Desert Fathers The Religious Right’s real pioneers came not from the South but Southern California.

he 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. MORE