Jean Vandruff bookends Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, appearing in the first sentence of chapter one and the final sentence of the epilogue. If you have never heard of Jean Vandruff, you are not alone. He never found fame, though he earned battle honors in WWII, invented a small radio, and developed tract homes in the Los Angeles suburbs. Vandruff's journeys—from Oklahoma to California, and from the inner-city working class to the suburban middle class—typify the hundreds of “plain folk” narratives in this monograph. Migrants like Vandruff followed economic opportunity westward, but they brought their southern faith with them. In so doing they transformed southern California and presaged the rise of suburban evangelical conservatism around the nation. Their individual anonymity belied their significance. Indeed, Dochuk convincingly demonstrates that migrants like Vandruff were the primary agents in creating Ronald Reagan's America.

The book begins in the 1930s, when depression drove millions of southerners westward. These migrants came primarily from the states of the “western South”: Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. Dochuk's first three chapters identify three types of southerners who moved west: plain folk (like Vandruff), preachers, and entrepreneurs. The diffuse suburban geography of southern California suited these new migrants. Rather than cramming into downtown high-rises, plain folk re-created rural America in their new suburban enclaves. Preachers established new churches in these suburbs, and they began delivering short sermons on the radio, drawing in the auto-bound masses of greater Los Angeles. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs launched businesses and—importantly—colleges where they could spread the gospel of Christian faith and free market capitalism.

In fact, preaching the virtue of the free market (Dochuk calls it “a new gospel of wealth”) transformed Christianity in southern California. Removed from both the racial turmoil and poverty of the inner city, suburbanites melded “Jefferson and Jesus”—preaching the virtue of independent producers (Jefferson) and the importance of individual salvation (Jesus). As a result, former Huey Long populists and FDR Democrats became Barry Goldwater conservatives. Dochuk masterfully charts this complex transformation, showing how geography, economics, and political battles gradually turned working class southern migrants into middle class Sunbelt conservatives. Amidst newfound wealth and widespread fears of government intervention in the market, these new suburbanites found themselves flocking to the GOP. Vandruff, for instance, led the “Democrats for Eisenhower” in 1952, and conservative economists like Friedrich von Hayek began appearing at entrepreneurial Christian colleges like Pepperdine, spreading the message that Christianity went hand in hand with conservative economics.

More than most historians, Dochuk pays attention to interdenominational differences. For instance, Pentecostal minister Ralph Wilkerson (another Oklahoman) transformed the Melodyland Theater (across from Disneyland) into a church that sponsored interracial worship alongside healing ministries and a promise of “health and wealth.” These characteristics differentiated Melodyland from, say, J. Vernon McGee's Church of the Open Door (COD). McGee, a former Presbyterian and Texan, preached a southern-tinged evangelicalism, making COD less Hollywood glam and more down-home gospel. But even as Dochuk ferrets out theological and cultural differences among these churches, he makes sure readers see the similarities. Both Melodyland and COD catered to congregations who saw the answer to social problems in individual spiritual transformation. One of Melodyland's most frequent guest preachers, African-American minister E.V. Hill (another Texan), abandoned his “very liberal” Democratic positions for an outlook that “stressed personal salvation over political reconstruction” (287). In so doing, Hill drifted towards Republicans and became an exemplar of black conservatism.

Dochuk's treatment of Hill makes clear that seeing the “conservative counterrevolution” of the 1970s and 1980s as a racially motivated response to the civil rights movement is an incomplete picture of late-twentieth century conservatism. Hill was an anomaly—a former civil rights activist who became a poster child for the Moral Majority—yet he represented a strain of black Christianity that deserves the attention Dochuk gives it. Many African-American Christians felt uneasy about the increasing radicalism of the late 1960s. Most stayed away from Republicanism, especially as white southerners began flocking to the GOP in the late 1970s. But California's conservative transformation came earlier, allowing figures like Hill to embrace the creed of “Jesus and Jefferson.” Dochuk shows how the suburban politics of the Sunbelt allowed Californians (unlike white southerners) to defer engagement with civil rights until after Republicanism had taken deep root in the soil of southern California. The relative racial homogeneity of the suburbs produced a movement that comprised a vast majority of whites but also featured a rhetoric of colorblindness that would become essential as California conservatism spread across the nation.

Dochuk demonstrates that California was the crucible of modern evangelical conservatism, but he occasionally overstates the point. Southerners like Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell appear in the book as adoptive Californians—a designation that overstates their connection to the region. Moreover, Dochuk understates the contributions of non-Californians to national networks (such as Christian school organizations) that provided the foot soldiers of the Christian right. Daniel William's recent monograph God's Own Party (New York; Oxford University Press, 2010) shows the centrality of the Old South to the new Christian right. Dochuk, conversely, treats the late-1970s rise of southern figures like Falwell as something of anti-climax.

Yet Dochuk's focus on the Sunbelt has enabled him to produce the most compelling historical treatment of the Christian right to date. This bottom-up account, filled with rich detail about the relationships and local issues that spawned southern California conservatism, offers a textured narrative that avoids the hyperbole and hand wringing found in so many accounts of the Christian right. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt features vivid prose, strong organization, and extensive research. The narrative bounces effortlessly between ground-level anecdotes and complex analytical arguments. Most important, Dochuk features characters and institutions that do not appear in any other studies of the Christian right. In other words, Dochuk has made knowing Jean Vandruff's story essential to understanding the Christian right.