Britney Jean Spears was born on December 2, 1981, in McComb, Mississippi, to James "Jamie" Parnell Spears and Lynne Irene Bridges as their second child. Lillian Portell, Spears' maternal grandmother, was English (born in London), and one of her maternal great-grandfathers was Maltese. Bryan James Spears and Jamie Lynn Spears are her siblings. She was baptized as a Southern Baptist and sung in a church choir as a child, growing up in the Bible Belt, where socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a particularly powerful religious influence.