This is a terrific piece by a friend of mine, Darren Dochuk. Darren is an historian of American Christianity, which can sound pretty norm-core and boring, but it isn't. And Darren makes it especially interesting because he sees the connections between the stories he tells and larger patterns in American life. He's a master at this, but then again, in American history, the presence of Christianity has been a pretty unavoidable fact of historical significance, and so he's got a rich field to dig in, so to speak.
Consider his first book, From Bible Belt to Sun Belt. This work is a masterpiece of understanding how late-twentieth century conservative Christianity came to dominate the US's domestic politics. I won't restate his thesis--it's basically in the title--but the core story is how the migration from the South (and especially Texas and Oklahoma) to California in the 1930s and forward reshaped Western Republicanism, and from there reshaped the GOP across the entire United States.
His second book, Anointed With Oil, is something of a complement to the first, though it stands on its own two feet as well. Here he looks less at the "muscle" of the conservative Christians who remade American politics in the second half of the twentieth century, and more at the "fuel" for it--quite literally in fact, as his argument is that this remaking was significantly funded by wealth derived from oil riches that inundated the United States in the late 19th and early twentieth century. Studying institutionalists like the Rockefellers, committed to "vertical integration" and to establishmentarianism (and therefore to "mainline" Protestatism), he tracks their rise and struggle with the "wildcatter Christianity" of "oil independents" like the Pew brothers, whose recoil from the establishmentarianism of the Rockefellers was more than simply a matter of economics, but touched on politics and religion as well. The research project I co-run, the Project on Religion and its Publics, just did a roundtable about this; you can find his response to the pieces (with links to the initial pieces) here.
The book is truly impressive, in its details as much as in the sweep of the story it tells; it reminds me of nothing so much as one of those massive movies of the 1950s, like Giant or something--multi-generational epics of outsized personalities taking on global issues. Except in this case, it's all pretty much true. Now Dochuk is out with this new small piece in Politico Magazine on the Pew brothers--founders of Sun Oil and of the many Pew charitable foundations. It's very much worth your attention. And go from there to reading the book!
Another thing--much of the American historical guild has been pretty ham-handed at talking about the history of American religion. They left it as the preserve of seminary professors and people with a personal investment in the issues. That attitude has caused some damage, such as leading to works like Frances FitzGerald's The Evangelicals, a commercially successful and popular book but one that is based on thoroughly outmoded scholarship from the 1970s and 80s. It is scholars like Dochuk, Molly Worthen (whose Apostles of Reason is very fine), my colleagues at UVA Matthew Hedstrom and Kathleen Flake, and others--the people around Marie Griffith and Leigh Schmidt at the Danforth Center at Washington University are excellent--who will write the future histories that we all read. In fact, they've been writing them for some time. I recommend you seek them out.