From Bible Belt to Sunbelt

Most of the poor whites who left the South during the Depression and moved to California were Baptists. They became the bedrock for a new "Sunbelt" influence on American political culture. For Dochuk (history, Purdue Univ.), the key transition for this population of "Christ against Culture" white Protestants was a change in their self-identity, in which a pessimistic Old Testament narrative of exile was replaced by an optimistic quasi-Pauline sense of "errand" into the secular culture. These men and women proposed to bless an American society that they viewed as endangered by state collectivism and secularism. The result has been the "meld[ing] of traditionalism into an uncentered, unbounded religious culture of entrepreneurialism, experimentation, and engagement," whose high point for the participants was the presidency of Ronald Reagan. (The irony that Nancy Reagan used biblically forbidden astrology to set the President's daily schedule is not lost on Dochuck.) Gradually, the original worldly pessimism of the Baptists was dissolved in favor of "the more therapeutic and technological requisites of "Jesus, California style."