the South such disputes array grassroots conservatives against urban business types who worry about revenue from tourism and conventions and about retaining new, footloose financial industries. Merle Black of Emory University says strife over immigration, which also pits sceptical small-town voters against welcoming big-city businesses, is part of the same pattern; a failed referendum in Nashville in 2009, which would have made English the sole language of official city activities, marshalled similar adversaries.

The awkwardness for Republican leaders, Mr Black summarises, is that “the religious conservatives have the votes, but the business conservatives have the money.” Given the South’s early importance in next year’s Republican presidential primaries, the split in local priorities is liable to colour, and help to prolong, the national contest. It was reflected this week in the candidates’ responses to the drama in Kentucky: Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee raced to embrace Ms Davis, Christian activists’ new mascot; others remained aloof.

Mr McKoon, meanwhile, hopes his bill will finally pass in 2016; it stalled this year after other Republicans added anti-discrimination clauses that he claims were needless and confusing. Religious conservatives, he argues, must achieve some of their aims if the Republican coalition is to hold. With elections in prospect, he may prevail. In any case, an even bigger bust-up between the corporate and religious lobbies looms—over whether to change Georgia’s constitution to let in casinos.