From The Land Of Fruits & Nuts*

Yes, it started here, in the capital of Kansas & Iowa (by the Sea) too. Whatcha gonna do about it?

Most of these settlers, battered by the Dust Bowl, were drawn to the Los Angeles area by the jobs that came with the massive defense spending that accompanied and followed World War II, and were soon inhabiting America’s first major “sprawl” community. Neighborhood churches became a focal point for political activism, and a militant anticommunism become a near-universal creed.

[...]

But it is in the realm of politics where California’s Christian conservatives most significantly led the way. Whereas white Christians in the South didn’t bolt the Democratic Party until the 1960s, their brethren in California began leaving as far back as the 1940s and ’50s, Dochuck notes, thanks to the growing progressivism of California’s Democratic Party and its labor allies. There were widespread battles over school curricula and textbooks in California a good forty years before the Christian Coalition made school boards a prime target across the country. Dochuk also suggests that California’s political culture (up to and including the shock of the Watts riots of 1965) forced southern expats to abandon overt racism and pioneer the sort of race-is-not-an-issue rhetoric and aggressive recruitment of like-minded African American and Latino ministers, a strategy that southern conservatives took longer to adopt.

By the end of the 1950s, much of what was later known as the Christian right was already in place in Southern California, with very active evangelical ministers and lay people avidly backing conservative cultural and economic causes and assisting in a conservative takeover of the state’s Republican Party. It’s no wonder that the area was a hotbed of support for Barry Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964, which in turn was the basis for Ronald Reagan’s successful gubernatorial run in 1966.

It is, we sadly suppose, in their natures to be two-faced, & there's nothing to be done about it.

Throughout Dochuk’s book, conservative evangelicals regularly alternate between the defensive reaction of the “righteous remnant” to the alleged tyranny of secular humanists and big government, and self-assured claims that they represented a “moral majority” that was simply exercising the right to self-government. This ambiguity about the basic nature of America has become a regular feature not only of the Christian right but also of today’s big conservative grassroots movement (which heavily overlaps in membership with the Christian right), the Tea Party movement.

It may well be that this ambivalence was born in California, the wonderland and nightmare of so many of the “plain folk” and leaders Dochuk writes about in this ultimately fascinating portrait of the early Christian right.

What a fucking shit-hole of filthy hypocrisy. And we live here (if you can call it living).

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*Alternatively, someone gave the continent a good shaking & everything loose rolled to Southern California.