If the goal of so much of the political class was, as Senator James D. Phelan vowed in his 1920 reelection campaign, to “keep California white,” religion was a more nuanced (yet no less significant) arbiter of right-wing thought in the state’s early days. Certainly, the Southern and Midwestern settlers who came to California in the late 19th century—Ohioans and Indianans like Frank and Hannah Nixon, respectively, parents of Richard M.—brought with them the pieties, mores, and religion of the heartland. Hollywood itself, developed in the 1880s in parcels sold for $350 an acre, was mapped out as a planned Protestant community, packed with churches and free of vice. Additionally, the former Alta California harbored a Catholicism uniquely strong compared to many other sites of westward expansion. And while Evangelical Christianity certainly made its presence felt, as Sandra Sizer Frankiel writes, “traditional Protestantism evolved so differently [in California] that it may not be appropriate to speak of evangelicalism there as a distinctive and coherent system.” Rather than a homogeneous statewide narrative, “a diffuse California mythology arose, emphasizing the state’s uniqueness and offering a liberal religious outlook.”
Religious conservatives who wanted to find stable footing had to contend with this diffuse, liberal outlook: Aimee Semple McPherson—who, broadcasting from an Echo Park megachurch in the 1920s, would become a prototype for the first modern mass media televangelists—offers one especially notable demonstration of this split dynamic. A twice-divorced female leader of a racially integrated congregation, McPherson nonetheless welcomed 2,000 Klansmen to one 1932 revival, while also publishing the work of Kansan evangelist Gerald B. Winrod, the “Jayhawk Nazi.” (Alongside other, largely Californian extremists like Wesley Swift, Winrod helped shape the racist Christian Identity ideology.) At the same time, as Chris Lehmann recounted in 2011 in The Nation, “many of the white Southern migrants who resettled in Southern California either arrived as or evolved into fervid champions of the New Deal,” with progressive Evangelicals even going so far as to join the “Ham and Eggs” movement, a 1930s pressure campaign to secure a $30 per week pension for those over the age of 50. But if many in this new cohort had a progressive streak, others answered a more typically conservative call—finding themselves, as Lehmann borrows from historian Darren Dochuk, “burdened with the responsibility of evangelizing and civilizing, initially on the godless borderland of the western South, then in the dark, secular reaches of Southern California.”