"Barbrook and Cameron’s critique of cyber-obsessed Golden State boosterism was prescient in many ways, as any long-suffering auditor of TED conference homilies or reader of the utopian prophecies of Wired magazine can attest. In a deeper sense, though, the hybrid character of this new ideology wasn’t as improbable or bizarre as the two critics supposed. California’s curious free-market orthodoxies are hardy offshoots of the classic fundamentalism of the religious variety that took root in Southern California in the early decades of the twentieth century. No less contradictory than the gospel truths of the California digerati, the dogmas of West Coast evangelicalism proved instrumental in acculturating an earlier generation of Jeffersonian golden dreamers to a life of abundance bolstered by government-driven subsidies and development policies that, over time, they came to despise with a righteous fury."
Chris Lehmann in The Nation reviews Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evengelical Conservatism and Matthew Avery Sutton's Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America.
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