This dissertation examines the contribution of grassroots, conservative religion, both in terms of ideological and institutional support, to the rise of the New Right in Southern California. Central to this study is the thesis that the conservative political culture of particular communities in Los Angeles County and Orange County, so conspicuous in the 1960s and 1980s, must be understood in terms of long-term developments stemming from the onset of World War II. Of particular concern will be the ways wartime migration of people from the southern and southwestern areas of the country to Southern California altered the religious, cultural and political climate of the region. Those who moved to the new suburban neighborhoods of Southern California during World War II and the Korean War often brought with them conservative value systems that were most clearly defined in religious terms - in theology, church activities, and notions of community life. These value systems encouraged a particular brand of politics, one that helped fuel various California-based populist movements ranging from the Townsend Pension Plan of the late 1930s and 1940s to the Ham and Eggs initiative of the mid-1940s. This early marriage of southern style religion and politics caused an initial fear among many native Californians that Southern California was being dixified. The mainstreaming of southern popular religion and culture and the celebration of plain-folk Americanism among white middle-class suburbanites, however, soon quelled such fears. Indeed, by the 1960s and early 1970s the ascendancy of such ideals was clearly evidenced in the way southern luminaries helped guide local conservative political movements against communism and expanding liberalism, movements personified by Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and other political champions of the right. In tracing the roots of modern conservatism to social and cultural shifts at mid-century, this dissertation seeks to address a number