xFrom Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism by Darren Dochuk (The Post War Era, Religion)

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

by Darren Dochuk 

The Post War Era
Religion

Thesis:

Specific examples/evidence that supports the thesis:

Summary:

From Bible Belt to Sun Belt tells the dramatic and largely unknown story of "plain-folk" religious migrants: hardworking men and women from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas who fled the Depression and came to California for military jobs during World War II. Investigating this fiercely pious community at a grassroots level, Darren Dochuk uses the stories of religious leaders, including Billy Graham, as well as many colorful, lesser-known figures to explain how evangelicals organized a powerful political machine. This machine made its mark with Barry Goldwater, inspired Richard Nixon's "Southern Solution," and achieved its greatest triumph with the victories of Ronald Reagan.

What does this tell us about Religion in the Post War Era?

What parts of the book can be applied to lectures?

General Thoughts:

Excerpts from Book Reviews: 

 " 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."

"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."

"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."

"In Dochuk’s telling, we have here the roots of the Religious Right, and there is no question that the American Left has savaged those with religious commitments, to its own detriment. But the Left’s failure is not nearly enough to explain why American evangelicalism has been so easily captured by right-wing corporate capitalism, militaristic nationalism, and the prosperity gospel. That is to say, how do we get from antebellum evangelicalism, with its plethora of socially progressive reform efforts, to the contemporary and reactionary evangelicalism of Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, and the Tea Party?"

"A pivotal point in Dochuk’s narrative comes in 1945–1946, when a peculiar old age welfare scheme ($30 scrip weekly to every unemployed Californian over age fifty) was resurrected. At this time California’s southern evangelical transplants were equally suspicious of “corporate capitalism and the bureaucratic state” (p. 80), and this “Ham and Eggs” proposal provided an alternative to “the industrial unionism and progressive liberalism that animated the Left, and the strident antistatism that energized the Right” (p. 92). The arrival of the rabidly anti-Semitic Gerald L. K. Smith in behalf of the Ham and Eggers helped convince Social Democrats that this proposal was the manifestation of reactionary, fundamentalist religion. The result was violent confrontations between the two groups and the defeat of Ham and Eggs. More importantly, this conflict ensured that southern evangelicals in California would choose the Right and its “united Christian, conservative front” over a Left that “sympathized with their economic plight but vilified their religion” (p. 101).

My Highlighted Passages: 

“Sunbelt evangelicals” were changing American politics, helping “win the governorship for Ronald Reagan in 1966, the South for Richard Nixon in 1972, and ultimately the country for Reagan’s Republican Party in 1980”