Teaching, Playing, and Praying: Evangelical Networking and Community Building in Modern America

Paul Harvey

One more AHA/ASCH session for you all to consider, especially for those of you interested in contemporary evangelical subcultures, home schoolers, and prayer warriors:

Teaching, Playing, and Praying: Evangelical Networking and Community Building in Modern America

AHA Session 48

Friday, January 6, 2012: 9:30 AM-11:30 AM

Chicago Ballroom D (Chicago Marriott Downtown)

Chair:

Matthew Avery Sutton, Washington State University

Papers:

Community Building and Networking among Homeschoolers in Delaware County, Indiana, 1980–2010
Rachel E. Coleman, Indiana University

Love and Spiritual War: Prayer and Community in Modern America
David W. McConeghy, University of California, Santa Barbara

Comment:

Randall Balmer, Barnard College, Columbia University

Session Abstract
Violence in public schools, anonymous neighborhoods that lack a sense of community, and legalized abortion all represent social, economic, spatial, and demographic changes that threatened the evangelical ideal of Christian schools, Christian neighborhoods, and Christian nation in the late twentieth century. Rather than attacking these problems head-on, many evangelicals built dynamic networks in an effort to realize their ideals outside the mainstream. In this effort evangelicals participated in a paradoxically mainstream American tradition of self-identifying as “outsiders” while endeavoring to create utopias. This panel addresses three such networks in the form of homeschooling, megachurches, and prayer marches. Yet even as evangelicals’ attempts to construct ideal communities are part of a longstanding American tradition, the three papers presented here also reveal the innovative ways in which evangelicals are building networks and communities today.    
            First, Rachel Coleman’s study of Christian homeschoolers in Delaware County, Indiana, demonstrates the successes and challenges of local evangelical networking in an era of technology. While Coleman’s homeschool subjects, eager to protect their children from ungodly influences, originally created a “homeschool community” that shut out non-Christian homeschoolers, the Internet soon served to decentralize and democratize homeschooling, offering greater opportunities but less social control. By focusing on the mechanics of this local network’s evolution, Coleman reveals a pattern that sheds light on national homeschooling’s creative solution to the isolation of the digital age.
            Second, and in contrast to the democratizing forces at work in Coleman’s homeschoolers, Lauren Beaupre’s study of Bellevue Baptist Church reveals the increasingly insular communities of modern megachurches. Replacing intimate neighborhoods with religious centers that provided education, recreation, and entertainment, Bellevue and other megachurches holistically attended to a dispersed Christian community. In response to large-scale reorganizations of metropolitan space, community became a religious product for sale in enormous religious complexes that were more like small towns than traditional parishes.  Buying into the product was easy, but Beaupre also reveals the challenges created by one-stop shopping for the broader local community.
            Finally, where Coleman sees a Christian alternative to public education and Beaupre highlights a Christian alternative to restoring residential neighborhoods, David McConeghy shows how prayer became a Christian alternative to public policy or legislation. Prayer was both a weapon to be wielded in the “culture war” against secularism and the olive branch shared among divided Christian churches. American communities could be redeemed if they could either be purged of sin or united by revival, and new spatial and geographic prayer techniques emerged to facilitate God’s intercession for spiritual breakthroughs on secular obstacles.
            The three networks examined here affirm the creativity and resourcefulness of evangelicals in attempting to recreate their ideal of Christian schools, Christian neighborhoods, and Christian nation. Yet while education, church, and prayer had long been important to evangelicals, the alternative communities they formed in the late twentieth century differed from previous efforts in their use of communications technologies, economies of scale, and critical geographies. Together these networks show evangelicals adeptly balancing the past and present in order to save American communities.

Aimee and Apocalypticism; or The 3 Days of the Sutton

Paul Harvey

Send lawyers, guns, and money,

The s*** has hit the fan
(Warren Zevon)

Warhol had his 15 minutes (leading one wag recently to opine that in the future everyone would be anonymous for 15 minutes), The Condor had three days, but this week our friend and contributor Matt Sutton has had his three days -- with some more to come. Call it the 3 Days of the Sutton.

First there was the New York Times editorial in Monday's paper, which we blogged about here. Then there was the appearance on the Lawrence O'Donnell show (and the usual hate mailers afterward). Then an hour later after the show, as if to personify the point (much more literally than Matt ever meant it), there was a heckler yelling at President Obama about how he was the anti-Christ. Then there was the inevitable commentary about how the heckler was a "plant." Yada yada blah blah.

(Here I digress just for a moment to quote from @MartyVanBuren, some very funny historian tweeting from "The Great White House in the Sky" as President Martin Van Buren: Obama heckled at campaign stop as the 'Antichrist.' Been there. Some folks just don't understand us Masons.)

Then there was Lawrence O'Donnell commenting on the previous evening's segment with Matt, replaying the heckler and Matt's comments and inserting his own measured commentary on the basic point here, which is the way the extreme has become part of the mainstream in political rhetoric (Ponzi schemes and Bachmann's fact-free speculations about vaccinations being some recent cases in point). Then there was Matt's appearance on the Michael Medved show, where he made some points that apparently left the conservative radio host apoplectic. I don't know if there's a link, but here is Matt's summary:

Just did the Medved show . . . I ended up comparing evangelicals to Muslims -- the vast majority are good people:-) He was not pleased.

I'll see if I can find a clip of that to link here.

Then there are the proliferating internet commentaries on the editorial and O'Donnell segment, by which point the subtler points of Matt's analysis have long since been muffled in the media noise.

And this doesn't even get to Matt's other career -- as an advisor for the musical Saving Aimee, premiering soon in Seattle with the hope of getting it to Broadway. Matt recently met with Kathie Lee Gifford, who is involved closely with this production in some way that I can't remember offhand, and maybe one of these days he will blog about that. In the meantime, here is a wonderful segment from Seattle Channel Video recorded in August; the first 10 minutes or so features Matt talking about Sister Aimee's life, the rest features various producers and actors from the musical talking about their roles.

You can also go here for a podcast of an interview with Matt by Ian Masters, where Matt talks about the conspiracy theories floating around the loonier sections of the media about the timing of that heckler (some have accused Matt of paying the heckler -- no way a university professor can afford that! And never mind that the New York Times piece was submitted about a month ago and delayed several times since then).

Finally, you should also check out his piece at the Harvard University Press website, "The Resurrections of Aimee Semple McPherson," which concludes with a comparison of Aimee's failed attempt to star on Broadway in the 1930s, but the hopeful success of the current theatrical revival of her life:

McPherson’s continuous reappearances in pop culture illustrate that the issues raised by her life were not simply about Los Angeles in the 1920s. Rather they illustrate how the mix of religion, sexuality, and mass media that she represented cut to the heart of modern American culture—then and now. In crafting a powerful, culturally engaged, theologically conservative movement in an era saturated with controversy over the roles of women in society and the relationship of fundamentalism to American culture, she garnered a lot of attention.

Although Aimee tried—and failed—to star on Broadway in the 1930s, she may yet get her chance. The new musical, Saving Aimee, will once again revisit her compelling, complicated life. With Aimee as the subject, it is bound to be an excellent show.

On a more serious side, there have been some excellent discussions of Matt's points, which ultimately are about the role of apocalypticism in American political discourse through the 20th century. Sarah Posner discusses Matt's piece together with Michael Kazin's consideration "Whatever Happened to the American Left" in Sunday's Times (short answer: the right has organized, the left has not; Diane Winston challenges that view here).

Aimee and apocalypticism represent different forms of religious theater that ultimately play towards ideas of the resurrection of Christian America. Michele Bachmann has mastered this point, as evidenced in her speech before Liberty University's students, which "found the precise sweet spot where testimony and Christian American exceptionalism mythology intersect" (the link takes you to a C-SPAN video of the talk). Bachmann's campaign is faltering and she'll be out of the picture soon enough, but she's made an impact with this kind of galvanizing rhetoric, bringing certain strands of apocalyptic themes into mainstream discourse through her own form of theatricality. God help us.

P.S. Forgot to mention the most startling thing of all: Sutton's fantasy football team is now 2-1, and he's a threat to make the playoffs. Truly the time of tribulation is upon us.

Noebel Cause: Summit Ministries Director Retires

Paul Harvey

Colorado Springs hasn't been in the news quite as much in recent years (Ted Haggard notably excepted) as it was at the height of the culture wars. That may soon change as the Republican primary heats up. In the meantime, though, here's an important organization-in-transition story for you, from a (relatively) little known but quietly powerful local Christian training center that has exerted its influence over a couple of generation of folks now. Mark Barna, our local Colorado Springs Gazette religion reporter, recounts the career of David Noebel of Summit Ministries, who is retiring after close to half a century of leading his group. Originally an offshoot of Billy James Hargis's Christian Crusade, Noebel struck out on his own after sex scandals brought Hargis down -- including a couple who, upon their honeymoon, discovered they had both slept with Hargis out of wedlock. Noebel reportedly pushed out Hargis and took over the Christian Crusade program, folded it into Summit Ministries, and has carried on from there since.

In case you are worried that Noebel will get bored during his retirement, fear not.

Though retiring from Summit, Noebel will continue to lead the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, founded in 1953 in Iowa by Fred Schwarz to track U.S. communism, and currently headquartered in Manitou Springs. Noebel has written for the nonprofit’s newsletter for 45 years.

Noebel is best known now, at least among historians, as the great nonstop fountain of colorful quotes from his books in the 1960s and 1970s, most of which are rants about communism and rock-n-roll -- see, for example, Rhythm, Riots, and Revolution (1966), and Marxist Minstrels (1973). The first simply cannot be beat as an anti-rock screed (if I'm wrong about that, Randall, correct me): Noebel writes:

"THE BEATLES, or THE MINDBENDERS, for example, need only mass hypnotize thousands of American youth, condition their emotions through the beat of the 'music' and then have someone give the word for riot and revolt...If the following scientific program is not exposed, degenerated Americans will indeed raise the Communist flag over their own nation"

Because he's usually quoted in that context, Noebel has tended to be written off as a product of the culture wars of an entirely different era -- one before Christian rock/pop infiltrated the enemy headquarters and established itself on the scene (as David Stowe has documented in No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of Evangelicalism), and before, as Charity Carney just described, saccharine instrumental Muzak versions of Lennon's "Imagine" are piped into Christian chain stores.

But far from being the product of another era, Summit Ministries has remained an active training organization, with tens of thousands of people coming through its programs and filtering its message out to the grassroots. Sarah Posner has described its work in this area in much greater detail here. She writes:

If Noebel seems stuck in time with his fearmongering about a fifth column of “reds” aiming to take over America, his protégés continue to reinterpret his conspiratorial thinking in ways that reverberate throughout the conservative movement—despite the embarrassment over conspiracy theories from some conservative journalists. Noebel himself acknowledged the thread running from his activism to the Tea Party movement. “Most of them are evangelical Christian anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-statist... Michele Bachmann is one of their leaders and she certainly is a fine Christian gal and she’s got her feet in that camp big time.” And, he added, “I would say Ron Paul, for example, Ron Paul is more Christian than anything, to tell the truth.”

Noebel’s influence can be seen in the work of a Summit alumnus who answered the Christian Right call for evangelicals to create their own media and entertainment enterprises to replace secular ones. Noebel makes an appearance in the propaganda film Agenda: Grinding America Down, produced by former Idaho state legislator Curtis Bowers, who recently won the Christian Reconstructionist San Antonio Christian Film Festival. As a youth, Bowers and his family spent summers at Summit, which he described recently as “such a valuable and important thing that was helping turn America back to God and the Bible."

Noebel has been a colorful character for sure, and will remain a surefire source for quotable quotes for historians documenting the cultural conflicts of the 1960s/1970s. But he should remain of interest for his considerable influence on influencing the rhetoric and positioning of a substantial sub-group in contemporary politics. This far predates the Tea Party, and while off or under the radar for a couple of decades, its day is here -- again.

And if nothing else, that's good for business here at RiAH, and it primes the pump for interest in the new book by Randall and the forthcoming masterpiece (American Evangelicals and the Politics of Apocalypse, under contract with Harvard U. Press) from Matt.

Shall the Historians Win, Part III: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family

Paul Harvey



To continue with our theme for the day, I'm pleased to recommend to you a fascinating book, part memoir, part historical analysis, part family history, part personal meditation: Andrew Himes's The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in An American Family (the facebook fan page of the book is here).



As mentioned in the last post, this book arose from Himes's own struggles with his own family legacy as the grandson of the legendary fundamentalist leader John R. Rice. Historians love Rice; he's an endless source of colorful quotations from his paper The Sword of the Lord and from his various books, most especially his Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers -- thesis of which is that he didn't like any of them. You can't heave an egg out of a Toyota Prius window without hitting a historian of 20th century evangelicalism who has referenced that book somewhere in his/her work. This 1941 book is short but really all you need to do is read the lengthy table of contents, one of those great table of contents that books used to have in the 19th century and are the historian's best friend -- check it out at google books here.

Seeking to understand his own family's history, Himes goes long, examining the long history of Scots-Irish immigration to America and the rise of a particular style of southern evangelical Calvinism in the 19th century. He examines the Rice family in post-Civil War Texas, a surefire training ground for a hardened religious view, and then makes his way to the more familiar (to historians) story of the creation of what became known as "fundamentalism" in the early twentieth century.

For me, the highlight of the book is the opportunity to get to know John R. Rice and his family in intimate detail, a kind of thing I've never seen elsewhere before. Himes mines the family archives beautifully, and the end result is exactly what one hopes for in history, a much fuller and richer understanding of a person who elsewhere almost always appears as a virtual self-parody of fundamentalist rigidity. We also get close accounts of Rice' s interactions with almost everyone on the fundamentalist all-star team -- Billy Sunday, J. Frank Norris (whom Rice worked closely with in Texas before discovering what a narcissistic psycho Norris was), Mordecai Ham, William Bell Riley, and pretty much everyone involved with Billy Graham (whom he admired but with whom he eventually broke, as Graham was too broadly evangelical for Rice's tastes). That's not to say that Himes shies away from the uglier parts of that history, including the very active participation of his great grandfather (Rice's father) in the Texas Klan, Rice's own racist predilections, and so on. But he treats all this with historical understanding, and feels connected always to Rice through Rice's wife, his grandmother, who stayed in contact and continued to love the author even after he had broken from much of his family.

Rice's heyday was in the 1930s and 1940s, when his Sword of the Lord was central to knitting together fundamentalists nationwide during their years "in the wilderness" after Scopes and before more recent resurgences of religious-political conservatives. He kept going strong, however, after the war and into the 1960s, including the years when Himes found his way to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, during the high point of the student movement (he tells the story in the book of meeting Fannie Lou Hamer in Racine, Wisconsin in 1967, and feeling moved by her religiosity right at the very moment that he was rejecting his own family's religiosity). Rice mellowed somewhat as he grew older, and was somewhat less inclined to preach sermons like this one, reprinted in The Sword of the Lord in 1940:

Preach on booze. Preach on the scarlet sin, adultery. Some cheeks will turn red with sahem, and some won't like it, but it will bring people to repentance. Preach on the dance, tell people it is rotten as sin. Tell people they dance because they enjoy the lust. . . Preach on the movies made by vile, lewd people, holding up rotten moral standards, breaking down respect for marriage, pure love, hard work . . . Preach against the Masonic Lodges. Preach against evolution, and false cults. Preach on death, sin Hell, judgment!

This is a different sort of text than the academic volumes we normally focus on here, and this book might not have come to my attention except for my own connection (through friends of my Oklahoma family) with people related to the author. For those familiar with the topic, the details of the birth and rise of fundamentalism will be reasonably familiar, but all of this is given with a personal twist and poignancy that sheds new light on the topic. I learned an awful lot about the history of fundamentalism and some of the individuals associated with it, and recommend the book to all.

Shall the Historians Win, Part II: More Fundamentalist Roundup

Paul Harvey



For those of you who happen to be in the Pacific Northwest or planning on attending the Pacific Coast Branch meeting of the AHA in Seattle coming up this Fri-Sat., come on by and visit this panel on Friday afternoon, 3:30 - 5, in the Seattle Renaissance hotel (before you go to our panel, make sure to go visit the Seattle Public Library first, a really wonderfully cool architectural landmark in downtown SEA a few blocks from the hotel):

Rethinking American Religion during the Interwar Period

Chair and Comment: Paul Harvey, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

Papers:

“What does Fundamentalism Have to Do with Class?: The New York Labor Temple, 1920-

1926” -- Janine Giordano Drake, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

“The Great Depression and the Elasticity of Fundamentalism”

Christopher Schlect, Washington State University

“Evangelical Methodists and Postwar Conservatism”

W. Andrew Tooley, Wheaton College



The papers collectively represent excellent empirical work in the complications regarding the term "fundamentalism" during its originary years earlier in the twentieth century, and Janine's work suggests much about the ways in which working-class socialist Christianity got "read out" of acceptability around the end of World War I. Christopher's paper shows how various Presbyterian ministers nationwide who were identified as "fundamentalists" in fact disagreed substantially on any number of issues.

While these papers considerably complicate the meaning and definitions given to "fundamentalism," one person that no one would dispute fits the label, however the label is defined, is John R. Rice, longtime editor of the important periodical The Sword of the Lord.



Rice's grandson, Andrew Himes, moved from the fundamentalism of his family background to another form of fundamentalism, Maoist leftism, in the 1970s. He has emerged from that wrenching experience to author a book at once poignant and informative, juxtaposing anecdotes from his own life together with a hefty "long history" of fundamentalism, culminating in extensive sections on his grandfather John R. Rice.

As it happens, after you enjoy the excellent papers mentioned above at the PCB-AHA panel, you have the opportunity to meet Andrew Himes and hear him read from his work The Sword of the Lord: The Roots of Fundamentalism in an American Family (with a foreword by Parker J. Palmer). Himes will be reading from his work at a great independent bookseller, Elliott Bay Books in Seattle, on Friday evening at 7:00 p.m. Here's a description from the author's own site:

My new book was released on May 15, and ever since then I have been eagerly awaiting my gig at Elliot Bay Bookstore. Ever since I moved to Seattle in 1985 I've been a fan of Elliot Bay -- perhaps the best independent bookstore in the world. Elliot Bay has a passionate, articulate, engaged staff, a wide selection of great books, and a fantastic cafe with some of the best coffe, pastries, sandwiches and soups in Seattle. Elliot Bay also has a well-stocked calendar of author readings in the basement, and I have been to many over the years -- reading performances and talks by some of the funniest, smartest, best story tellers and writers I've heard or read. So it makes me really happy to be invited to speak/read/perform, at Elliot Bay Bookstore on Friday, August 12th at 7:00 PM. If you are in Seattle, I dearly hope you come to this event to support Elliot Bay and have a great time giving me a hard time with challenging questions. Then you can hang out with me in the cafe and talk 'til all hours!



More about the book next!

Shall the Historians Win? Fundamentalist Roundup

Paul Harvey

As a quick followup to the Houston Prayer rally, make sure and read this firsthand reportage/account from Sarah Posner, as well as this analysis piece from Paul Horwitz, a law professor, in the New York Times, which concludes as follows:

Some people think we would be better off without religion in public life. In the long run, however, we would lose much more than we gain. Our debates may be more contentious if we allow religion in, but they will also be more committed and honest. Just as the Constitution allows Mr. Perry to stake his political future on “The Response,” it allows the rest of us to answer back.

Perry is set to enter the race soon, and doubtless will be competing for some of the same market share in a certain sector of the Republican primary market with Michele Bachmann, discussed by Posner at length here ("surely," she writes, "he wants to suck all of the air out of Michele Bachmann's air-conditioned tent"). Sarah's piece also links to, amends, and mildly critiques this week's New Yorker analysis of Michele Bachmann's ascent, religiosity and worldview. The author, Ryan Lizza, writes:

Liberty is the concept—or at least the word—most resonant with the Republican Party’s Tea Party faction, which Bachmann’s Presidential aspirations depend upon. It is a peculiarity of the current political moment that a politician with a history of pushing sectarian religious beliefs in government has become a hero to a libertarian movement. But Bachmann’s merger of these two strands of ideology is not unique. In fact, the Pew Research Center, in its recent quadrennial study of the American electorate, noted that “the most visible shift in the political landscape” since 2005 “is the emergence of a single bloc of across-the-board conservatives. The long-standing divide between economic, pro-business conservatives and social conservatives has blurred.”

The article also examines material from Bachmann's past campaigns, and concludes (among other things) that her supposed "gaffe" about slavery was in fact entirely consistent with the neo-Confederate literature that she had listed on her "reading list" recommended for others.



Bachmann also has some connections with our local evangelical doyen David Noebel, of Summit Ministries, maybe the most important evangelical leader that no one has ever heard of. Sarah Posner examines that history here and here, and also Bachmann's training at Oral Roberts University here.

Discussion continues in the next post with more on an interesting new book on the history of fundamentalism in one very important family in its history.

Prayer Rally Roundup: If You're Ever in Houston, You Better Do the Right

Paul Harvey

Civil religious prayers, fast days, proclamations of thanksgiving and/or humbling, and organized mass praying events have a long history in America from the Puritans to the present. So does the long history of politicians trying to capitalize on group piety -- sometimes much to their own detriment, as John Adams speculated about his own participation in one such effort. He might tell the participants:

If you're ever in Houston, well you better do the right,

You better not gamble, you better not fight

The latest -- and surely one of the most egregiously sectarian and transparently partisan -- is Rick Perry's Prayer Rally, called The Response, scheduled tomorrow for Houston. The Miami Herald gives some background on Perry and the rally here, and one of its main sponsors, a rapture-ready prayer warrior group called the "International House of Prayer," here. Our local friend James Dobson, an "honorary chairman" for the event, advertises it as follows: "We believe that America is in crisis -- not just politically, financially, or morally, but because our nation has not honored God in its sucesses or humbly called on Him in its struggles." Compared to the statements of many of the other sponsors, that is positively pluralistic, or at least stays within the usual vein of rhetoric surrounding historic fast days, jeremiad sermons, and the like.

Mark Silk examines the ways in which this particular event transgresses the usual norms of civil religious events. The Response's website announces: "As a nation we must come together and call upon Jesus to guide us through unprecedented struggles, and thank Him for the blessings of freedom we so richly enjoy." So much for Protestant-Catholic-Jew!.

Beyond that, I say "egregious" above because of its sponsorship, in part, by the American Family Association, a Tupelo, Mississippi-based group with a long and disturbing history of connections with white supremacists, theocrats, and various other disreputable characters from the fringe far right, as well as a pattern of abusive relations directed towards some of its employees.

The New York Times briefly covers the history of the AFA here, but much more effective and searching is Sarah Posner's detailed expose here, a must read in understanding the deeper background of this event. My favorite: The AFA's radio host Bryan Fischer's analysis of the origins of the Nazi Party among a group of "homosexual thugs." Beyond that bit of historical amusement, however, comes some far more disturbing sentiments:

Fischer admits that he shares with Breivik that disdain for "multiculturalism" and "politically correct elites" who are ruining our culture -- for Breivik, it's a "pure" European or Nordic culture; for Fischer, it's "Judeo-Christian" American culture.

I'm assuming that the event will mostly consist of the usual mixture of patriotism and piety, and likely will be largely unremarkable in that regard. But the openly proselytizing nature of the proceedings, and the notably central presence of so many from the far-right fringe, makes it remarkable in its own way. Perhaps it's also why almost every national politician is keeping his/her distance from it. You know, those inconvenient scheduling conflicts, and all that. Me? I'm unable to attend because I need more time to spend with my family. Isn't that right, Omar? (He just meowed in response).

Jimmy Carter and Conservatism

Blake Renfro

J. Brooks Flippen’s Jimmy Carter, The Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right (University of Georgia Press, 2011) provides another interpretation of how conservative Christians became a vocal part of the body politic. Flippen contends that Jimmy Carter’s presidency inadvertently laid the foundation for the rise of the Religious Right under Ronald Reagan. The book focuses on Carter’s 1976 coalition between southern white evangelicals and traditional Democrats. Such an alliance might seem impossible in today’s political environment, and at the time it was a weak partnership. Historians familiar with the era will not be surprised by the contentious issues, including abortion, debates over secular education, feminism, and gay rights. Some studies of modern American conservatism have stressed the role of grassroots organizations in developing a sophisticated and politically charged rebuttal of liberalism, but Flippen focuses on a more powerful force-the American presidency. He demonstrates how the president’s language on social issues influenced broader political and cultural attitudes. Ultimately, Carter’s political balancing “set the stage for its [the Religious Right] movers and shakers.” It was, Flippen suggest, “a top-down movement” led by Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and an accompanying cast of familiar characters.

Race is an important issue when examining this dramatic change in American politics, and it seems like a new version is published every week. An emerging group of scholars has broadened the story by addressing gender and economics. State and local histories, including those by Joseph Crespino, Darren Dochuck, and Allen Tullos, use place and region as a metaphor for the nation’s political terrain. Flippen’s appraisal of race is not particularly new. Similar to Billy Graham’s efforts to sooth racial animosity, Carter catered to southern white Democrats with Biblical language and a call to cleanse one’s heart of hatred. But, Flippen subtly traces how evolving language about race eventually led to the Reagan Revolution’s “post racial” tropes. We can only expect more dissertations will continue to dissect the topic.

Flippin is particularly helpful in understanding the battle over gay rights. Historians of conservatism have paid little attention to the conversation between gay rights activists and conservative evangelicals. Prior to the 1969 Stonewall Riots, gay activism was almost unheard of in American politics, but Flippen illustrates how it emerged as a national issue during Carter’s bid for the presidency. For the time Carter was surprisingly progressive on the issue. Though he did not support the so-called “homosexual lifestyle,” Carter clearly abhorred the kind of rhetoric voiced by Jerry Falwell and Anita Bryant. When he denounced the Briggs Initiative, which proposed to ban homosexual teachers from California’s public schools, evangelical leaders called him a traitor. The administration was not pioneering on gay rights, but Flippen has done more than any other scholar to illuminate the origins of this ongoing culture war.

Jimmy Carter, The Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right reminds us how powerful the American Presidency has shaped our political and cultural conversation. As we enter another round of political campaigns, historians will undoubtedly find more ways to demonstrate how the past informs our contemporary political temper.

Rick Perry, Come On Down!

Paul Harvey

Amy Sullivan reports (HT Charles Marsh), in a piece for Time, that Tony Perkins (of the Family Research Council), David Barton (you know who he is), and John Hagee (he's not dead yet, evidently, despite the 2008 debacle) teamed up on a phone call a few weeks ago to express their displeasure with the current crop of Republican primary candidates -- either because they're not conservative enough, or they're not the right kind of religious conservative (i.e. they're Mormon), or they're not "southern enough," or they're just flakes (i.e. Gingrich and self-immolating campaign). Huckabee's not around, so enter their dream candidate, Rick Perry, who fits the bill on all fronts. Read all about it here. And then follow up with some more background information on all this by Sarah Posner here. And there's reporting on Perry's strategic breaks with his fellow Texan George W. Bush here.

Just a bit from Amy Sullivan's piece:

So, come on down, Rick Perry! He may be the favorite by default, but the Texas governor is also a terrific match for the Christian Right. Sarah Posner of Religious Dispatches recently outlined Perry’s social conservative bona fides and they’re impressive:

• **Signed a gay marriage ban into law at a Christian school in Fort Worth with evangelical heavyweights Tony Perkins (Family Research Council), Rod Parsley (Ohio mega-church pastor), and Don Wildmon (American Family Association) in attendance
  
  
• **The Sunday before his 2006 re-election, Perry attended Cornerstone Church and sat by the side of controversial pastor John Hagee (in 2008, John McCain had to reject Hagee’s endorsement after critics pointed out the pastor’s many extreme statements, including calling the Catholic Church “the whore of Babylon”)
  
  
• **Supported and was a primary beneficiary of the Texas Restoration Project, an effort to increase the electoral involvement of conservative pastors
  
  

All of this, however, pales beside Perry’s current project–a Christian all-day prayer event called “The Response” on August 6 in Houston. The governor is sponsoring the event along with the American Family Association, which is footing the estimated $1.5 million tab for the gathering. The Response is intended for Christians only, although one spokesman said that if people of other faiths attend, he hopes they will see the light and “seek out the living Christ” for their lives.

Luckily for us, Historianess will be attending the all-day prayer event on the 6th (hey, it's local, it's free, and it's air conditioned), and giving us live updates. Or not :)

Sunday, in the Park

Paul Harvey

You wouldn't think it was the 4th of July in the showdown between the KKK and the Westboro Baptist Church at some Memorial Day remembrances at Arlington National Cemetery. You can't make this stuff up, even when you just so happen to have a historical analysis of the 2nd Ku Klux Klan's white Christian nationalism on its way out soon. My co-conspirator Kelly Baker looks at this bizarre confrontation here, in an op-ed piece for History News Network.

Some other pieces catching attention lately in our Sunday roundup:

I just finished reading Jennifer Burns's book Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, a completely fascinating biography and analysis of the impact of Rand's works as a historic "gateway drug to the right." The religious metaphors quickly come to mind when looking at how the aggressively proselytizing atheist worked to control her own cult of personality, how heretics from her "Collective" were shunned and exiled, how "The Collective" was sardonically named but eerily apt as a descriptor, and how her novelistic heroes operated as godlike mythical heroes and heroines.

Unlike Hobbits or children residing in Hogwarts, Rand's heroes have proven impossible to transfer to movies or television mini-series, the genius of the market having rejected at the box office movie adaptations of her agitprop novels. Peter Travers writes of this most recent screen adaption of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's monumental 1,168-page, 1957 novel gets the low-budget, no-talent treatment and sits there flapping on screen like a bludgeoned seal. Our local (Colorado) AM agitprop specialist Mike Rosen, of 850 AM radio out of Denver, hosted a special screening and wrote a series of god-awful editorials for the Denver Post attemtping to flog the film. Rosen provided post-screening commentary together with Michael "heck of a job" Brown, lately of FEMA and Katrina fame, and host of the nightly show on same said "blowtorch" of Colorado radio. The rapture is sounding better by the moment.

Author Jennifer Burns also covers how much William F. Buckley, Whittaker Chambers, and others of that pioneering conservative generation hated Rand, and how she returned the favor. Rand also apparently didn't think much of that noted collectivist sympathizer Friedrich Hayek, but then there was almost no one else that she did like. Hayek didn't really have a problem philosophically, for example, with national health insurance, which of course put him in the same camp with the slaves rather than the individualists, in Rand's eyes. All of this has come back in the news now thanks to the Rand-inspired politics of Paul Ryan, a development discussed further over at Mark Silk's Spiritual Politics blog.

(A side note unrelated to this blog but just interesting to read about in this book anyway: In the late 60s/early 70s, Rand opposed the Vietnam War, which further angered many conservatives, while she celebrated in Kennedy-esque language the Apollo space program, which pissed off libertarians who already had sort of broken from her. As for her temper, let's just say that good thing Twitter wasn't around then).

Speaking of money uber alles and the cash nexus, my friend Lerone Martin has a very popular "Open Letter to Creflo Dollar," concerning Dollar's defense of Bishop Eddie Long, here.

In other news:

John Schmalzbauer has an outstandingly interesting review of Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt in the new Evangelical Studies Bulletin. No link for it, but click on the ESB link for quick and very inexpensive addition to the mailing list of this very informative newsletter. The link also gives you access to a number of back issues from 2007-2010, with lengthy and very substantive reviews of important recent works by Barry Hankins, Thomas Kidd, and many others.

In "Roots of Bachmann's Ambition Began at Home," the New York Times goes over some of the same material that the Rolling Stone did in Menckenian excess (except not as funny as Mencken), about the origins of Michele Bachmann's political career in Minnesota, only without the hypervenilation. Of her appearances speaking in church basements early in her career, one attendee remembers, “It felt like we were in a tent, like a revival,” Ms. Cecconi said. “It was obvious Michele was the star."

While Huntsman and Romney split families and compete for the same donor base, Bachmann is competing equally with Romney and trouncing the relatively unknown Huntsman in Iowa. The two candidates Romney and Huntsman have Tea Party trouble alike, while Huntsman moves away from Romney's position on his faith and his politics articulated in 2008; Matt Bowman explores Huntsman's new generational Mormonism here for New Republic. See also Russell Fox's response to Bowman's piece here -- Fox feels that it is not a generational difference between the business Mormonism of Romney and the more renegade style of Huntsman, but rather that "Huntsman doesn’t take his Mormonism quite as seriously as pioneer-stock Romney does." Both pieces are well worth reading.

We Don't Have to Call it "Holy War": Historicizing Michelle Bachmann

Janine Giordano Drake

Is it just me, or does coverage these days of Michelle Bachmann these days sound like it was ripped right out of the journals of H.L Mencken in the hot Tennessee summer of 1925? Writes Rolling Stone Magazine this week in an article entitled, "Michelle Bachmann's Holy War,"

"Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions. She believes that the Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats, and that God personally chose her to become both an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers and a raging anti-tax Tea Party crusader against big government. She kicked off her unofficial presidential campaign in New Hampshire, by mistakenly declaring it the birthplace of the American Revolution. "It's your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world!" she gushed. "You are the state of Lexington and Concord, you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard.... And later,

Bachmann's entire political career has followed this exact same pattern of God-speaks-directly-to-me fundamentalism mixed with pathological, relentless, conscienceless lying. She's not a liar in the traditional way of politicians, who tend to lie dully, usefully and (they hope) believably, often with the aim of courting competing demographics at the same time. That's not what Bachmann's thing is. Bachmann lies because she can't help it, because it's a built-in component of both her genetics and her ideology. She is at once the most entertaining and the most dangerous kind of liar, a turbocharged cross between a born bullshit artist and a religious fanatic, for whom lying to the infidel is a kind of holy duty."

Now, I know one could argue that it is Bachmann herself who is channeling William Jennings Bryan. She is not only bold, audacious, and self-assured, but she is right when she says that she is not alone in her cultural gripes. Sure- she participated in the homeschooling and "Christian school" movement, an odd practice for the moderns of the East Coast. However, this is not such an unusual circumstance in America's heartland. She fights an unspokenly regional and religious culture war, a war about principles, a war driven by nostalgia for a world gone by. Outwardly, though, she yearns for power in Washington. Even though she doesn't make a good impression on the media, she draws crowds. She talks about God openly and confidently, maintaining an audience I'm quite sure is divided between political supporters and lovers of spectacle. We could go on and on here, especially in discussing the Third Party Politics, the struggle for Bryan's nomination to the Democratic Party in 1896, and the way jeremiads figure in American political rhetoric.

However, I am not really surprised at Bachmann for taking this approach to politics. She has learned from history that icons in the Bryan mold may not win presidencies but do have the power to reconstruct party platforms. Bryan may have spelled the end of the Populist Party, but he brought many key points of Populism to the Democratic Party, and many of those eventually came to pass.

Who I am surprised at is the contemporary, secular humanist media that has not found a way to move beyond its 1920s predecessors. H. L Mencken reported in 1925,

The Scopes trial, from the start, has been carried on in a manner exactly fitted to the anti- evolution law and the simian imbecility under it.... The rustic judge, a candidate for re-election, has postured the yokels like a clown in a ten-cent side show, and almost every word he has uttered has been an undisguised appeal to their prejudices and superstitions. The chief prosecuting attorney, beginning like a competent lawyer and a man of self-respect, ended like a convert at a Billy Sunday revival. It fell to him, finally, to make a clear and astounding statement of theory of justice prevailing under fundamentalism.

In 2011, Rolling Stone, calls Bachmann a "zealot," "pathological," and a fundamentalist. We are told that Bachmann is

crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.

There is no mention of the history of Protestant Fundamentalism and its overlap with politics. No mention of the cultural and political shoulders she stands on. We are simply told to have fear. If this is all that the triumph of liberal, secular, scientific and widespread public education can show for us after 90 years of Clarence Darrows in our midst, the problem is not Michelle Bachmann.

I'd like to make Rolling Stone and other media outlets some recommendations for their news commentary. For some background on the religious and political history of Populism, perhaps starting with the works of Robert McMath, Joe Creech and Michael Kazin. Consider the history of Fundamentalism and its role in politics, perhaps starting with Joel Carpenter, George Nash, Leo Ribuffo, Darren Dochuk, and Preston Shires. For more on the politics of family within conservative Christian circles, start with Betty DeBerg, Bethany Moreton and Natasha Zaretsky.

And, I invite others to join me in naming more good books that help define the shoulders that Bachmann stands upon. Rolling Stone, has the news not reached you yet?: Even if evolution is not the law of the land in every public school in America, Science eventually won in twentieth century America. And not just the hard sciences, but the social sciences. We don't have to think of the next presidential election as a Holy War unless we want to. In fact, to call it holy war-- to accept the fight on those terms--is, if you ask me, to lose the war that is actually being waged.

You Say Evangelical, I Say Evangélico

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Today's guest post is from Stephen Dove, a graduate student in the history department at the University of Texas at Austin. He currently lives in Guatemala where he is writing his dissertation about the ways Guatemalan Protestants in the early-twentieth century shaped the theologies and practices they received from missionaries. Dove aptly reminds us about the problems with some of the designations we use as scholars of American religion.

Stephen Dove

Summer is here, and for those of us who live in developing countries that means that missionary season has arrived as well. For the next few months, a steady stream of eager, well-intentioned groups in matching T-shirts will offer a visual reminder that U.S. religion—especially evangelical Protestantism—does not stop at the border. Seeing these groups interact with the non-U.S. churches they have helped create also serves as a reminder that our definitions of what are effectively international religious movements can become a little small when viewed exclusively through a U.S. lens.

Take “evangelical,” a label that applies both to most summer missionaries and also to most local churches here in Guatemala. In the U.S., the battle over that term has become increasingly narrow in recent decades as social and political conservatives have essentially elbowed all other Protestants into categories like mainline or liberal. A few outliers like Jim Wallis continue to fight for inclusion under the banner of evangelical, but for the most part, the word has moved closer and closer to being a synonym for conservatism in general. In Latin America, the past century has seen the exact opposite trend occur among evangélicos. This term has become the preferred self-referent for virtually all non-Catholic Christians from Pentecostals to strict dispensationalists to social progressives. This is a diverse bunch, which has led some scholars to caution (correctly) that evangélico does not have the same meaning as evangelical does in the U.S. However, the two groups do share some important foundational beliefs such as an emphasis on the authority of the Bible, a belief that personal conversion is essential, and an imperative to share their faith.

Because of these similarities (and no doubt also because of a love of bigger membership numbers), both U.S. evangelicals and Latin American evangélicos like to consider themselves part of the same team. This weekend, however, I was reminded again just how odd that pairing can sometimes be.

At its Sunday service (attended by at a least one U.S. evangelical mission group), a local church passed out a flyer for a Father’s Day gathering titled “Papás Revolucionarios,” complete with an illustration straight out of Communist propaganda: a woodcut of a stylized worker waving a red, revolutionary flag. This church, which matches theologically with U.S. evangelicals in most ways, was completely comfortable drawing on leftist political imagery to promote its event, and its leaders knew exactly what they were doing. This was not just a convenient clip art graphic or an ironic Jesus-as-Che-Guevara T-shirt worn by an edgy youth pastor. I doubt this particular church has many Communist sympathies, but they could nonetheless imagine the radical social revolutions of their own country’s past as a model for their spirituality. Somehow, I don’t see the same metaphor flying in the average U.S. evangelical congregation. Even left-leaning U.S. evangelicals like Wallis have distanced themselves from such imagery in the current political climate.

At the same time, I have no doubt that this church could turn around next week and draw on imagery from a law-and-order, right-wing political group to make a different point. The reality in Latin America is not that evangélicos are the opposite of their counterparts to the north or even that they can somehow hold people with opposing beliefs together. The truth is that many individuals who identify themselves as evangélico can shift back and forth depending on their context. Their tent is not just bigger; it’s also portable.

Understanding this form of evangelicalism is not just important to the U.S. because of the historical missionary connection. This other evangelicalism is also moving back across the border, not only through immigration but also through reverse missions. Latin American immigration is usually associated with Catholicism when it comes to religion, but in many Central American countries like Guatemala, as much as one-third of the population is evangélico, and the Pew Forum estimated a few years ago that 15 percent of U.S. Latinos are evangélico. The political arena is one place Latino evangélicos have shown their political malleability compared to traditional U.S. evangelicals, with a majority voting for George W. Bush in 2004 but Barack Obama in 2008. In both elections, however, a sizable minority voted the opposite way, again illustrating that this group does not fit easily into political and social categories. This is an important issue in North American religion now, but it is only going to become more so as the evangélico population grows in the U.S. and as Latin American churches build more and stronger relationships with their counterparts in the U.S., forcing both groups to evaluate where their identities merge and where they diverge.

After Cloven Tongues of Fire, The Nation (Magazine) Gets Religion

Paul Harvey

I think a lot of you are out there are having fun thinking about Elesha's provocative post yesterday Do Religion Scholars Read the Bible, and the conversation about it will continue tomorrow with a follow-up post by Janine -- but in the meantime here are some more items of great interest that passed my way today, and very much related with one another.

First, The Nation magazine has given one of its reviewers, Chris Lehmann, ample space to discuss together Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt alongside Matt Sutton's Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (which, as some of you know, was John Updike's alltime favorite book in his New Yorker review). Subscribers can read the review here, and the rest of you will have to track it down somewhere else, but if you're at a subscribing library as I was today it will show up as well.

Lehmann's lengthy discussion is fascinating, and framed in a way I have not seen before; he begins by discussing Golden State high-tech boosterism characteristic of TED conferences, Wired magazine, and the early Whole Earth catalog, and then tries to figure out how religious conservatives previously suspicious of free market orthodoxies (as discussed in Darren's book) came to be in the same camp as the "Californian ideologues" who preached "an anti-statist gospel of hi-tech libertarianism," concluding that "No less contradictory than the gospel truths of the California digerati, the dogmas of West Coast evangelicalism proved instrumental in acculturating an earlier generation of Jeffersonian golden dreams to a life of abundance bolstered by government-driven subsidies and development policies that, over time, they came to despite with a righteous fury."

Anyway, given a few years separation of publication dates, I have not seen Dochuk and Sutton's works considered together elsewhere, but they are here, and very fruitfully. Plus, Lehmann picks out some stories from Sutton's book about McPherson, who of course is an endless fount of fascinating tales, which I had forgotten about. And yes, that "who" pronoun was deliberately ambiguous.

Next semester I'm having my MA students read Sutton's biography of Aimee together with Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right -- a wonderfully engaging book I'm just now finishing. I'm expecting this pairing to lead to a great class discussion -- two of the most self-inventive Americans of the twentieth century, with personal sagas which no fiction writer could make up (indeed, fiction writers of McPherson's time modeled characters after her precisely because they could not make her up), but obviously at opposite ends of the spectrum in their relationship to Christianity. Or maybe not, since Rand's visceral hatred of religion didn't prevent her from creating her own version of a rigid belief system.

The other article to call your attention to is David Hollinger's Presidential Address at the Organization of American Historians meeting in Houston a few months back, which is now published in the Journal of American History:

"Presidential Address: After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity," by David A. Hollinger

It bears mentioning that Hollinger, who teaches at Berkeley, was the PhD advisor for blog friend and occasional contributor Kevin Schultz, whose book Tri-Faith America has received attention here, as well as of Jennifer Burns, author of the Rand biography just mentioned above. Congratulations to Prof. Hollinger for his OAH presidency and for the outstanding work that his students are doing.

Here's a brief summary of the main point:

In his presidential address to the 2011 Organization of American Historians annual meeting, David A. Hollinger argues that the flourishing of evangelicals and the membership decline of ecumenicals since World War II constitute a single dialectic driven by contrasting dispositions toward ethnoracial, sexual, religious, and cultural difference. More sensitive than their evangelical rivals to the diversity of American society and of the globe, ecumenicals abandoned a series of ideas that were not supportive of diversity, but those same ideas remained popular with the white public that was the chief constituency of Protestantism. Evangelicals then energetically espoused ideas such as the notion of a "Christian America" to appeal to Americans dubious of the accommodations with diversity that ecumenists had enacted with secular liberals. Americans become increasingly comfortable with the liberal ideas espoused by the ecumenical churches, while Protestantism itself became an evangelical stronghold.

What is interesting here -- among many other things -- is that the histories of "mainline" or "mainstream" Protestants have been largely considered separately from the "rise of the evangelicals" historiography, and Hollinger suggests one way to bring them together.

I hope my buddies over at U.S. Intellectual History might take up some of the ideas discussed by Hollinger and weigh in on his argument -- down the road when people have had a chance to read it, of course. In the meantime, if you historians out there haven't joined the OAH, what's wrong with you?

Jesus and Jefferson: Mark Noll Reviews Dochuk and Williams in The New Republic

Paul Harvey

Here's a discussion of interest to many: Mark Noll reviews Daniel Williams, God's Own Party, and Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, in the most recent New Republic -- a teaser is online, but you'll have to get the magazine for the rest (or, email me and I'll send to you). Here's a small excerpt:

Recent studies have begun to do better, with two of the best being these books by Daniel K. Williams and Darren Dochuk. Williams, who works from the top down in attempting a broad national perspective, does as well as any writer to date in answering the basic questions of what went into making up the religious right and specifying when the movement coalesced. Dochuk, who works from below in a superbly researched study of grassroots political mobilization, goes far to answer the question of where it came from. The solid history in these volumes should be applauded by all as a welcome alternative to the frenzy of earlier efforts. Yet neither Williams nor Dochuk addresses directly what should be one of the most compelling questions about the political history they describe so well: what exactly is Christian about the Christian right

You will remember we have posted extensively about these important new works, and have put up interviews with Williams here and Dochuk here. Noll adds to the discussion with an interesting conclusion reflecting on historians' own moral evaluations. Noll writes: "neither of these writers carries out the moral evaluation, that, especially, in tandem, their volumes make possible," and then a bit further down,

The merger of Jesus and Jefferson that propelled the New Christian Right was neither made in heaven, as in the eyes of its proponents, nor was it a cynical exercise in hypocritical self-interest, as often portrayed by its opponents. It was rather a historically constructed contingency that, judged from a broad Christian perspective, deserves to be both applauded and denounced."

And he concludes:

Theirs [evangelicals'] is not the tradition of Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, or Mater et Magistra. It is instead the tradition of Charles G. Finney, who in the 1830s declared that the problem of slavery could be resolved “in three years’ time” if only slaveholders would recognize that slaveholding was a sin. It is the lineage of Billy Sunday, who in 1919 predicted that Prohibition would empty American prisons and transform the country into a heaven on earth.

The flourishing of conservative evangelical politics in recent American history has done considerable good through the exercise of instinct, anger, energy, and zeal. It would have done much more good, and also drawn nearer to the Christianity by which it is named, if it had manifested comparable wisdom, honesty, self-criticism, and discernment.

From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: An Interview with Darren Dochuk

Editor's Note: I'm delighted today to post the first of a two-part interview (the rest will come tomorrow) with Darren Dochuk, author of the recent and much-noted book From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism, published last year by Norton. The dissertation version of this work won the Allan Nevins Prize, and now in published form I predict the work will be a top contender for some of the big forthcoming prizes. Here's a brief rundown on the work, from the book's website:

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. Based on entirely new research, the manuscript has already won the prestigious Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians. The judges wrote, "Dochuk offers a rich and multidimensional perspective on the origins of one of the most far-ranging developments of the second half of the twentieth century: the rise of the New Right and modern conservatism.

Of course, an endorsement of this work from a justly obscure historian such as myself means jack, so let's look at what some of the premiere historians of our time (Kevin Starr, Michael Kazin, and Sean Wilentz) have to say about it:

The nation is today color-coded into red and blue. In this tour de force of research, narrative, and analysis, a brilliant young historian chronicles how Southern California served as the matrix for this enduring bifurcation. Beneath the sunshine and the palm trees, uprooted evangelicals experienced a Great Awakening that transformed American politics in our era.” — Kevin Starr, University of Southern California

“With narrative authority and sparkling insight, Darren Dochuk explains how and why Southern California became the crucible of the Christian Right. Anyone who wants to understand the history of modern American conservatism should read this book.” — Michael Kazin, author of A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan

“Darren Dochuk's fortunate readers are in for some surprises as well as for enlightenment. The story of the Dust Bowl and the migration to southern California during the Great Depression, usually told through the left-wing tale of Tom Joad, turns out to be prologue to the rise of a vital segment of the modern Christian Right. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt is an essential contribution to our growing understanding of the origins and development of contemporary American conservatism.” — Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy

Just as a final note, I used this work this semester in conjunction with Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Wal-Mart (which we've featured extensively on the blog before, and is also reviewed, somewhat more critically, here) and Jefferson Cowie's fascinating new book Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (reviewed at length by Rick Perlstein here). Taking the three together -- with Dochuk and Moreton centrally featuring religious themes and characters, and Cowie scarcely mentioning religion as his interests/subjects lie elsewhere -- made for a fascinating comparison and contrast of recent history, especially the 1970s. In truth, by very different routes, the authors end up in some similar places, but perhaps the routes are more interesting than the final destination. For more extensive discussion of the emerging historiography of the 1970s, see the fine discussion over at U.S. Intellectual History.

Without further adieu, it's question time for Darren.

Update: Part II of the interview is here.
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PH: Darren, how does a volleyball star like you from the Great Plains of Socialist Canada end up studying and writing this massive book about conservative southern evangelicals in twentieth-century California? Take us through some of your professional trajectory that got you to this book.

DD: The Great Plains, Socialist Canada, and volleyball may have had something to do with my obsessions. As a kid growing up in Alberta, I had a warped fascination with all things American; I read more about George Washington than John A. Macdonald, I loved U.S. college football, and my family’s annual vacation usually took us south (Edmontonians don’t drive north unless ice fishing or moose hunting are in order). South meant Southern California, a place where we could escape the Great Plains tundra for beaches and Disneyland. It wasn’t uncommon for us to use some of the 30 hours of driving time to debate why Americans hate government so much and Canadians don’t think it’s so bad. Then, while playing university volleyball, I had the chance to compete against California programs I followed as a high schooler. I had the best match of my career against the Pepperdine Waves, despite being heckled by some brutally tough fans. So perhaps the book can be boiled down to catharsis—some subconscious attempt to reclaim (or maybe purge) a familiar past…but I’ll leave that up to my sister psychologist to figure out.

The “professional trajectory” can be summed up more simply. While struggling to find a Ph.D. dissertation topic, I read (and loved) Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors and thought more could be done to explain Southern California conservatism, so I set out to do it. My goal was to write a book that embedded evangelicalism in the larger story of post-1930s politics by teasing out its connections to suburbanization, political economy, race relations, and the politics of labor, education, housing, and business. I wanted to thread evangelicalism into mainstream narratives of U.S. political history, which still tend to paint evangelicalism as a sideshow.

PH: I read somewhere, on another online interview I think it was, that in part this book is a response (and historical critique) of the "What's the Matter with Kansas" thesis, which of course holds that a fair number of Americans have been effectively snookered into voting against the own material economic interests by forces which have sold them on a falsely cultural populism. Am I right in seeing this book in part as a response, and if so, how so?

DD: I didn’t set out to address Frank’s thesis, but my book touches on a few of its themes. At the least, it tries to add a layer of complexity to Frank’s notion that Main Street populists have been “duped” by Wall Street corporate types into voting against their economic interests. First of all, the “duped” motif has its limitations. Some of the Wall Street types I include in my story could be classified as evangelical populists themselves whose own politics covered a range of issues beyond their pocketbooks; economic interest wasn’t their sole interest. And many of the Main Street types I talk about continually measured their economic interests against the “culture wars” agenda they’ve purportedly been spoon-fed from above, so to say they were snookered into doing something against their wellbeing shortchanges their own capacity as rational political actors.

Along this same line, I think Frank’s provocative critique also downplays the processes of negotiation that have taken place between Wall Street and Main Street over the past half-century. The people I talk about were embroiled in a struggle against liberalism that started much earlier than the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s, and the alliances they forged to fight their battles were not static, uncontested, or permanent. The Main Street evangelicals I write about were never perfectly or entirely or always willing to do Wall Street’s dirty work in the trenches, and the evangelical businessmen I talk about sometimes acted on behalf of their rank-and-file brethren in ways that defied fiscal logic.

And ultimately, I’m hesitant to say someone is voting or acting against their best interests, as if I have some deep wisdom they don’t; I can’t even figure out what my own best interests are, let alone someone else’s, so I’m not that eager to pass judgment.

PH: The people you study didn't wait around for Rand Paul or the contemporary Tea Party to develop a pretty deep-rooted antipathy towards the New Deal and the expanded state that came out of the New Deal. Ironies abound here, of course, since the processes set in motion by the New Deal brought many of them to California in the first place. When did the subjects you study come to distrust the New Deal state, and how did they get to that point given their origins as poorer folk who were supposed to be one bulwark of the New Deal coalition? What role did religion play in that critique?

DD: I don’t think the people I study ever truly trusted the New Deal state. They certainly relied on it during times of trouble and they believed it was their right as white American citizens to do so; however contradictory or not, they thought that the federal government had a responsibility to provide short-term aid in exceptionally bad circumstances, and be the last resort in times of need. Roosevelt came through for these citizens, and they returned the favor by supporting him. But their first choice was always a limited state; as soon as times got better, Washington, they believed wholeheartedly, was to move aside.

When government didn’t move aside, they got angry. Their anger was politicized right after World War II, during the labor wars that erupted in the defense plants and neighborhoods that had lured them west.

Amid post-war adjustments, when California’s Social Democrats pressed for an active government that would support industrial unionism and race reform—for an expanded New Deal, in other words—southern evangelicals attempted to protect their interests as white workers and homeowners through a movement called Ham and Eggs, which combined calls for Christian revival and morality with a championing of the independent producer. This was William Jennings Bryan’s (and Huey Long’s) Populism reborn, and it scared Social Democrats, who believed that Ham and Eggs was irrational and racist. Ham and Eggs failed, leaving liberals in charge of California’s Democratic Party and evangelicals convinced that a coordinated assault on “big labor” and “big government” was in order. It’s in this moment that they began recasting Roosevelt and the New Deal as twin evils that had allowed socialism to creep in to American society.

It’s also in this moment that they began shifting their party affiliation to Independent and Republican. Evangelical businessmen, who at the time were helping form an anti-statist/free market movement, urged their fellow churchgoers along in this thinking. These sides would unite in the 1950s thanks, in large part, to Right-to-Work campaigns, which sought to rollback the power of unions in the workplace (sound familiar?).

PH: It's rather amazing to me that in reading your book alongside Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and WalMart, two previously obscure tiny colleges in Arkansas - John Brown University and Harding University -- have suddenly become central to the narrative of twentieth-century religion and conservatism, and hence to the entire narrative of twentieth-century American politics (I should add here that my cousin's son, who grew up in California, attends John Brown U.). As far as California higher educational institutions go, only Pepperdine plays as central a role in your book. Tell us something briefly about those two institutions, and what role they play in your book

Funny thing is, Bethany and I met in the one-room archive of John Brown University, tucked away in the foothills of the Ozarks. We were told that no researcher had visited in quite some time…yet there we were, two dissertators from “up north” eagerly flipping through files and splitting time at the photocopier.

The reason we were there is because we recognized that evangelical institutions have rich stories to tell. Historians often focus on preachers and the pews when tracking the evangelical Right. But a much thicker history of this phenomenon emerges when we follow the money trails that link evangelical schools to their patrons (highly politicized businessmen), or read between the lines to see how a college’s pedagogy endorses certain political expressions.

So, for instance, John Brown University and Harding University wrapped their pedagogy in a curriculum (“Head, Heart, and Hand”) that stressed practical education in the trades and business, full immersion in boots-strap entrepreneurialism, and staunch defense of traditional family values. These schools’ founders saw that this curriculum as a counter to the liberal elitism of the Ivy League, and the only answer to society’s “socialist” drift. Like countless other southern colleges, these two schools were near financial collapse in the 1930s. To save themselves—and preserve their independence—they approached the nation’s most powerful (and often evangelical) corporate leaders for support and got it, with the promise that they would train the next generation of evangelicals in a corporate-friendly environment. During the Cold War, as public education expanded and private schools faltered, John Brown, Harding, and their peer institutions stepped up their search for corporate help, by hosting annual “Freedom Forums,” for instance, which gathered CEOs, educators, and activists from around the country. In reaching out in this way, at such a formative moment in American political development, these schools essentially became the conservative movement’s first “think tanks” and marshaling zones.

I think a second benefit of studying these schools is the way they account for regional change in the post-Depression era. One of my book’s goals was to track the emergence of a Sunbelt axis of power—of the kind Kevin Phillips and Kirkpatrick Sale first designated in the 1970s as spanning from California to the Carolinas. Scholars have debated the strengths of the Sunbelt thesis, with detractors often stressing important differences in Atlanta, Houston, and Los Angeles’ metropolitan politics, or the disjuncture between notions of citizenship in Oxnard, California and Oxford Mississippi as reasons to jettison the concept. I think the Sunbelt concept is useful, and one way I saw it play out was in the realm of evangelical higher education. The more I dug the more I became fascinated with the way these schools (as well as west-coast ones like Pepperdine) linked the futures of the South and West through institutional channels, laying the groundwork for a broader, Sunbelt powerbase. Critics of the Sunbelt thesis claim that their research on urban development doesn’t bare the burden of this concept, but perhaps they should look to simpler data for evidence—bank statements for Christian colleges, which demonstrate Californian, Texan, and Floridians’ shared investment in places like John Brown University, or school enrollment books that track the flow of teens from Tulsa to Los Angeles, Orange County to the Ozarks—teens with last names like “Harvey."

Update: Part II of the interview is here.