Desert fathers: the religious right's real pioneers came not from the South but Southern California.

• Author: Kilgore, Ed
• Position: 'From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism' - Book review

From Bible Belt to Sun Belt:

Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots

Politics, and the Rise of

Evangelical Conservatism

by Darren Dochuk

W. W. Norton & Co., 520 pp.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The saga of the Christian right is often told as a horror story of southern fanaticism escaping from the rural churches of Dixie and infecting the politics and culture of a sometimes uncomprehending country. Less well known is the history of conservative Christians who made Southern California their home, and who came to have as profound an impact on the emerging Sun Belt and its conservative approach to God and country as their brethren in the Deep South itself.

In his new book, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism, Purdue University history professor Darren Dochuk tells the tale of southern migrants (mainly from the freewheeling states of the "western South" such as Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma) who flooded into the Los Angeles area before and after World War II. They brought with them a distinctive brand of institutionally adaptive but theologically rigid evangelical Protestantism, which eventually served as a crucial vanguard for the conservative movement that mobilized behind Barry Goldwater and reached the promised land via California's own Ronald Reagan.

Dochuk excels in his profiles of early "plain-folk" settlers and their world, and the tangled personal, institutional, and doctrinal motives of the ministry that served them. He describes the evangelizing and church-building activities of "tent-makers and prophets"--essentially religious entrepreneurs--like Bob Shuler, Jonathan Perkins, and Robert Lackey, and the educational efforts of John Brown (whose John Brown University in Arkansas pioneered evangelical championship of capitalism) and George Pepperdine (whose eponymous university in Los Angeles, originally affiliated with the Churches of Christ, became one of the flagship conservative schools in the country). All of these leaders contributed to the politicalization of Southern California evangelicals and built a close alliance between churches and wealthy conservative ideologues.

Most of these settlers, battered by the Dust Bowl, were drawn to the Los Angeles area by the jobs that came with the massive defense spending that accompanied and followed World War II, and were soon inhabiting America's first major "sprawl" community. Neighborhood churches became a focal point for...