From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (review)

From Bible Belt to Sun Belt by Darren Dochuk explores more than the intersection of religion and politics in contemporary America, as its receipt of the prestigious Nivens Prize from the Society of American Historians indicates. In it, he also details the economic and cultural transformation of Southern California from the 1930s to the 1980s that led to the nationwide dissemination of the conservative views that influenced the rise of the Christian Right in American politics. As such, it is as much a regional history as it is a volume on religion and politics. Consulting myriad primary-source materials from periodicals, twenty-six personal interviews, forty-seven manuscript collections, and contemporary secondary sources that compose twelve pages, Dochuk has assembled an impressive collection of information from which to synthesize his thesis.

Beginning with the Dust Bowl migrations to Southern California, Dochuk describes marginal economic and religious outsiders who made the transition to economic and social respectability over the next thirty years. By the 1960s, thirty years of background work in conservative economic education and anticommunist activism by a number of eccentric but powerful speakers had produced significant results. Dochuk singles out three for special attention in this story. George S. Benson (president of Harding University and instrumental in its National Education Program), John Brown (founder of several educational institutions in Arkansas and California as well as of a prominent evangelical radio station in Southern California), and George Pepperdine (founder of the Western Auto nationwide chain of automotive specialty stories and Pepperdine University) created a network of media outlets, educational institutions, and evangelical Christian organizations that proved to be the catalyst for the emergence of the Religious Right in national politics.

According to Dochuk, Southern California became the financial and educational center of the New Christian Right as the upwardly mobile evangelical Christians from the South and Southwest found work in the new defense industries that dominated the region's economy. As they prospered in the new environment, they refused to enter the more liberal economic and political mainstream that had dominated California politics. Instead, they used their newfound wealth to create bigger and more respectable church buildings while maintaining and even increasing their conservative religious philosophy against the onslaught of a religious community that was steadily moving toward a more liberal theology. Evangelical leaders in Southern California constantly battled against the National Council of Churches and its "social gospel and postmillennial doctrine that suggested that the world would get better over time" (p. 161). The vast majority of evangelical Christians in Southern California adopted the premillennial view that individual salvation required personal commitment and constant vigilance against the creeping socialism of the liberal establishment and the threat of a worldwide communist takeover that would stamp out conservative Christian institutions.

Several factors led to the sharp division in California politics that prompted evangelical Christians to forcefully enter state and national politics on the conservative bandwagon. Dochuk details the influence of various labor conflicts of the 1940s, including violent strikes against the movie industry led by communist sympathizers in organized labor and the arguments over "the eighty different old-age welfare schemes that had been proposed in California in the 1930s" (p. 88). It was at this point that Southern California evangelicals were introduced to Benson, Brown, and Pepperdine, who had launched a "bold political venture" with "conservative businessmen and intellectuals . . . to combat what they thought was an entrenchment of a permanent New Deal, social welfare state" (p. 113).With the help and support of Ronald Reagan, Billy Graham, Walter Knott, and Pat Boone popularizing their message and hundreds of conservative evangelical institutions providing the resources, Dochuk argues convincingly that these conservative political activists and their victories in Southern California led eventually to the presidency of Reagan and the prominence of the New Religious Right in American politics ever since. [End Page...