In this fine historical study of politicized California evangelicals between the 1930s and 1980, Darren Dochuk makes two significant contributions.
First, he powerfully dramatizes something that specialists have long noted — that when scholars date the rise of the religious right to the 1970s, this seriously underestimates decades of earlier politicization. True, the 1970s saw higher levels of national-level mobilization, with unprecedented elite alliances. Dochuk ably covers the California aspects of this story: the Christian Voice, Trinity Broadcasting Network, Pat Boone, Campus Crusade for Christ, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, the religious right's leading African-American preacher E.V. Hill, and of course Ronald Reagan. He shows that their innovations and leadership are underappreciated compared to Southeast-based leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
However, Dochuk's greater contribution is documenting the deep roots of this activity. He traces it to migrants from the Texas/Oklahoma/Arkansas region, starting in the 1930s, who built Baptist, Church of Christ, Holiness, and Pentecostal churches and used them to shape their communities. Migrants brought populist sensibilities, commitments to proselytization and moralism, and ideologies of self-help and individualism. Their churches and related groups became focal points for community building, politicized preaching, and activism. Dochuk offers a blow-by-blow account of their battles — especially against efforts to extend the New Deal by desegregating neighborhoods and workplaces and using taxes for the common good, but also against communism, the United Nations, trends in education, and more. By the time of Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign, their political networks were well developed and they routinely linked individualist ideologies to “pro-business” priorities. Thus their aggressive support for Reagan's rise to California governor and later President extended longstanding patterns.
Second, Dochuk contributes to the comparative study of populism. His populists are neither monolithically reactionary nor grounded in irrational “status anxiety”; rather they are confident, self-aware, and evolving in complex ways. Although they arrived as Democrats who backed the “Ham and Eggs” movement of the 1930s and 1940s — a wealth redistribution scheme akin to Huey Long's, based on income supplements for unemployed people — they fit common images of oppression and collective struggle rather awkwardly. Rather they stressed “Jeffersonian” individual quests for prosperity. Ham and Eggs failed partly because of elite push-back and because key leaders veered into xenophobic anti-Semitism and anti-Communism — but also because its base was increasingly out of step with New Deal Democrats who sought after World War II to expand unionization and roll back racialized housing covenants. Dochuk understands that a key part of his protagonists' reaction was a defense of white privilege. However, he stresses that their self-conceptions stressed upholding self-reliance and limited government (as when Goldwater opposed civil rights legislation on libertarian rather than segregationist grounds), and that their self-concepts evolved into “color-blindness” and efforts to recruit allies like E.V. Hill. Thus, Dochuk poses questions about distinctive regional forms of racism while spinning a story that is more about progress toward anti-racism than about stages of ongoing institutional racism.
Whereas many scholars stress that right-wing populism misleads working people to vote against their interests, Dochuk's account is of anti-government ideologies dovetailing with the self-interest of upwardly mobile whites — at least during an era when military-industrial spending and incentives for suburban expansion provided their context for “self-made” success. Furthermore, the elites who increasingly funded them were less trying to dupe them than to forge alliances based on shared religious-political interests. Dochuk shows how former migrants partnered with wealthy evangelical businessman like Walter Knott of Knott's Berry Farm, Demos Shakarian (who organized a network of religious businessmen), and George Pepperdine (founder of the pro-business Pepperdine University, which Dochuk treats extensively in an especially illuminating thread of argument). Another illuminating section discusses Rick Warren's relationship with developers of a huge suburban tract after the 1978 Tax Revolt that bankrupted Orange County. Warren's church (complete with school and community center) filled a vacuum in this context of decimated public services and infrastructure.
By immersing himself sympathetically in his subjects' worldview and writing in detail with much interview material, Dochuk does an excellent job of helping readers understand his protagonists — but with the tradeoff of a relatively subdued critical voice, especially related to people who excoriated “government” while presupposing the ways their lifestyles depended on its spending. Dochuk's overall virtue of digging deep into his group's worldview and telling a story from their perspective also implies limits to his ability to analyze the groups' relative place within larger configurations of demography and policy-making. His organizing premise (following white evangelical migrants from the South/Southwest) enables a focus on a major cohort, yet it is sometimes murky how this cohort relates to migrants who were Southern non-evangelicals, Southern black evangelicals, non-Southern evangelicals, and so on. For example, Lisa McGirr's Suburban Warriors shows how migrants arrived not only from the South but also from the Midwest and elsewhere. Taken together, McGirr and Matthew Sutton's Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America highlight the roles of McPherson (from Ontario), Robert Schuller (from Iowa) and “Jesus People” of Calvary Chapel, as well as conservative Catholics, all within the milieu covered by Dochuk.
While it is obviously good that Dochuk documents additional pieces of the puzzle — and does so within the broadest study of California evangelicals yet produced — still his approach has limitations for weaving all these stories together within a big picture that partly decenters his cohort. Even some of his own protagonists press against a Southern migration paradigm, including Pepperdine (from Kansas), Shakarian (grandson of an Armenian immigrant), and the Illinois-born Reagan. Thus one might explore, for example, whether an approach to Reagan's and Warren's feel-good conservatism through McPherson and Schuller might have equal interpretive power in some contexts. Related tradeoffs related to standpoint and critical distance arise when Dochuk's narrative frame stresses a preacherly rhetoric of “errands” to evangelize in a “wilderness” (whereas others might probe for slippages between such rhetoric, its ideological distortions, and practice on the ground) and when he concludes with a decline narrative in which positive momentum (as perceived by his protagonists) slows and/or shifts out of California after 1980.
Overall, the point to accent is that Dochuk's core research represents a major contribution, however much it occasionally presses against the narrative “clothing” in which its author packages it. One hopes that this excellent book will turn a tide of scholarly neglect of the roots of evangelical mobilization, while underlining the importance of this case for untangling the puzzles of US populism.
