Suburbs of Zion: The Rise of the Metropolitan South and the Making of Modern American Evangelicalism

“Suburbs of Zion” places the suburbanization of the South at the center of white evangelicals’ rise to political, economic, and cultural power in America between the New Deal and the Reagan era. In the 1930s, Southern Baptists and southern Pentecostals, the foci of this study, were primarily rural, poor, and scattered across the region’s agrarian hinterlands. By the 1980s, they were at the heights of influence in American life, boasting the largest evangelical churches, the highest-paid evangelical ministers and televangelists, and the Christian Right’s leading donors. This dissertation argues that Southern Baptists and southern Pentecostals’ rise in the decades in between began as the New Deal state set out to modernize the South in the 1940s and 1950s through agricultural reforms, wartime industrial investment, and housing policy. With Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta as vantage points, this project maps how these New Deal state initiatives drove the midcentury migration of Southern Baptists and Pentecostals out of the South’s rural underclass into the region’s emerging suburban middle class. As these transplants recalibrated their lives to the sprawling, segregated cityscapes of the postwar South, they developed a prosperity theology sacralizing their upward mobility, an apocalypticism drawing on racialized anxieties of the inner-city, and a “family values” ethos tied to the symbolic structure of the single-family home. These suburbanized spiritual intuitions – a shock-city spirituality – gelled into a self-conscious social movement in the 1970s as GOP operatives mobilized these evangelicals rightward via the infrastructure of megachurches, TV networks, and private schools they had built into southern suburbia over the prior half-century. “Suburbs of Zion” illuminates how the modernization and suburbanization of the South (processes underwritten by midcentury New Deal liberalism) inadvertently laid infrastructural groundwork for the late twentieth-century Christian Right, long before Jim Crow fell or southern white evangelicals began to register as Republicans. In tracing how core features of modern American evangelicalism coalesced in the streets of the metropolitan South, this dissertation reveals structural relationships between the political economy of the New Deal state, the mobilization of the Christian Right, and the lived experience of suburbanization in post-World War II America.