CALIFORNIA: Home of Christians, Conservatives, and Capitalists

Disclaimer: Christianity is NOT conservatism. God created and institutes governments. These governments should install His morality, for it is good, right, and prosperous. Political conservatism has been a longtime ally to Christians and vice versa, though they are not fundamentally intertwined worldviews. A Christian can be a political conservative and vice versa, but there are plenty of godless conservatives and to a lesser degree, Christians with liberal political ideology. I speak about these two groups in a seemingly interchangeable way at times, but this is neither my intention nor conclusion.

California: Home of Christians, Conservatives, and Capitalists  

Welcome, I am glad you are here. Let’s play a game: I ask you which state in the Republic has more conservatives than any other state, and you Venmo me 50 bucks for every wrong answer (Dogecoin preferred though). If my math is right, I am about to make some solid cash, 2500 bucks a pop kind-of cash.

Welcome to California, home of the highest population of conservatives out of all 50 great American states. Over 6 million people voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. This isn’t a full-proof measurement, but it’s not bad either. Which state had the next highest number of total votes for DT? Ding ding ding, Texas, of course… with a whopping 5.8 million. Seriously, 5.8 million is a lot of conservatives in one place. Thank God for Texas, but there are still more conservatives in good-ol’ California. In fact, there are more conservatives in California than the entire population (liberals included) of Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Idaho, and West Virginia combined! Take me home, country roads!  Let’s thank those 5 states for their collective 18 electoral college votes. That is almost 7% of the necessary votes to win an election… talk about influence! 

“Ok, so you have the most conservatives currently, but it must be trending downward by the minute…”

Donald Trump scored more votes in the 2020 election in the state of California than any other Republican in the 21^st century (including Trump in 2016). I stopped my research at 2000, but based on population numbers overall, I would go so far as to say Donald Trump in 2020 scored more Republican votes in California than any other Republican ever has in California, which was a deep red state for decades. Yes, he even beat beloved Reagan (but seriously, that’s just due to population growth; Reagan was 100x the man and conservative Trump is).

“No way! Ben Shapiro AND his 63 employees left that God-forsaken place, along with almost every other conservative! Isn’t that state’s population crumbling entirely??”

I’d ask to play another game, but only the folks reading this in Vegas will probably want to play again. I’ll give you a freebie: The answer is no. In fact, since the states inception in 1850 it has grown more rapidly than any other state in the union every single year until the last decade. Even then, the growth continued until the earth shattering (thunder LIGHTNING thunder) population loss of 2020. The migration has made the state a darn near ghost town… One more round, and I’ll make it easier with multiple choice. How many people did the Golden State lose in 2020, which was the first year of overall population decline since it became a state in 1850?

1. 1 billion people (pinky to the mouth, of course) 
2. 1 trillion people (AOC’s desired number of people who receive money from the Covid stimulus package)
3. Okay, let’s get serious- At least 1 million, right? At least.
4. 71,000 people, AKA an overwhelming .0018% of the population
5. Just select D or send me more Dogecoin

“But the three and a half conservative news outlets on the face of the planet all said California is losing people hand over fist! Have you looked at U-Haul prices to leave that place??” 

“The one who states his case first seems right,
until the other comes and examines him.” Proverbs 18:17

This is a blog, so let me just explain this quickly: California Population is 39 million. Domestic migration has been for the last decade a loss of just shy of a million annually, while legal – yes, legal – immigration (Welcome to Stanford, UCLA, Google, Apple, and so on) has been a gain of a little over a million annually, with a near wash of births and deaths annually. Even if CA population was decreasing by 100s of 1000s, we are over 10 million people larger than the next biggest state in the country. Second place Texas would have to grow by 35% to catch up to us.

We are larger than the smallest 20 United States combined. That is almost half of the states in this Republic! 

 Some Californians would say 2 plus 2 doesn’t equal 4… I, along with millions of others, would disagree. 

“Okay, so population is steady, but businesses are leaving in droves!”

“Oh, which ones?”

“Tesla, HP… did I mention Ben Shapiro and his 63 employees?”

“Yes, thank you for the reminder though.” (For the record, we love The Daily Wire and have many leftist tears tumblers at our church)

Here’s the deal, Tesla didn’t really go anywhere, though Elon Musk did. I am thankful, because now that he is closer to Mark Cuban he may start taking DOGE at Tesla. HP Enterprises did move to Texas, but the larger segment and monetarily more valuable piece of the company, HP INC. is still headquartered in the Golden State. Alright, just for fun, go on your Robinhood or other trading app and type “California” in the search bar to see which businesses are still based here. My guess is you’ll recognize at least a few… a few hundred, that is… of the 800+ publically traded companies on there. Is California a good place to start a business and make money, you ask?

It is the long reigning champion of holding the “Gold Standard Business Start Up Title” of the world. 

“Stop exaggerating!” 

Another game? You should have money to play with all those tax savings if you’re in another state, so let’s go another round. Make every state in America a country and compare them to every other country on the face of God’s beautiful earth in terms of GDP (Growth Domestic Product, AKA monetary value of goods and services produced in a country, AKA big and small business production/success). Here are the top ten from 2019, which includes any prospective American States:

1. USA USA USA: 19.3 Trillion
2. China: 12 Trillion
3. Japan: 4.9 Trillion
4. Germany: 3.7 Trillion
5. California: 2.7 Trillion
6. United Kingdom: 2.6 Trillion
7. India: 2.6 Trillion
8. France: 2.6 Trillion
9. Brazil: 2.0 Trillion
10. Italy: 1.9 Trillion

California: Home of Christians, Conservatives, and Capitalist Cash… 

America is a significantly younger country than those other top 4, and California is remarkably younger than everyone on that list. This isn’t old money. It’s booming businesses and constant start-ups from tech to plumbers, restaurants to schools. It’s just Capitalism at its finest, and there is plenty more to go around! 

Alright, let’s get a bit more serious, though I am hoping you’re having as much fun as I am with all these games. Though I have spoken quite sarcastically, I am not lying or exaggerating in these numbers or conclusions. There are more conservatives in California than any other state, it’s the nation’s and arguably world’s best place to start a prosperous business, and the population is not shrinking in any meaningful way whatsoever.

Intermission: Go get some snacks, water, or just pause until tomorrow. We have been playing games, albeit truthful ones, but you really need to focus for the rest of this. The satire is over. This is a matter of life and death. 

Premise: California is the most influential state in the most influential Republic of states and countries by a landslide. 

If California continues to decline morally, legislatively, and politically, and simply loses its Christians and their salty influence, the entire country goes with it. California will not be out-influenced.

America is subsequently destroyed from within, and numerous countries pounce on the vulnerable, centuries-long powerhouse while we are down, leading to destruction from outside as well.

With the collapse of America comes the collapse of many other free market, liberty driven countries, including casualties of an untold number.

Conclusion: No one can afford to “lose” California. 

If California continues to decline morally, legislatively, and politically, and simply loses its Christians and their salty influence, the entire country goes with it. California will not be out-influenced.

Book length is more appropriate to adequately back this argument up with a lot of data, robust reasoning, and better persuasion, but just give me the blog length pitch and 5 years and maybe I’ll get that book out there. Do your research in the meantime. Research California’s history and its political influence over the last 100 years. Research global enemies, political strategy, political comebacks, etc.

The money of California alone equals more power and influence than any other state. 

The overall size of California, especially in a mob-justice society, leads to lots of influence over the rest of the country. Every state east of California feels this reality with its bluing cities and populations in once deep red seas, as California has many domestic migrants going outward. The mass numbers aren’t even the whole story though. Hollywood and every social media outlet (guess where they are all are headquartered…) influences the country and globe immensely, and they do so with increasing dirtiness. We can (and should) start conservative alternatives, but tweets in a vacuum will not change the mind of a single soul. 

Join me in some history. Do you know what the greatest landslide Republican presidential victory was? Of course you do; you’re a “true” conservative! 

Ronald Reagan in 1984. Google it, print out a big poster of it, and enjoy. 525 electoral votes to 13.

Second place landslide?

Ronald Reagan in 1980: 489 to 49.

Reagan won the presidential election after being the two term Governor of the Golden State. Is there a correlation between the greatest landslide victory in the country and the victor having created a deep red California, first? Yes, yes there is. California was the most influential state then in terms of money, media, population, and overall power, and the same is only more true now. 

Do you think if California was more conservative and if it sent out far more moderates (swing/on the fence votes) and Republicans to Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, that the 2020 presidential election would have concluded differently? Do you think there would be stronger conservative bases as opposed to decreasing ones in Texas and the mid-west, where many California migrants return to after their 5-10 years in the Golden State? Do you think it would lead to redder and redder pastures nationally? California is a discipleship factory for liberals, sending out “missionaries” by the droves, when it could be the same for conservatives as history plainly teaches us.

Conservatives have been leaving California for decades now, returning to their homes from 50 years prior, since before WW2 when California became the hub of weapon and military production for the Allied Powers. Some left because of the unbelievable equity they had in their homes, others left to retire elsewhere, and increasingly many have migrated due to the state trending more and more leftward. The effects of the power exchange in California is leading to a power exchange in the United States. You might think California is “lost,” but so did the liberals after nearly 3 decades of primarily Republican Governors through the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, leading to the greatest electoral college landslide loss in liberal history. Imagine how they felt after 1980… and then it only got worse in 1984! 

Here’s the difference though. The liberals got to work, while the conservatives became spineless, lazy, and morally decayed. From grass-roots efforts to big time funding, the Democratic party has outworked Republicans to take California and swing the nation into its increasingly debased morality. Listen to me, Christianity has no care for the Republican party over any other party, but when one party increasingly wants to slaughter children, make government the savior, and destroy the free market due to empirically baseless woke claims… you simply can’t be a voting Democrat as the Democrats have so decided to define themselves and be Christian. We find ourselves in dark times politically, because we find ourselves in dark times as Christ’s Church.

The Church is the pillar and buttress of the truth. The underlying premise to all this is that if the Church falls, everything else falls with it- and I mean everything. God destroys that which has lost all of its saltiness. It’s worthless. 

When the Church thinks it can sit back, only working to get its families to church and catechized, only working to get that building so it can have nice fellowship lunches, just trying to get good jobs and leave a financial inheritance for their grandchildren, and there is no fight for the neighborhood, local government (which God created and installs), and the morality of the land, then we are sowing the very deaths of our grandchildren. We can get them those few acres of the “American Dream,” but the darkness will find them. California’s moral death will find them, because all these people and states are just pawns fighting for their Father, the Evil One. We don’t fight against flesh and blood but principalities and rulers of darkness. If you think you can post up in a state that can secede or that civil war is our best future option, please go read a book on the Civil War, WW1, WW2, and guess again. Your worst enemy won’t be California when you try to secede, though you would lose that battle if it came to it. It will be communist China and Russia, chaotic North Korea, and a long list of others who know American soil is some of the most valuable on the planet. How many F-35 fighter jets or nuclear weapons does Texas, Idaho, Montana, Alabama, and the like have?  Your Sigs (personally a proud Sig owner) and high capacity assault rifles could hold down a farm against some anarchist, but not a real military, not even for 5 minutes. The nation cannot afford a civil war. We cannot afford the internal war, let alone the outside powers that would surely capitalize on the once-a-century opportunity to do so. 

Therefore, we cannot afford to lose the country to any more debased morality. We cannot afford to have a growing political party that finds it blasphemous to call a boy a boy, slaughters children by the millions and still isn’t satisfied, and values false woke ideology over facts. No one can afford to lose California. The nation can’t afford California’s millions of people to pour into its other states, all the while getting backfilled by highly intelligent and influential young international immigrants who become woke in 5-10 years. Then they decide that they, too, want to buy a house for half the price on some land east of CA, bringing with them their decade of morally bankrupt indoctrination from the not-so-golden state.

Please don’t misunderstand my earlier sarcasm for rose-colored glasses. California is a disgustingly dark land. We are richer and more powerful than any other state by far, but as a population we are doing our best to nominate fools to destroy it all and use it all for utter darkness. It’s a land of rampant sexual immorality, sodomy, murder, suppression of truth, and creation of new evils. Yet, it’s still the juggernaut among the 50 states, leading them all like sheep to the slaughter, some faster than others.

So where do we go from here?

We need to fight.  By “fight” I mean proclaim the Word of God and persuade every person in this state through word, deed, and funding of our civil responsibilities as creatures made in the image of God. We need to fight for the truth, the truth of God’s law written on the hearts of every person, and God’s Law revealed to us in His Word. Only we, by God’s grace and commission through the proclamation of the Word of God, can help the suppression of truth stop dead in its tracks. We need to fight for the proclamation of the Gospel, as God’s coming judgement for decades of wickedness is fast approaching millions here. Yet, if history is any indicator, God elected to save millions in California and many more across this nation. We need to fight at the polls, fight on the streets, fight at our work places, fight on any media platform, fight with and for our neighbors, fight wicked elected officials, fight for Christian education so that generations may rise up who fear the Lord our God and demolish the ideologies of our day, and fight in our homes and churches. 

We need the nation, and Christians specifically, to support, pray, and fund the fight. It is your fight, too. We are being fools if we are going to throw away the millions of Christians here, millions upon millions of impressionable, lost people, plus 6 million conservatives. We are likewise being fools if we think we can just pick them up and move them, regardless of how bad of a strategy that would be in the first place. This state isn’t fully “lost”. That is like a General seeing his greatest number of soldiers fighting on the front lines- and despite their decades of historic success, having plenty of resources available, and fighting for the most resource heavy and influential land out there, you just cut off the supply chain and let them perish. Your largest single grouping of soldiers anywhere in the world, rotting away over the next few decades, or if God is unfathomably merciful, winning the battle to your shame without your help. 

It is not the time to retreat, not at all. I don’t think we can actually ever afford to retreat, but now is certainly not the time, regardless. There is A LOT to work with and ground to gain. Hitler took over France, which possessed Europe’s finest military at the time, in a couple of weeks. Yet we don’t think that with the Word of God, the Spirit of God, a base of millions of Christians, millions more sympathetic conservatives, and a nation of millions upon millions more Christians and conservatives, we can start gaining ground in this state over the next couple decades? The presidential election numbers show an increase of a conservative base here, not a decrease. Almost every California statewide proposition in the 2020 election was won by conservatives. We are about to successfully recall our Governor, and the most recent two term mayor of San Diego, the country’s 8^th biggest city, is a Republican who won twice in a Democratic majority city. He has already said he will run in the recall election, and regardless of the outcome, he will run in the 2022 CA governor election. 

When Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966, he did so against Pat Brown who had been the reigning two term democratic governor. Brown was undoing decades of hard conservative work, and Reagan spoke of the current state of California as follows: “’The Great Society…’ is great ‘alright’: great in cost, great in waste, great in its swollen bureaucracy. And by those measures it is ‘greater’ every day!”

Darren Dochuk in his book “From Bible Belt to Sunbelt” notes the daily work of California Christians to transform California, and subsequently the nation, in decades past:

“By the early 1950’s transplanted southern [California] evangelicals were lobbying for ‘A New Age, Not a New Deal.’ By the mid-1960’s they had helped remake California politics, and within another decade they were looking for ways to spread their success eastward across the South. In 1980, roughly forty years after their first purposeful steps, southern evangelicals celebrated with fellow conservatives the election of their favored son Ronald Regan to the Oval Office” 

There is nothing new under the sun. We are fighting the same battles. These battles are not easy, they do not produce quick wins, and even once victory is gained the battle to maintain such victories becomes the everlasting need. The good news to this simple reality is that though California has been “won” by liberals for now, like anything else, without diligent maintenance it will be “lost” again to conservatives.

It is also important to understand that California’s loud voice comes from liberal elites more than the general population. The actual lay of the land is not as bad as many people paint it. To compare it to North Korea or China for the Christian is an immense disrespect to Christians in those areas, and it flows from a fundamentally flawed view of the balance of powers we have that they don’t. California is one of the worst states when it comes to honoring the Constitution, and yet it still bows to the many checks and balances, despite the current leadership’s attempts to executively supersede them. We have met indoors for many months as a church, directly across from a police station in a liberal part of the city, without ever even receiving an inquiry. We have had people preaching outside of Planned Parenthood, again in liberal parts of the city, for years, far more often receiving civil respect and assistance from police officers as opposed to any form of resistance. Last week one of our pastors, who is a full-time San Diego police officer, greeted the police officer on duty who was monitoring us at Planned Parenthood. This officer had no idea who was approaching him, as our pastor was in plain clothes and he did not announce that he is an officer as well.

Our pastor: “Hey, what do they have you here for?”

The officer, a brand new recruit two weeks out of phase training (which means his answer is the latest in California’s police code) responded: “I am here to protect your 1^st amendment right, sir.”

That’s a good police officer. Praise God for him and for those training him in America’s finest city.  

My point is- if we don’t have the courage to raise a family in California and the wisdom to handle its difficulties, then shame on us, because it’s still a free land filled with opportunity for Christians and conservatives. Even more so, I believe it’s a place we would have to fight to regain even if we were in a far worse situation.

Those in our church who have started businesses have been very successful. Anyone who purchased real estate at any point in California’s history, besides the last few years and the years of 2003-2007, would say that owning a home in California was one of the most lucrative things they ever did, and they likely did so with little more than normal first home buyer difficulties. To categorize the state’s real estate based off of San Jose, LA or even San Diego will lead to false conclusions. Currently in San Diego it is much harder to enter the market than it historically has been, but it can certainly still be done if we lower our materialistic standards for our first home purchase. Your dream home can come later, if that is part of the legacy you want to leave your children, but the legacy of the fight will be worth the loss of a bigger home on a bit more land in the immediate. Your material goals may be delayed, but if history tells us anything, even from a purely materialistic framework your lesser home in San Diego or LA will outpace price growth than almost anywhere else in the country over your 30-year mortgage by a landslide.

Conclusively, the followers of darkness have outworked us, Church. Not only have they turned the tide of the once conservative California through decades of diligent work, but they have falsely convinced conservatives elsewhere that this state has very few conservatives and that you will have to cowardly bend the knee to their agenda if you decide to come here. This is false on many fronts, though our window of opportunity is shrinking as the years go by. No one can afford for that window to be shut entirely, though. The moral decay of the land, both in California and America at large, will not stop until we repent and fight. There is no retreating in this fight. We fight until we die; we fight for life, liberty, and happiness- all of which are found in the Lord our God. We fight for the honor of His Holy Name. Shame on us for thinking California isn’t “winnable.” We serve the God who dwindles armies down to nothing, that He may receive all the glory when they destroy the enemy. California is not our main enemy or our prize, but the darkness it represents must be pushed back, lest it overtake the whole land we love. The whole land millions have died to preserve, both Christian martyrs fighting for the furthering of God’s Word, fighting to establish the religiously free land of America, as well as American soldiers fighting against evil embodied in men like Stalin and Hitler. 

In the providence of God, California is the queen in this great chess game. Therefore, we need to think wiser and work harder. We need to not only call the 6 million conservatives of California, millions of Christians, and millions more moderates to stand ground, but we must as a nation, as bishops, rooks, and knights, reinforce the troops so as to win the war- all for the glory of the King.