The Politics of Religion in Modern America: A Review Essay

Darren Dochuk seeks to rescue evangelicals from the conventional wisdom that until recently they existed only on the political fringes, surfacing periodically to make the Republican Party focus on social issues before disappearing from active political engagement. Dochuk argues that this wrongheaded view stems from the tendency in scholarly and popular literature to examine evangelicals’ political activities strictly in terms of social issues like abortion, school prayer, and gay rights. This myopia has obscured evangelicals’ engagement with economic issues like deregulation and tax cuts. Thus the journalist Thomas Franks’s 2004 polemic What’s the Matter with Kansas famously argues that conservative Christians are dupes of the Republican Party, voting against their economic interests for the false promise of action on their social agenda. But, as Dochuk ably shows, evangelicals have never been dupes of GOP strategists. Indeed, they have promoted and helped advance the conservative economic agenda and since the 1940s have been integral to the rise of the modern conservative movement. As Dochuk puts it, evangelicals “sustained a keen political interest in virtually every political mater that affected their livelihood . . . [including] pensions and employment practices, zoning and housing policies, disarmament and right-to-work legislation, race relations and tax relief—areas few historians have considered relevant to religious folk” (xxiii).

From Bible Belt to Sunbelt charts the rise of evangelical conservatism primarily in Southern California, which attracted thousands of migrants from the impoverished South during the first half of the 20th century. Southern California was home to well-paying defense industry jobs and quickly spawned a solid middle class. How and why it became a bastion of conservatism, and one strongly shaped by everyday Protestant evangelicals, is at the heart of this book. As Dochuk shows, many of the migrants who came to California were Protestants steeped in a plain-folk evangelicalism. They saw themselves less as running away from poverty than as on a religious errand to spread the gospel to new areas. Young and motivated evangelical ministers from the South soon followed to tend to these migrant flocks, emphasizing the need to infuse the political system with the same religious values that shaped their lives.

The mere arrival of southern evangelicals did not lead immediately to a widespread conservative movement or ready electoral success for California’s Republican Party. Indeed, many of these new arrivals in the 1930s supported the New Deal and the Democratic Party, while holding a deep suspicion of corporate capitalism. On the other hand, like many of their Populist ancestors, they clung fiercely to their independence and supported the idea of small government. Further, a number of prominent evangelical entrepreneurs— George Pepperdine, John Brown, and George Benson, among others—founded or ran Christian colleges and radio stations that fused Christian values and free market economics. The work of these entrepreneurs slowly reshaped evangelical politics. Beginning in the late 1940s many of these evangelicals became disenchanted with California’s incumbent Democratic regime and its agenda to expand the New Deal welfare and regulatory state. What’s remarkable in Dochuk’s telling is how unabashedly pro-capitalist and anti-statist so many of these evangelicals became. While concerns over the nation’s moral direction, the growing secularization of the public schools, and the need to witness for Christ certainly informed their worldviews, California conservative evangelicals by the 1950s seemed to be even more motivated by economic matters, and often come across in the book as every bit the free market zealots as Ayn Rand or Friedrich Hayek. Fears of communism and, for some, a desire to maintain the South’s white racial hierarchy also contributed to this political shift.

On the issue of race and its connection to the rise of different conservative movements Dochuk offers a fairly balanced interpretation. One of the most contentious debates within the historiography of American conservatism is about the role played by race, and more specifically racism, in the rise and shaping of the modern conservative movement. Whereas some have found...