Sometimes mere facts must be ignored, in the interest of a good story. That seems to be the journalistic ethic at work at Politico, the online journal that published a piece this week titled “How the South Skews America: We’d be less violent, more mobile and in general more normal if not for Dixie.”

“In the absence of Southern exceptionalism, the U.S. would be much more similar to other English-speaking democracies, which don’t subject their leaders to religious tests, don’t suffer from high levels of gun violence and don’t rival communist China and despotic Saudi Arabia in the number of executions per capita,” writer Michael Lind claims.

Those are his three measures of civilization: religiosity, gun violence and support for the death penalty. Even given these arbitrary parameters, Lind’s reasoning is flawed.

But we’ll let him make his case: “In most modern English-speaking countries, voters find ostentatious piety on the part of political candidates troubling, not reassuring. But in the U.S., born-again Southern evangelical politicians like Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, who troll for votes with piety, have given U.S. presidential politics a flavor more reminiscent of Tehran than of London or Ottawa or Canberra.”

Likewise, he writes, “Southern violence also goes a long way toward explaining the exceptional violence of the United States in general compared to otherwise similar countries. The pre-modern ‘culture of honor’ continues to exist to a greater degree in the South.”

And finally, he claims, “Compared to other Americans, Southerners disproportionately support sanctioned violence in all of its forms, from military intervention abroad to capital punishment to corporal punishment of children.”

These generalizations support a popular narrative about the South, but ignore some basic facts.

The first is mobility. Just what is Southern culture these days, when mass migration has changed the cultural and demographic makeup of the South, time and time again?

Let’s take Texas, for example. Only about 61 percent of Texas residents were native-born Texans in 2012, according to census figures. A full 17 percent of Texas residents were born outside of the U.S. What role do non-natives play in shaping our culture? What about Hispanics, who tend to be more religious, but less supportive of the death penalty? But those don’t fit Lind’s Southern culture narrative, so he doesn’t address them.

Another inconvenient fact is that gun violence is spiking in many Northern cities, such as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and the District of Columbia. It’s trending down in most states, on the other hand. The state with the highest number of gun-related deaths is Alaska — not a Southern state.

As for religiosity, Lind makes two blunders. First, he fails to establish that publicly acknowledged piety is a bad thing. He merely asserts that we’re not Great Britain. Fair enough. We’ll surrender our scones.

But then he goes on to equate our faith-professing politicians with the rabidly sectarian regime in Tehran. That’s insulting, and ignores basic facts, such as the role faith plays in African-American and civil rights politics.

But for Politico, the story itself was too tempting to let facts get in the way.