137. California Dreamin: The Missions Movement to the 1848 Gold Rush

This one goes out to all our pals in California. And anyone who really likes gold.

The early half of the 19th century was a massive time of western expansion in the United States. One of the most fascinating movements among this era was the explosive migration of young men flooding into California, hoping to make it rich off of gold.

But what was the church doing during this time? Well, sending missionaries of course! Join us (as we are joined by special guest Dr. Taylor Mendoza) as we discuss a scintillating time in American history coupled by a unique glimpse into how churches approached evangelism in new frontiers.

Also let us know if you'll be joining the annual Taylor Convention this year. Word is that Taylor Treadway will be a keynote speaker doing his speech, "I'm not a girl, but my name is Taylor." Don't miss it! 

Transcript

John Simon, MT (00:00.61)
Hey everybody, welcome to Church History for Chumps. My name is John Simon and my my my do my eyes deceive me? I happen to be seeing two tailors at the time. What's going on here?

Taylor Treadway (00:11.502)
There's two well, one of them is much better looking than the other. I'll let you guys decide.

John Simon, MT (00:15.318)
This is very true. This is ver I think it speaks for itself. we have the original the the the the coolest cat on the block, mister Taylor Treadway. Taylor, hello.

Taylor Treadway (00:27.086)
What's up, man?

John Simon, MT (00:28.802)
And then we have the esteemed, the educated, the renowned, the illustrious. Dr. Taylor Mendoza, thank you, sir, for joining us today.

Taylor Treadway (00:32.001)
Illustrious.

Taylor Treadway (00:37.55)
Yes.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (00:39.222)
It's good to be here guys. Thanks for inviting me on.

John Simon, MT (00:41.302)
Of course, of course. Well, I mean y so you guys kinda have the natural connection. I'm assuming it was probably at one of the annual Taylor Taylors only meetups that happen in California.

Taylor Treadway (00:53.624)
Well, that doesn't happen until August, but No, so Taylor and I met at the Andrew Fuller conference that we had invited everybody to. And we were sitting next to each other at lunch and just having a grand old time and I looked at him and I said, Hey, I just met you and this is crazy. But come on our podcast something.

John Simon, MT (00:57.098)
okay. All right. All right.

John Simon, MT (01:04.47)
wow. Okay, very cool.

John Simon, MT (01:16.206)
Mm.

John Simon, MT (01:20.568)
See, guys, that's how easy it is. The last guy we had on our podcast, Taylor just met him at McDonald's. Like he didn't even know anything. He Taylor literally gave him a book and said, come on our show if you read this. That's how easy it is. That scribe's not a good one. Not a good one. No, Tyler Tyler's Tyler's the homie. That was a fun episode. so Taylor.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (01:20.598)
Yeah, was probably some Chinese food, I think.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (01:32.64)
Ha

Taylor Treadway (01:33.016)
Yeah, we didn't we didn't publish that episode. I was gonna say don't dog Tyler Sanders like that.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (01:35.894)
Thank

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (01:41.086)
Yeah, yeah.

John Simon, MT (01:48.146)
gosh, it's gonna be this is gonna become really confusing. Actually, I'll just say doctor. Doc Doctor Mendoza Taylor told me that you recently just finished school. Is that is that true?

Taylor Treadway (01:50.424)
Well, why don't we we just do yeah, does do Doctor Mendoza?

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (02:00.576)
That's right. I graduated this last fall, or no, sorry, last fall, this May from Southern Seminary. Thank you.

John Simon, MT (02:06.242)
Congratulations. Congratulations. Yeah. tell us a little about about yourself, where you're from, what you've studied. yeah. Tell tell tell us how it feels to be to share a name with such an inferior being in this in this very room. just tell us about yourself, Doctor.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (02:20.394)
Yeah.

Yeah, well I gotta say though, what's funny is that growing up I always had a bunch of tailors that I knew, but they were always girls. Like I never knew like any guy tailors, know what I mean? I think I knew like one growing up and he played baseball with me, but I think I had like four girl tailors in my class, so like every year it was like, boy tailor, know, do so and so. So it's good to know another boy tailor out there.

John Simon, MT (02:32.654)
Mm.

Taylor Treadway (02:34.637)
Me too, dog. Me too.

Taylor Treadway (02:49.399)
That's right.

John Simon, MT (02:50.572)
Love it. Love kindred spirits.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (02:51.574)
There's actually a lot less of us out there than I thought. Yeah, a little bit about myself. Yeah, so I'm born and raised here in California. Really only three cities, Newport, Beach, Irvine, and Corona. And the joke I always tell my parents is like, you just kept moving farther and farther away from the beach. Corona's not bad, it's still 45 minutes away, but Newport Beach is like right there. So I started attending an EV free church.

Taylor Treadway (03:10.913)
No

John Simon, MT (03:11.167)
Ha ha ha

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (03:21.526)
through my family here in Corona and that was in 1997. So was only like four years old, four or five years old. And yeah, we, grew up here at this church and I've been here, never left. So I'm actually pastoring in the same church that I grew up in. We duly aligned with the SBC in 2017, think, 2017, 2018. And so we're a EV free church and an SBC church.

So yeah, I just grew up at this church. It was a wonderful church. We had a lot of people that were influenced by Talbot and Master Seminary. They had a lot of guys that poured me poured into me from those backgrounds. So I kind of had this call to ministry at a young age and wanted to be a pastor someday. So I thought, you know, the dream is to go to seminary. And so when I graduated, I think I applied to Biola.

and California Baptist University. are the two places I wanted to go. I wanted to stay close by, stay at my church. And I think I signed paperwork saying I was going to go to Biola, and...

He's now our lead pastor, but dr. Anthony shoe He he called me and said hey you put on your application here. You want to go into ministry? We have a special program for that the applied theology program. I said, I honestly wasn't interested at all and I remember I was sitting in my parents house because he said there's like scholarship money involved I said I'll sign me up Yeah, let me know what do I have to do? know kind of thing so I interviewed and I ended up going to CBU and did their

John Simon, MT (04:53.262)
tell me more.

Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (05:01.176)
theology program absolutely loved it. I in love with the Dr. Chris Morgan and Dr. Anthony Schutte there and was mentored by them. Long story short, didn't know where I was gonna go for seminary. I was set to go to Ted's in Deerfield Illinois and I didn't feel right leaving my church.

But Gateway, wasn't Gateway yet, it still Golden Gate, it was on its way down, it was right at that time. my only other choice was really Talbot, and I realized I'm gonna have to sell my arm and leg in order to make that work. So Master Seminary became the choice, and so I ended up going to Masters for my MDiv, and I actually loved it. I was a little, to be honest, a little hesitant at first, because my theological convictions had changed, and they weren't Master Seminary, to be honest.

John Simon, MT (05:36.11)
Mm.

John Simon, MT (05:52.952)
Sure. Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (05:54.136)
I was a little nervous and was like, much am going to fit in? And I absolutely loved it. There's just emphasis on the Puritans, emphasis on holiness, expository preaching, the whole bit. I loved it.

And then I graduated from there and knew I wanted to do a doctorate. I wanted to do it, something in American history. And I wanted to do it here in the United States. I'd looked in Europe, but I didn't want to leave my church. At this point, I've been pastoring already here for a while. so I went to Southern, did their modular program, and I started fall of 2020. And maybe we can get into it a little bit later, but because of archival work and transcription work that I had to do, it took me a lot longer.

to get it done and so then just graduated. So I've been in my church that whole time and I was hired at age 15 as a janitor and then the joke is I just kind of kept moving my way up. There you go, that's right. So then the youth pastor, an intern, then the youth pastor, or director, then the youth pastor, and now an associate pastor, which means whatever they need me to do I do.

John Simon, MT (06:48.92)
There's hope for you too, lowly janitor. Yeah.

Taylor Treadway (06:51.823)
That's so.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (07:03.242)
But yeah, that's kind of a little bit. I am married. I've been married for 10 years. We actually had our 10 year wedding anniversary this last Friday. yeah, so it was a lot of fun. And then we have just one child. Her name's Raelyn and she's three years old. So yeah, a little bit of that.

John Simon, MT (07:03.605)
Yeah, very nice.

Taylor Treadway (07:10.676)
Wow.

John Simon, MT (07:19.274)
Awesome, awesome. You like stuttered for a second after you said you said we were married for ten years and we have ten and I thought you were gonna be like, We have actually had ten children. Which I know some masters guys and I'm like, No, that checks out, you know, that quiver, they keep that quiver full, you know what I'm saying? I you never know, hey

Taylor Treadway (07:19.898)
That's awesome.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (07:29.937)
Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah.

Taylor Treadway (07:36.44)
We're we're reformed. We're not that reformed.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (07:37.686)
Yeah, yeah, I'll say all my guys in the PhD program they all had at least four kids, you know, I'm like, all right

Taylor Treadway (07:45.915)
Wow.

John Simon, MT (07:46.273)
yeah. yeah. Yeah. I I've got a good good buddy who is he's not a master's guy, I'm not sure it's he's he's an expositors guy, which is like the Florida branch, but still like kind of from the same MacArthuran line, if you could say that. but yeah, he got married shoot when we were like

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (07:55.368)
Okay. Yeah.

John Simon, MT (08:06.71)
Night w we were we were 19, he was 20, he got married, and gosh, he's lapped me on kids so bad. He's got like six kids. Like I'm never gonna catch up. There's not a chance I'm gonna catch up. kind of resent him for it, honestly. But you know, I'm sure you understand. yeah, yeah. But but that's awesome. So a pastor, so you've been serving as a pastor for a number of years there as well, too, right? Okay.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (08:20.81)
Yeah, dude. They multiply, dude. It's crazy.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (08:31.606)
Yeah, yeah, I've done ministry now here. I mean since I was 18 so it's all 13 years now 14 years

Taylor Treadway (08:37.71)
How how was that going through the program the program as we were saying earlier? How how was it going through the program also pastoring? 'Cause were you full time youth pastor and doing PhD?

John Simon, MT (08:43.064)
Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (08:52.628)
Yeah, by that point I was already like pastor of adults and students. I don't they gave me some title that was a little bit outside of just youth ministry. It was a lot. But the thing is is that I've always worked full-time and gone to school full-time. So I've never done anything different. So I don't know what it's like to be honest to be working full-time and not be in school full-time either. So...

Taylor Treadway (09:08.834)
Mm-hmm.

Taylor Treadway (09:17.422)
Heard that.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (09:18.934)
It's a lot of work, that's for sure. But I just, you my wife and I just both knew like, if you're gonna live in California, you gotta, we have to work. and he had to work a lot in order for gonna make it work. So, we both just knew we wanted to be with each other. So she worked full time. She was a manager at Chick-fil-A here in Corona for about 10 years.

Taylor Treadway (09:24.59)
That's yeah.

John Simon, MT (09:27.918)
Mm.

Taylor Treadway (09:36.45)
Mm.

John Simon, MT (09:36.57)
nice.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (09:36.694)
and she worked there. So, it was funny because I would go to Chick-fil-A and use her meal credit, right, to get food. And then I remember the first day, like after she finished, that someone asked me, like, to pay for my Chick-fil-A meal. And they're like, oh, yo, that'd be like $15.79 or something like that. And I remember, like, looking at them as if I was offended because I was like, wait, no one's asked me in like 10 years to pay for, a Chick-fil-A meal. I'm like, great, now I want to just work with Chick-fil-A more. I can't use her food credit.

John Simon, MT (10:02.144)
What do you mean?

Taylor Treadway (10:07.012)
That's a testament that's so you've eaten a lot of Chick fil A and you still go back.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (10:11.22)
Yes, yeah. Well, mostly because my wife. I was an in-and-out guy forever, you know, I still am. So that's my first lover.

Taylor Treadway (10:17.71)
Yes.

John Simon, MT (10:17.74)
Yeah, yeah. That's fair. That's fair. okay. Well, Doctor Taylor, tell us a little about your kind of like your studies. I'm sure that's gonna segue us well into our topic for today. Which I'm very excited to say. I'm coming in with a completely f clean slate because Taylor told me once and I promptly forgot. But then I was like, you know what? I love a movie when I haven't seen any trailers, so I'm super stoked about whatever it is you have to say. I know it's gonna be really good. Yes, I can't wait. I'm so excited.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (10:43.38)
good and I'll surprise you there. It's good. Yeah, so I did, I think the program's degree is called Historical Theological Studies.

Southern and you have to pick church history theology. I picked church history and I started under dr. Wilsey Who I actually didn't know that well prior to going to southern but he's a great American history scholar American church history scholar and heavily involved in like Christian nationalism like scholarship right now too and Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's Whoa, he's for us

Taylor Treadway (11:13.496)
He he's against it just to clarify. Just to you know, you gotta

John Simon, MT (11:18.006)
I was gonna just let that one sit for a second. I was curious. Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (11:21.364)
He's for patriotism, but not Christian nationalism. yeah. yeah, like, I do that at my church, by the way, too. So, yeah, I wrote in Christian nationalism, and then don't tell them what I think. then I'll go up to preach or something afterwards. But, Yeah, so I studied with him, and... Honestly, the way I got into my projects...

John Simon, MT (11:24.632)
No, I was gonna let I was gonna let that simmer.

Taylor Treadway (11:33.742)
Yeah.

Taylor Treadway (11:37.37)
Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (11:45.364)
because I wrote on evangelical missionaries to California during the Gold Rush period. And that's probably about 75 % of the dissertation. The other 25 % is all on prior to the Gold Rush. Like, why did the evangelicals show up then and not earlier or something like that? And so the biggest question I had was that, you know, growing up, I know...

I know how evangelicals or the Puritans arrived here in North America. thinking Mayflower, Pilgrim, I'm thinking of those kind of things. But how did it end up in California? No one's ever told me that. So I was kind curious. So that kind of it up and I found way more than I thought. So that kind of got me rolling. So the dissertation is trying to answer the question.

how did evangelicalism arrive in California? And the answer is missions work during the gold rush. And so then the rest of the dissertation is on what did they think about California and then what they do. Gold rush society, maybe we can get that in a little bit later, but it's crazy. There's a reason why there's a lot, it makes great books and great movies, that kind of thing.

I just, you I had no idea that there were evangelicals even involved during that time. So that's how I got into it. You guys can tell me where you guys want to go next from there, but that's how I got started.

John Simon, MT (13:13.71)
Sure. Yeah. Well the first question that comes to mind for me is, would you say the missionaries to the gold rush were more successful than the missionaries to the myrrh and frankincense rushes?

Taylor Treadway (13:25.85)
my boo.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (13:26.134)
Yeah, well, that's like, was like, we're pranking that, it's good. Well, you know what's funny though? You know what's funny? Is that at first I was like, is that a serious question? Wait, oh, wait. That's good, that's good. I love that, I love that, that's good. You know what's funny though, is that also at the same time, when I'm thinking about these missionaries, Dr. Wills asked me that, not the same way you asked me, but the same question. And I remember saying to him, like, I really don't know. Like, it's, they're just trying to survive.

John Simon, MT (13:36.28)
Gotta listen to more episodes, man. Sorry.

John Simon, MT (13:51.598)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (13:54.198)
And from some standards, yeah, they were successful. And other standards, they completely flopped, man. I mean, in large part just because everybody was showing up to California just to get rich. They did not care about spiritual things, most of them.

John Simon, MT (13:59.087)
Mm.

John Simon, MT (14:06.414)
That's fascinating. Cause I mean, I I was just watching it's this is serious now. I'm I'm serious, John now. so I I was just watching a really interesting documentary about kind of the history of San Francisco. And it seems like a lot of parts of California like were pretty unsettled before the gold rush. So people kind of think, you know, people, you know, prospectors going with their little pans to sift for gold. But like this was a massive migration event, right? Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (14:34.102)
Huge, huge, yeah. so, yeah, prior, I basically found out that California is pretty undeveloped. The only places that it is developed is where the Roman Catholic missions are. And people who grew up in California, know about the 21 Franciscan missions in California. That's where the civilization is, right, put that in quotes. But after 1848, it's a mad dash.

John Simon, MT (14:48.427)
Interesting.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (15:02.102)
just to get into California, primarily through San Francisco. Southern California remains undeveloped until about the 1870s, 1880s, some more. yeah, in 1848, they call it, I have a whole section on it in there, but they call it the Great Coincidence of 1848. it's James Marshall finds gold in the American River.

John Simon, MT (15:05.134)
Sure.

John Simon, MT (15:09.602)
Okay.

John Simon, MT (15:17.688)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (15:25.638)
And within nine days, Nicholas Trist signs the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ends the Mexican-American War down in Mexico within nine days. So the treaty annexes California to the United States. And it's nine days after California is revealed to be one of the richest places on planet Earth at the time. So there's kind of this what if question. it didn't get out yet. It took like three months for the gold, you know,

John Simon, MT (15:47.01)
Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (15:54.538)
Discovery to get out people wonder if Mexico would have tried to keep something of maybe maybe they would have cut California in half or something like that like try and keep some of it because If they knew that much gold they were sitting on you know So they call it the great coincidence because all of a sudden it's like everybody in the world is like we got to go to California and it's part of the United States now, so like within a week period ten days

John Simon, MT (16:05.228)
If they knew how valuable it would be. Yeah.

John Simon, MT (16:16.578)
Mm-hmm.

Taylor Treadway (16:17.572)
Wow.

John Simon, MT (16:20.098)
That's definitely one of those like huge what ifs of history, right? Cause you gotta imagine that quite a quite a few things would be different if Mexico was sitting on that many natural resources, right? Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (16:31.542)
Absolutely. Yeah, had to like look at this, you know, someone said like 1852 that was the banner year for California gold, know, they're saying oh, it's like 65 million is how much they either producing it doesn't really mean anything to me, know today, but when you put it in this perspective in just that year alone, California produced more gold than the entire world's gold mines had produced in the 1700s. So we're talking like

John Simon, MT (16:45.806)
Mm-hmm.

John Simon, MT (16:57.178)
my gosh.

Taylor Treadway (16:57.806)
Wow.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (16:59.604)
I mean, part of it's the technological advancements, right? So California is just at this time where steam power has taken off, canals, all of that has, and then hydraulic mining has started to take off. So you can mass produce technologically advanced mines and things like that. But to say that much gold is being produced is incredible.

There's one story of this guy saying like the San Francisco Mint was processing so much gold that like the gold was coming out of the smoke stacks and Like they sent roofers to like all the blocks because the roofs had like gilded rooftops And they had to like sweep the gold off to like reprocess it because they wasn't been able to take it out. There's a lot dude. It's so much

Taylor Treadway (17:33.4)
Wow.

John Simon, MT (17:33.53)
My

John Simon, MT (17:39.011)
Mm-hmm.

That is insane. Yeah. So when so okay. So I am I'm sure this this the answer to this question probably depends on time period. But like I'm some guy living in Oklahoma, and I'm I'm like, there's a gold rush happening. Now

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (17:49.599)
Wow.

John Simon, MT (18:03.296)
Like the the common picture, and this is probably like a pop culture thing, is like you go out there, you find your little spot, and then you just you just kinda do your own thing. Or are there like companies that are there that I'm gonna try to get a job for? Like how are people what is the process like for the average person going out to to make it rich on the rush?

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (18:24.342)
Yeah, every single person going has gold fever and gold fever is I mean like one I think one ministers he was so disappointed because half his church left, you know, because they're going to the gold rush. I think he's like a Rhode Island or something like that. It's like, yeah, and they're like on a boat the next day.

John Simon, MT (18:29.102)
Yeah.

John Simon, MT (18:36.206)
Yeah. my god, he was not even close. He was super far away and they were still like, that's crazy. Man.

Taylor Treadway (18:38.099)
Dr. Taylor Mendoza (18:46.934)
He's like, it's like the cholera, he says. He goes, it's like this disease that sweeps through a whole community and wipes us out, you know, is what he says. And honestly, Goldfever, it's amazing. I mean, everybody's journal and diaries, these sermons, even like songs people are writing. It's the same idea. It's this singular idea that if I go to California, I can make it rich.

John Simon, MT (19:11.18)
Right. Right.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (19:11.668)
And it's like a contagion, it spreads everywhere. So that's actually true. The average person thought, if I go, I could strike it rich, and I'll come back a hero. And they didn't know the spiritual ramifications of that. I like to say to people that a lot of them deconstructed, they just left their faith behind.

John Simon, MT (19:18.688)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Taylor Treadway (19:30.21)
Mm.

John Simon, MT (19:30.539)
Wow. Okay.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (19:31.402)
Some of them de-churched. just, hey, you know, I'm glad you're doing that here, pastor, you know, but I didn't come to California to go to church. I came here get rich. That was it. And I'm going back home. You know, so they still believers, but they de-churched. then, you know, mean, immigration was from all over the world was incredible to the point where a lot of people were saying, like, you're going to have to learn a new language just to move to California. I mean, you're in the United States, but, you know, so many Chinese are showing up. There's so many Hispanics, you know, things like that. So a lot

of it is they just go because they think they're gonna make it rich. Most of them don't even make it there. So if you travel over land you're looking at a six to eight month trip. That's the whole Oregon Trail. Yeah, the train, the train, yeah the railroad didn't get done till 1848 or 1868, And so this is afterwards. The fastest way was by steam power.

John Simon, MT (20:07.735)
Wow.

John Simon, MT (20:12.226)
This is pre trains, I'm guessing, right? So there's no

John Simon, MT (20:19.371)
Okay. Okay.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (20:25.982)
And you had the route was something like New York and Boston to New Orleans, New Orleans down to Panama. This is before the Panama Canal. So you got out boat there and you walked across or got on some alpaca or something like that and then got on a new boat on the other side where the canal would end technically today. And then you took that steamboat to Honolulu and then ended up in San Francisco.

Taylor Treadway (20:34.851)
Right.

Taylor Treadway (20:50.584)
And how long was that journey?

John Simon, MT (20:50.958)
Gosh.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (20:52.894)
the best steamboats and you didn't get stopped in any of the ports for too long, maybe four months. Which is actually, that's fast, the food lacks in the period though.

Taylor Treadway (20:58.778)
Jeez. And that was that's what I was thinking. How much did that cost them to do that?

John Simon, MT (20:59.426)
And I'm guessing that's probably pretty expensive too, right?

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (21:05.982)
Like, so you're talking like people are giving up most of their life savings just to make the trip.

John Simon, MT (21:10.435)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (21:12.702)
And it's kind of one way. It's not like buying a two-way ticket. So it's like, I'm going one way and I'm just hoping that I get gold there and I could pay for my stuff on the way back and I have something to bring home to my family. So most people who go, they don't strike it rich. The ones who make the most amount of money are not people who even found gold. It was those who went to California to start a business.

John Simon, MT (21:36.174)
Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (21:36.298)
and those are the ones that made the money. And most miners would join with some type of joint stock mining company, know, and travel with a band, you know, there. The missionaries would go with other missionaries. So if I find out a Methodist is going, I'm going to hang out with that guy because there's not very many of us there, you know, so they would hang out together. So.

Taylor Treadway (21:39.652)
that

John Simon, MT (21:45.87)
Mm-hmm.

John Simon, MT (21:54.349)
Was there was it more common for men to go by themselves than it was for entire families to uproot? Okay.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (22:03.102)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so up until about 1855, so Gold Rush, Gold discovered it beginning 1848. The 49ers, Ryan, that's the mass migration from the East Coast. All into about 1855. Nine out of 10 people in the Gold Rush are men. Yeah. Most of them are married and they're mostly young, but they left their families behind.

John Simon, MT (22:22.103)
wow. Okay. Yeah.

Taylor Treadway (22:22.209)
Wow.

Mm-hmm.

John Simon, MT (22:29.272)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (22:29.75)
So, by 1855, whole family start moving out and you have, mean, when I say everybody from around the world, you get everybody from around the world migrating from South America, China, Europe.

Taylor Treadway (22:29.891)
So

John Simon, MT (22:42.296)
See that right there tells me plenty about just how awful it had to be living in a place where it's nothing but like wiveless dudes trying to get really rich living without any women around. Like that probably stinks. There's a bunch of like brothels and strip clubs. Like that that sounds awful.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (22:47.926)
I'm sorry.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (22:56.585)
Yeah, dude.

Taylor Treadway (22:57.826)
S well yeah, that's what I was wondering because so so I are you familiar with Bisbee? Yeah, yeah, I'm I would imagine that you came across so are you laughing at the Bisbee reference, John?

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (23:00.214)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (23:07.734)
Yeah, a little bit.

John Simon, MT (23:13.102)
I just I'm I really wanna know where you're going with this. No, I'm I'm

Taylor Treadway (23:15.842)
You don't know. John doesn't know. Bisbe the cap copper capital of the world around the same time that this was going on. And so yeah, yeah. And so you I kind of you know, we've done enough tours there and talked to enough people. You the the vibe there was bad. Like it was moral degeneracy because it was just men coming out to get rich. And so the women were

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (23:16.214)
Thank

John Simon, MT (23:24.721)
I didn't know that.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (23:39.029)
Yeah.

John Simon, MT (23:42.127)
Well, that's what I'm saying. Like, mine towns, you know, they build around the mine. It's mostly it's not really like big homes or big big neighborhoods that you're building for the family. They're like dorms you're building for single guys. But mine towns are usually pretty small. This is this seems like a gigantic operation. Yeah.

Taylor Treadway (23:53.506)
Right.

Taylor Treadway (24:03.458)
And s well, I was gonna say so so the ministers arrive when and they arrive to essentially a bunch of degenerates that are just greedy and trying to find gold.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (24:20.817)
Yeah, so it's weird so like California and I think this is important for just California's place in the United States California is what we call a contact zone. So it's the meeting place And the reason I say that is because from like the 1820s to 1848 you have the whole Pacific world and Evangelicals are heavily involved in Hawaii or the sandwich islands at the time is what they're called

And that's a whole other fascinating story how that, Hawaii and California are very closely connected during this time. I don't even know, I'm assuming that because the islands are close by and they're called Sandwiches, I don't even know.

Taylor Treadway (24:50.082)
Is it 'cause they made sandwiches?

John Simon, MT (24:50.638)
Mm.

John Simon, MT (24:56.822)
It's it's 'cause there were three islands, Taylor, and two the two ones were big and the one was flat. That I don't know if that's true. Again, I'd I lie a lot on this show.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (25:06.166)
I know. I just remember the first time I studied it was like, sandwich islands, where the heck is that? And then I oh, the whole Hawaiian islands. So yeah, you have that going on. And then you have this whole push westward, like the whole manifest destiny thing, American West movement. And then you have the whole Roman Catholic scenario going on in California. And right when that great coincidence happens, the Pacific world and the American West meet.

Taylor Treadway (25:11.084)
So yeah.

John Simon, MT (25:12.31)
Hawaii. Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (25:35.862)
At the same time Rome Catholicism is at its all-time low for the last 200 years They had been in California for 200 years In the same I'm trying to remember the same month that the colonies were signing the Declaration of Independence Was the same month that they were? Building their mission Dolores, which was their last mission in San Francisco So to give you kind of a parallel what's going on on each side of the United States, I guess modern-day United States

John Simon, MT (25:43.246)
Mm-hmm.

John Simon, MT (25:56.917)
Interesting.

John Simon, MT (26:03.214)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (26:03.862)
But so from that, that whole convergence there, all the home missionary societies, even the foreign missionary societies are saying, why aren't we sending people there? I mean, there's so many people going and it's now like the meeting place for like the whole Pacific world. We've been dreaming about reaching China with the gospel and we've been involved in the Hawaiian islands for the last 30 years. Why aren't we going to California? That's kind of the question. And when they get there, yeah.

Taylor Treadway (26:26.778)
That's so Baptist to be like the whole the the Chinese are coming to us. Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (26:31.606)
Yeah, that's so true. But dude, one of the Baptists goes, the guy tells him, this is Osgood Church Wheeler, he was a pastor in Jersey City, and he was doing a great job at, you know, pastoring his church, and the guy says, an American Baptist, he says, you you need to go to California, I think you're the best choice. He prays about it, talks about it with his wife for like two weeks, and he's like, okay, I think we should go, and...

They don't give him like a big parade or anything like that and say, hey, I'm so glad you're going. The guy who asked him to go says, all right, I'm going to pray for you, but I'm going to warn you, California is the darkest spot on planet Earth. And he said, it's worse than China. For Americans at that point, that's saying a lot, know, kind of thing. So not good. But they went and.

Taylor Treadway (27:09.185)
my gosh.

John Simon, MT (27:18.072)
Was it for the exact reasons we've been talking about that it's just a bunch of stinky wifeless guys just debaucherizing?

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (27:25.514)
Well, yeah, there's part of it. You know, a big part of it is that they really do want to see the gospel reaching people. And when they find out, I mean, the immigration numbers are off the charts. We hadn't seen in the United States this kind of immigration to this point. And when they find out, one Methodist preacher, he says, California is the world in miniature. And he's right.

John Simon, MT (27:27.96)
Sure.

Taylor Treadway (27:44.911)
Mm.

John Simon, MT (27:51.03)
Mm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (27:52.022)
At that time, it is the most cosmopolitan place in the world at that time. It wouldn't be 30 years later. The rest of world is starting to do the same thing. But for its time, it's ahead of the game. so a lot of them are really thinking, California is not a home mission work. It's like foreign mission work. So for some of them, they really wanted to go and get the gospel to California. For others, they're thinking, we need to make California American.

because we have the United States on the East Coast, but isn't our vision like the whole continent? So some of them are a little more nationalistic. And then there's another whole group, which I think find most fascinating. It's eschatologically driven. So they think that California is like the major stepping stone to fulfilling the Great Commission. So a lot of them are post-millennial and they think...

John Simon, MT (28:47.99)
wow. Okay.

Taylor Treadway (28:50.306)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (28:52.202)
that California is going to be the headquarters to reaching the Pacific world, which I said includes China and India and the Hawaiian Islands and even Australia. So for them, China is the end game. If they can get China, they think they can end world, finish world evangelization. And California is the major stepping stone for that, the gateway to the Orient is what they call it. So for some of them, it's like, this is it. We got to win here, because if we win here, we'll be able to win there.

John Simon, MT (29:16.504)
Yeah.

John Simon, MT (29:21.836)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (29:22.614)
So it's all kind of mixed together.

Taylor Treadway (29:23.066)
So for the guys spreading kind the more nationalistic guys, that sounds like like it I don't know, like that sounds late for that. Cause that attitude was a lot more prominent, at least we saw that when we were, you know, looking at like missions to the Indians. That was some of them were minded in that, but so they were was that a common sentiment at the time?

Of like we need to go bring Christian cr Christianity to these people and civilize them.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (29:59.286)
Yeah, it would be, I mean, that's one of the dominant views up until about the 1910s, actually. So, yeah, so you're living in a period where, well, like prior to all that, Christian nationalism looks more like Puritan covenantalism, right? Like we're the chosen people of God, the chosen nation, the new Israel, right? That kind of fades a little bit at this point, and now it's a manifest destiny thing. So, and the idea that...

Taylor Treadway (30:03.61)
okay. Wow.

John Simon, MT (30:05.24)
Dang.

Taylor Treadway (30:17.262)
Yeah.

John Simon, MT (30:17.612)
City on a hill.

Taylor Treadway (30:23.67)
Amer America's not Zion anymore.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (30:26.624)
So yeah, it isn't it isn't, but the thing is it's like, I say it's more of an optimistic attempt to say if we really are the chosen people of God, then we need to be the ones evangelizing the world. And so we need to be the ones spreading American civilization too. You know, to be fair to them though too, when you really read them closely, they really do care about the gospel first.

Taylor Treadway (30:40.666)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (30:54.47)
And they just, this is the problem, they assume that if you get the gospel in any culture, put that in the blender, out pops the British or the American system. Right? Like they think that that is the result of this, which is a type of nationalism, think about it. But it is interesting that if I just sat down and had a conversation with them, they would probably just say like, no, we just, want to get the gospel out. They just assume though that

John Simon, MT (31:04.745)
Right. Right.

John Simon, MT (31:12.792)
Mm-hmm.

John Simon, MT (31:22.05)
Right.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (31:23.574)
you the gospel is gonna make it, you know those things. I mean it's important to know like we didn't invite, we didn't use the word culture yet, you know, so Franz Boas and his students, he was a well-known scholar, he's the guy that kind of popularized the term culture and that wasn't until the 1900s. So prior to that, this is a pre-critical world where they don't use terminology like, like that's a different culture.

Taylor Treadway (31:26.25)
Mm.

John Simon, MT (31:30.904)
Hmm.

John Simon, MT (31:50.158)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (31:50.678)
So for them, it doesn't even dawn on them.

John Simon, MT (31:54.499)
Yeah. And I mean it it makes sense. I mean, like, Taylor and I, we've been going through the Crusades for shoot six months at this point. Yeah, for a long time. And I think like even then, like there is a link that isn't really talked about of faith and what your faith looks like in the context that you're around, to where like

Taylor Treadway (32:00.111)
Way too long.

John Simon, MT (32:17.078)
Yeah, you don't really think, well I'm a Christian, but I'm a Latin Christian. You think like, No, I'm a Christian and what makes me Latin is an expression of my faith. Therefore, someone else, if they want to really live out their faith, will also look Latin or will also look Byzantine. So I think it's the same kind of sentiment being shared. Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (32:35.99)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it changes into like a messianic interventionism around World War I, so like 1910. That's when the civilization thing kind of goes away. And it's more about like the United States exists. We're now messianic. And our job is to intervene and save the world. And if that means we have to lay down our own lives like Christ did for other nations, then we'll do so.

John Simon, MT (32:42.382)
Mm-hmm.

John Simon, MT (32:54.228)
Interesting.

John Simon, MT (32:59.116)
Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (33:00.084)
That's where that changes, about 1898 with the Spanish War. during this time, it's all about, we're going to get the continent. Let's make sure we're the chosen people of God. And that's from east to west coast.

John Simon, MT (33:03.596)
Man, that is

Taylor Treadway (33:08.922)
S those three groups that you described, you know, you have the more baptistic missionaries, pro right, you have the nationalistic and then you have the eschatologically minded guys. Which ones got over there and had the most success?

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (33:27.926)
Yeah, so this is amazing to me. So I think this is where the triumph comes in. So there were zero churches before the gold was discovered. Not a single church in California. By the time the Civil War starts in 1861, you have hundreds of churches. And...

Taylor Treadway (33:45.166)
Wow.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (33:46.654)
To me, I look at that and I go, it's part of California's very fast development. know, speed has been embedded in California's culture. And then we just exported that everywhere else. But speed.

John Simon, MT (33:51.502)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (34:00.414)
I think is developed there in the culture, at least amongst these missionaries, I mean, they're planting churches like crazy. So the, the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians do decently. The Baptists probably would have been more successful if they had better finances. They really struggled. The SBC especially struggled at raising up men to go to California in large part because they saw it as valuable, but they just, couldn't raise the finances at the time. And, but above all, the method of

John Simon, MT (34:26.966)
Hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (34:30.378)
were by far the most successful, about 120 something churches or something like that. And they were so, so smart in the way they did it too. like one story that you guys might find interesting is that...

know, cost of living is already high in California because everybody's moving there. I'm like, great, nothing's changed. And they can't buy land, you know, to even build a church, let alone even get the materials to build one. So these two Methodists, they have this idea that they're going to get

somebody, the guy, one of the guy's churches back home to prefabricate a church building and they like build a church back in Baltimore, then they tear it down and then they put it on a steamboat and it goes all the way to California. And the idea was that like when they get there they were gonna send it up to like I think in Sacramento or something like that and they were gonna just have a pop-up church, you know, that was gonna be their first functioning church. Well, it took him a long time to do that whole project, of course. So one of the guys there, he's

Realizing that there's so many ships coming into the San Francisco Bay I mean sometimes you would get there and you would just be stuck in the bay waiting to dock for like a good two months before you Terrible talk about like 91 feet freeway traffic

Taylor Treadway (35:46.186)
What

John Simon, MT (35:46.432)
my god, that's crazy.

Yeah.

Taylor Treadway (35:52.698)
Dude I'm jumping off and swimming ashore at that point.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (35:56.886)
Literally. So sometimes you just get that and then the problem was is that they would dock their boats, everybody would get off and captains wouldn't even have enough, they wouldn't have enough sailors to get out of the bay because they would just run to the gold mines. So they dock there and then the ships are just sitting there at these parking spots as it were.

And so this guy, one of the pastors, just says, well, why don't I just buy one of these ships? No one's using it. So he buys the ship. It's permanently docked because no one's using it. And it becomes like a church. He builds a church on the boat. And it becomes like a Siemens Bethel where someone had done it in Boston, something like that. And so they come. And his Baltimore church, it's prefabricated, shows up. He's like, oh, don't need that anymore. And they send it up to Sacramento for another Methodist guy to use.

John Simon, MT (36:28.738)
That's genius.

Taylor Treadway (36:30.266)
That's very

John Simon, MT (36:43.163)
my god, dude, come on. They're crushing it.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (36:44.746)
The Methodists are so good at innovating and they understood California's culture already at the beginning to just make it happen, you know, so everybody else was, you know, much slower at figuring those things out. The Methodists figured it out much quicker than we did.

John Simon, MT (36:51.95)
Mm-hmm.

John Simon, MT (36:59.202)
Yeah. Man.

Taylor Treadway (37:00.61)
And what what years were your f was your project focused on?

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (37:05.75)
So I did two chapters between like 1820s and 1848 and then three chapters just on the 1848 to 1861 period. yeah, and basically the discovery of gold to the start of the Civil War.

Taylor Treadway (37:21.686)
Okay. Well, 'cause I was wondering if the SBC couldn't raise the funds because of the Civil War, but that I guess that hadn't happened yet. Hey, good for the Methodists so. Look at them.

John Simon, MT (37:21.709)
Okay.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (37:27.424)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's part of it. Yeah.

John Simon, MT (37:34.198)
Was there a pretty even spread? Cause I mean you you mentioned the Civil War made me realize holy smokes, we really are on the heels of us a a terrible time in our country. Was there pretty even representation of northern and southern missionaries coming out for this?

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (37:52.474)
That's a good question. so most most people who had the money and who were who liked travel were New England New Englanders so Most of them are Congregationalist and Presbyterians or American Baptists, know from the from or even Methodists from the north Baltimore Boston, New York area And that's a large part because southerners

John Simon, MT (38:01.581)
Yeah.

Okay.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (38:19.37)
They weren't into travel, early travel. They're not gonna get on a steamboat. They're not gonna leave the plantation farm life, to be honest. And so for a lot of them, they don't feel like they wanna do that. There's some good scholarship that was written in the 80s on the same time period. And they basically say that the whole mission is about transplanting New England values into California. And that's the whole period. I think that's mostly right. The problem with that though is that they completely ignore a few major Southerners that do go and are very influential.

John Simon, MT (38:25.422)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (38:49.374)
have the same type of missiology as the northerners do. And so it's not just a New Englandism.

Taylor Treadway (38:52.61)
Mm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (38:55.67)
It's more than that. So one guy's name's, his name's William Anderson Scott. He was an old school Presbyterian, but he was born and raised in Tennessee. He went to Princeton. He knew, you know, the Charles Haas, BB Warfield types. He went down to New Orleans and was a missionary in New Orleans because he knew French really well. And he was speaking to natives there who also knew French.

Taylor Treadway (39:09.764)
Yep.

John Simon, MT (39:10.008)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (39:19.638)
Then he went up to the Hermitage estate in Tennessee, which people know their American history They know that the Hermitage estate was owned by Andrew Jackson at that point was the outgoing president and so he was the pastor of the Hermitage Church on Andrew Jackson's estate So he was a really close friend with Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay and James Polk

And he got asked to be a pastor in New Orleans. I think it was the largest Presbyterian church in New Orleans. And New Orleans was the stopping ground for all missionaries and everybody traveling from the East Coast on their way to California. So he got to know all those California culture and things like that. And he goes to California and he's a very, very influential, very good preacher, but he's hated there. Absolutely hated.

John Simon, MT (39:48.728)
Wow.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (40:09.328)
he's got southern sympathies there the guys are trying to make a new england he he stands up against the vigilante committees which is basically you know a bunch of batmans from the dark night you know trying to bring order to san francisco and he says that person shouldn't do that and they they burn him in effigy in the plaza and they think he's got all the southern senate sympathies for the civil war so he he leaves because the

Taylor Treadway (40:20.602)
Mm.

John Simon, MT (40:22.878)
Interesting. Yeah.

John Simon, MT (40:34.412)
That's so interesting.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (40:35.924)
He goes to London and then Paris and finally comes back in 1868, just spends the rest of his life in California. But he's heavily influential and he's a, I think he named like three waterfalls in the Yosemite Valley that people don't really normally know that, but like he was pretty influential here in California and he was Southern, fully Southern guy. So he's an interesting character, but he won.

John Simon, MT (40:50.19)
Mm-hmm.

Taylor Treadway (40:56.781)
Wow.

John Simon, MT (41:00.578)
That's really cool. Would I almost huh I almost hesitate to answer the to ask this question because it feels so reductive. So I'll I'll say it like would you say that the New England transplant like culture transplanting did contribute to the Christian California culture kind of shaping to be more northeast flavored than south flavored over time? Yeah.

Taylor Treadway (41:01.028)
Do you

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (41:28.948)
I think so, yeah. Part of it is again, they just outnumber the Southerners. But the other part of it is that the New Anglers have a very strong...

John Simon, MT (41:33.475)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (41:39.062)
belief in a Christian America, to be honest. know, so they believe that can happen. So they go to California to do just that. And the Southerners don't as much. You know, I talk about John Lewis Shuck. He was an SBC missionary. He was in China for 20 years. His wife, Henrietta Hall, died. And I think he came back in 1853, but he planted a Chinese speaking church because he knew Chinese. And his church, claims to have a

about 250, 280 members, but his normal attendance was over 500, which in those days was a huge church. And I haven't found any records of any church being any bigger. this man planted a Chinese speaking church in Sacramento, fully Chinese speaking. He preached in Chinese and it was probably the largest church in this time period. And...

Taylor Treadway (42:14.969)
Wow.

John Simon, MT (42:17.272)
Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (42:33.962)
People don't talk about him, but he was also somebody who was willing to defend the Chinese who were being mistreated heavily.

Taylor Treadway (42:41.028)
Good. So that's really interesting, 'cause even today, you know, kind of the joke is the Chinese get off the plane and become Baptist, right? Like so apparently, apparently even 150 years ago, they got off the boat and became Baptists. So that's a that's amazing. Yeah, I guess my my question was similar to John's, but when I went up to San Francisco, I realized that there's a very it's very high church. and I wonder if

John Simon, MT (42:42.029)
Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (42:51.775)
Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (42:57.014)
Yeah, right away. So, yeah.

Taylor Treadway (43:10.296)
That is because that tradition g goes all the way back to kind of that New England flavor of high church that I mean it's as high church as like Protestants get, if you know what I mean. But yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (43:18.228)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, they really, one of the guys said, the whole mission here in California is to make California the Massachusetts of the Pacific. So everything that made up Mass, they thought Massachusetts was the country, but everything that made Massachusetts or Boston, Boston, they wanted that to happen in California. It didn't happen because...

John Simon, MT (43:23.404)
If you're not an Anglican.

Taylor Treadway (43:33.154)
Mm.

John Simon, MT (43:33.747)
Mm. Yeah.

John Simon, MT (43:42.755)
Hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (43:44.918)
When they got there, they're trying to make that happen while everybody and their mom is showing up. It's California at the same time So they can't yeah, they can't there's no infrastructure to build they're building with these immigrants, which makes it very pluralistic and Not as Christian. They thought it would be

Taylor Treadway (43:51.041)
Yeah.

John Simon, MT (43:51.438)
Mm-hmm.

Taylor Treadway (44:01.284)
So so overall you would say the missionaries were successful in the sense of hundreds of churches were planted that seemed to be doing well, but like ultimately, I guess per capita it wasn't a lot.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (44:15.702)
Yeah, they would have thought it was a failure in large part because they, again, they wanted to make it American. They wanted it to be civilized, so they succeeded there, they felt like. But to make it Christian, they didn't feel like they were really that successful at that. And so it didn't look like Massachusetts. And that's important, I think, for a lot of people because that means California...

Taylor Treadway (44:30.754)
Mm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (44:38.27)
Has never been like the rest of the united states like there never was a point in california's history Maybe you get maybe closer to the reagan years. You maybe have an exception there But california is not a place in the united states that where the dominant view is it's christian, you know kind of thing It's because it's just it just never

John Simon, MT (44:55.734)
Yeah, that's a good point.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (45:00.24)
Maybe the New Englanders needed to be there longer before the gold was discovered. But they would have never gotten there, I don't think, anyways without the gold being discovered. So it's an interesting history.

Taylor Treadway (45:05.986)
Mm-hmm.

John Simon, MT (45:09.772)
Yeah, it makes me wonder, like, ca it seems like it seems interesting to me that during this time where California was kind of in the early ages of forming an identity, there was still never any homogenization there. Cause they've got lots of Mexicans who live there, they've got i immigrants coming from big Asian countries, they've got they've got Western settlers coming over. Like, there's gonna be so much cultural

mixing that happens, like it it makes sense why there's never quite a a single strand, like a single like Christian lineage running through it. It's always gonna be a little complicated.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (45:50.334)
Yeah, yeah, and I didn't make it into the dissertation, but the biggest thing that happens is that when the Civil War starts, all the missionaries leave because they lose their funding. All the missionary organizations are like, well, we're not, it's just whatever's happening on the East Coast with the Civil War. And only those who are self-sustaining stay.

Taylor Treadway (45:59.963)
yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (46:12.554)
But what that does though is that opens the door for other religions to take center stage. And so you have all these religions that the Chinese are bringing over that start to grow up there. Roman Catholicism makes a huge comeback. They try to push really hard. We never outpaced, the evangelicals never outpaced the Roman Catholics, and that's important to say too. We said we planted hundreds of churches. The Roman Catholics doubled that in that gold rush period.

John Simon, MT (46:31.649)
Interesting.

Taylor Treadway (46:38.178)
Mm.

John Simon, MT (46:38.52)
Wow.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (46:39.062)
And then we forget too that the Mormons really wanted California. So the Mormons are very active on the West Coast. Everybody from Utah, all the from San Bernardino up to San Francisco. And this was really interesting, but there was a guy who was a Unitarian named Thomas Starr King who came out to California in 1861. He's a nationalist.

He's a unionist, right? He loves the North, so he's against slavery, he's for the North, he's for Lincoln, but he's also a Unitarian, so he's not evangelical, and he loves California's nature, its landscape. Everybody kind of admitted, like, wow, California's a beautiful place. I mean, some of these pastors would go up to Lake Tahoe or Yosemite, and they would just enjoy it as a retreat. I can't imagine going to Lake Tahoe during this time where it's not the zoo that it is today, you know, kind of thing, just like,

Completely uninhabited, just beauty, you know? But he kind of amalgamates...

like an American unionism, Unitarianism, and then like a Transcendental like spiritualism together. And he becomes the most popular preacher in California. So in DC, you know, I forgot the name of the building, but we have each state has like two statutes that they give in the in DC. We had two from California. It was Father Unipero Serra. It was the Franciscan monk who was in charge of all the 21 Roman Catholic missions. And then our second statue for a long time was

John Simon, MT (47:50.956)
Wow.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (48:10.484)
Thomas Star King. was this Unitarian preacher. And so the two most significant people we thought for California, think until they changed it to Reagan and others, were two religious folks. But one of them was Roman Catholic and the other one was some weird Californian exceptional spiritualism. I don't know what to call it. It became its own thing. And to me it feels new agey. Yeah, feels very new agey. Yeah, exactly.

John Simon, MT (48:11.907)
Mm-hmm.

John Simon, MT (48:30.956)
Yeah, yeah. Kinda like a new age like a new age prototype in a sense, yeah. Which when we think of California today feels a lot more California than an evangelical preacher.

Taylor Treadway (48:37.497)
Yeah, no.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (48:43.572)
Yeah, so I think he just synthesized what he was seeing in California's culture. And to your point earlier, they wanted their own identity. What's California apart from Boston, in New York, and the South, and Texas even? And they didn't want it. Texas started turning into this extension of the Bible Belt, and they didn't want that. They didn't want to be an extension of the Bible Belt, and they didn't want to be an extension of Massachusetts. So what are we going to be? We're different.

John Simon, MT (48:53.837)
Mm-hmm.

Taylor Treadway (48:56.857)
Wow.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (49:09.674)
And there's some exceptions in there, some pride that they have. They've been through a lot if they stayed through the 1850s too, so makes sense to me.

John Simon, MT (49:16.77)
That is that is really fascinating. I know this was probably pretty early in the stages of trying to be ecumenical, but what was the relationship like between Catholic and Protestant, like missionaries or yeah, I don't know. Were they just kind of like we're doing our own thing, we're not on the same page and we're not gonna pretend that we are? Or yeah, what did that look like?

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (49:40.532)
Yeah, so in the United States there's a huge anti-Catholic push and a lot of scholars have looked into California and what they want to see is they want to see did anti-Catholicism actually

John Simon, MT (49:45.997)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (49:56.374)
Was it a thing in California just like the rest of the United States? And the answer to that question is actually no. So there never really was an anti-Catholicism in California in the same way as the ethos, right? It came up in different ways and it's like recycled in different ways over the last 150 years or whatever. So those missionaries came with kind of a suspicion to Catholicism.

John Simon, MT (50:06.926)
Sure, for sure.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (50:23.284)
They didn't go by the way originally. They wanted to go in the 1820s to California. And they sent a missionary, the ABCFM sent a missionary from Hawaii there to find a headquarters. And when he showed up, all he found were the other Roman Catholic missions. And so he was like, dude, there's no room for us here. And he actually writes in his journal that like the religion of California is Roman Catholic.

John Simon, MT (50:37.603)
Hmm.

John Simon, MT (50:45.557)
Interesting. Yeah.

Taylor Treadway (50:45.602)
Mm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (50:46.398)
And so the ABCFM, they meet like two years later in their main meeting in Boston. And they had like a three page report and they just say, we're not going to California. And they say the influence of Roman Catholicism there would make it impossible for us to start a mission. So that closes the door and they're like, we're not going to California until the gold is discovered. they're like, all right, we got to go now.

So they kind of went with a little bit of, all right, is it going to be really Roman Catholic when we show up? And they get there and they find out that they're willing to partner with anybody who can help them bring civilization to California, including Roman Catholics. So you have a lot of interdenominational partnerships. have a lot of, they partner with the Jews or the Lutherans, even the Anglicans or Episcopalians, in large part because there's so few of them. And,

John Simon, MT (51:20.546)
Yeah. Mm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (51:37.098)
There is one Methodist.

William Taylor was his name. He showed up and his family told him that you're never gonna meet another Methodist in California Like you're gonna be a loser if you go and you're never gonna meet another one there and he was determined to prove them wrong And when he got there he found out like there might be one Methodist family in San Francisco and they're like out the outskirts of town and so he goes out there and He meets his family and they bring him in have dinner and they talk the whole night. He thinks he's talking to Methodists

But at the end, he's about to walk out the door and he finds out they were Campbellites instead. And he was like, he wrote in his journal like, I, yeah, my family's right. I have not found a single Methodist in this whole thing. Yeah, but he knew a Baptist and he knew a Congregationalist. So he's like, I guess those are my friends, know? hopefully that answers the question, but.

Taylor Treadway (52:14.01)
no.

John Simon, MT (52:18.99)
This is the closest I could get.

Taylor Treadway (52:20.61)
Wow.

John Simon, MT (52:26.434)
Yeah.

Taylor Treadway (52:27.934)
Wow. no, that was so what I was wondering, maybe we could like close out as we always like to say, Taylor, that we're gonna land the plane. So we're like, you know, get your seats in the upright position and all that. So I would think maybe we could do some rapid fire questions with like quick answers. So what was are you planning on trying to get your dissertation published? Because this sounds like you did something actually pretty unique.

John Simon, MT (52:31.618)
No, that's great.

Taylor Treadway (52:57.412)
Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (52:58.644)
Yeah, yes, they've asked me to, the supervisor asked me to work on publications. So we'll see, I'm gonna revise it and hopefully within this next year I can find a publisher that's gonna pick it up. yeah.

Taylor Treadway (53:09.846)
So cool. Okay. Second rapid fire. What was the hardest part of the dissertation?

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (53:17.718)
Definitely the archive work. There's nothing together, put together, so...

Taylor Treadway (53:21.806)
Which ex explain explain for the listeners what archive work is.

John Simon, MT (53:24.502)
Mm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (53:28.244)
Yeah, so in this case, there is no book out there that has a collection of their sermons, diaries, journals, letters, nothing like that. archive work means, in this case, I had to travel to a bunch of different archives. The biggest one I went to was the Berkeley Library, the Bancroft Library at Cal Berkeley.

and they just pull out a trunkload of stuff and I open, it's amazing, like you open up these folders and I'm staring at like their original handwritten documents from these missionaries. I went to one place and they had like his marriage, like the marriage records for the church, like handwritten, and then they pulled out these shoes and I'm like, there's shoes in this, like in this box? And they're like, yeah, those are the shoes that he wore when he got married. And I was like, okay. Like, it's like, so there's like, they're just bringing me loads of

stuff and I'm just sifting through letters that I can't read because they're in bad shape you know someone tried to transcribe it but it's unpublished and is just sitting there you know so most of it is handwritten in cursive and I had to take hundreds of photos and then just spend hours and asking others to help me read this cursive transcribe it and then from there interpret it and put it all together for a dissertation so

Taylor Treadway (54:18.254)
Hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (54:44.598)
That's what it looked like. And it was, that slowed me down for another whole year or so. It was fun though.

Taylor Treadway (54:49.358)
Did you did you transcribe it well enough that you could publish like a you know, collections from blah blah blah? Whatever whatever you wanna call it.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (54:58.262)
Yeah, I've thought about them a lot. Yeah, an editorial, like a collection of their work. Yeah, I don't know who would publish it because so much of the...

publication now is not interested in white evangelicals, to be honest, from New England, in California. So that's part of the challenge here. But I do think there could be an opportunity there. people love reading like Gold Rush diaries. So in my mind, I'm thinking, well, why not publish some of their sermons together? Some of them are fascinating, really fascinating. That'd be good for pastors, I think, to read even.

Taylor Treadway (55:24.973)
Yeah.

John Simon, MT (55:37.614)
Mm-hmm.

Taylor Treadway (55:38.36)
I know the evangelical academic world is mostly obsessed with the eighteenth century, you know, nineteenth century's out, but stuff comes in and out of vogue, right? So I I would I you know, I hope one day maybe you're old by the time it happens, but you know, that's really cool.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (55:55.141)
Here you go.

John Simon, MT (55:55.887)
Well the beautiful thing about any journal is like it tells you about the person writing it, but it also tells you about the the place they're in when they're writing about it. And like what was so interesting to me about this conversation was it shows so much about the place of where these missionaries were, just like theologically, sociologically, like, you know, but also like it says so much about what this like

amorphous blob of California was at this time and what it was gradually growing into to what we see today. And I think all that's really fascinating.

Taylor Treadway (56:31.214)
Well yeah, that's what's fascinating to me is it just I feel like there's this is a unique time in human history. Yeah. Like nothing really looks like this and hasn't looked like this.

John Simon, MT (56:41.526)
That's a that's a good point. Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (56:43.294)
No, yeah, I like to tell people that the missionaries, the evangelicals in California during this period are late to one party, but they also help start a new one. So they're doing everything that they learned from the first half of the 19th century. So everything that like those New Englanders were taught at Andover Theological Seminary, the missions movement, all of that, they're just pulling from that. But yet at the same time, they're in a brand new context.

Taylor Treadway (56:51.897)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (57:07.454)
And that context is so new, it prefigures all the immigration issues of the 1870s and 1880s, even all up to World War I. So to me, if I'm writing a Mark Knoll turning points in American church history kind of thing, I see this as a major turning point for the whole nation. terms of evangelical...

John Simon, MT (57:26.765)
Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (57:30.934)
presence throughout the whole nation. it's the first time they made it all the to the far west coast. So that'd be a huge thing to think about.

John Simon, MT (57:37.837)
Yeah. I do have one plain landing question which I think I think you'll enjoy. you know, you're an academic, clearly have a soft spot for the for the educational side of things. You're also a pastor, clearly have a heart for ministry, for the people, for the flock.

In all your course of studying this, what was like the pastoral spark you had that was like, this is something that I'm gathering from this time in church history that has really spoken a profound word that could be relevant today, whether it's to missionaries, whether it's to Californians, whether it's to the people in your church? Yeah, what what was that for you?

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (58:20.468)
Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, the biggest thing for me is that it's hard not to be romantic about doing ministry in California when you're studying people doing ministry in California, you know, during this period. And so I think the biggest thing here is that I love their vision for California.

And I see this more and more, especially with conservative reform evangelicals. We wanna go back to Texas or Tennessee, and those places are great, no problem with that. But I don't know about you guys, but we have a lot of people who leave North Point and they go back east. There's other cost of living issues and things like that too. But I just get the sense that a lot of evangelicals are afraid to be in California.

There's a stereotype on California, and to me I see it as a huge opportunity. And so I was just captured by their love for this state and the desire to preach the gospel there.

I tell people all the time now, said, there's room for Daniels and Esthers and there's room for Ezra's and Nehemiah's. If you're going to move back east and you want to rebuild the walls and try to do something that we think we lost here in the United States, that's okay. You can go back to Israel and you can do that kind of thing. That's what Ezra and Nehemiah did. But California is not Ezra and Nehemiah ministry. It's going to be Daniel and Esther ministry. And these missionaries really got that. And so my encouragement to my church people

Taylor Treadway (59:44.514)
Hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (59:50.332)
myself and I hope others will catch this too is that they they have a vision just for California and there's a reason why California is still you know what fifth or sixth largest economy in the world you know it's like in between Japan and England like we're still pretty significant you know you can talk about businesses moving out but we still have a lot to give and there's a lot of that we could influence just by being here as Christians so

Taylor Treadway (01:00:04.29)
Right.

John Simon, MT (01:00:16.558)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (01:00:17.376)
That's the biggest thing that I think I found.

John Simon, MT (01:00:19.426)
Very nice. Well said. Well said. Dr. Taylor Mendoza, thank you so much. This was this was a great conversation. And I I don't know what else you can talk about this impressively, but if you figure it out, we'll have you back at some point because this was a blast. Maybe write another dissertation. four years from now, we'll we'll give you a call, you know?

Taylor Treadway (01:00:21.305)
That's great.

Dude, thank you.

Taylor Treadway (01:00:36.45)
Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (01:00:38.334)
Yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (01:00:42.774)
And Taylor was right dude, I feel like we scratched the surface I was like shoot we didn't even touch most of it

John Simon, MT (01:00:47.348)
So much more. I could tell. I could tell. There is so much more, which I which I love. Absolutely. Taylor, is there is there any is there anything that you could point our listeners to if they wanted to dig deeper into this? obviously we talked about getting your dissertation published, but prior to that, is there anything that really blessed you and your research that we could share with our listeners?

Taylor Treadway (01:00:47.616)
No, yeah.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (01:00:51.328)
Thanks for having me guys, it's awesome.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (01:01:12.18)
Yeah, so the there's really isn't that much there's some other books out there that People can look at there's one. I forgot the name. It's a religion in society in california by lori mathley kip I think is her name She wrote one that's pretty well written. So if people are interested in just california history and evangelicals and that'd be a great place I hope to get this published. So hopefully that will be helpful I did like a seminar at my church where I I went for like two hours or something like that and we had like I made like a

John Simon, MT (01:01:24.206)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (01:01:42.324)
night and I walked through like all these stories and then gave like seven or eight discipleship lessons. Our church is hopefully gonna post that soon and you know if people want to do that maybe I'll send it you guys and you could put in the show notes or something like that. Other than that there's not much else and my hope is is that people hear more about it. So thanks for asking.

John Simon, MT (01:01:55.628)
Yeah, please do.

Taylor Treadway (01:01:56.974)
Yes.

John Simon, MT (01:01:59.233)
Okay.

Very cool. All right. Well, thank you, brother. We appreciate you, man. Thanks for coming on and leading us in a riveting conversation. And and thank you, dear listener, dear dear member of Chump Nation. Thank you for supporting us. Thank you for all that you do. If yeah, if you'd like to show Dr. Mendoza any love, feel free to share it in our comments below. We'll make sure that it goes straight to his ears so that he can he receive all the praise or maybe criticism you have for him. But you know.

Taylor Treadway (01:02:07.715)
Yes.

Taylor Treadway (01:02:29.688)
my god.

John Simon, MT (01:02:30.612)
Only good only good Christian criticism. We always say that for ourselves. You know, we're always like, we like learning. We could be wrong. I don't think I don't think he's gonna be wrong. He did a lot of archiving stuff. Taylor goes to Wikipedia. We're we're not built the same. I do too. I'm not sure why I'm dogging so much on on Taylor. But anyways. If I'm in a great mood, I'm in a golden mood, brother. Come on. I turned the ring light to gold for this episode. Yeah. For the ambiance.

Taylor Treadway (01:02:36.479)
half our comments I know.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (01:02:41.056)
Yeah.

Taylor Treadway (01:02:43.309)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's you're in a mood. You're in a mood tonight.

Mm ooo gold.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (01:02:52.394)
Hahaha

John Simon, MT (01:02:58.969)
But thank you guys so much for listening. thank you again to Dr. Taylor Mendoza for joining us. And we will see you guys in a week. God bless you. See you next time.

Taylor Treadway (01:03:07.067)
Bye bye.

Dr. Taylor Mendoza (01:03:08.854)
Thanks guys.