Rebecca L. Davis's book is a rare combination of good storytelling and sharp analysis. Covering a series of heavily publicized religious conversions between the 1940s and the 1970s—from congresswoman and literary icon Clare Booth Luce's conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1946 to the 1973 conversion to evangelical Christianity of Chuck Colson, a Nixon aide convicted of crimes in the Watergate scandal—Davis argues that religious conversion served as an important signifier of cultural tropes important in the charged atmosphere of the Cold War, chief among them authenticity, identity, and choice. But it was not only the seeming competition with the Soviet Union as a state and communism as an ideology that made the concept of religious conversion fascinating to Americans. A particular conflation of political urgency, growing fascination and familiarity with the disciplines of psychiatry and psychology, and the suddenly overwhelming presence of the mass media brought such stories into the public eye and turned them into symbols for what it meant to be an American.
For contemporary Americans it may seem odd that religious conversions made the news they did in the middle decades of the century. Davis illuminates why. The book's six chapters each focus on a particularly high-profile conversion experience (like those of Luce or Colson), but also explore parallel stories that made the press as well, though perhaps with less fanfare or cultural impact, like Elizabeth Taylor's conversion to Judaism or the utterly wild and forgotten life of conman and Mormon convert Harvey Matusow. Davis captures the mood of the mid-twentieth century, a time when leaders political and religious alike were proclaiming how significant religion was to the grapple with communism. But she also illustrates change over time, showing not only that “religion,” generically, was important but how this spate of conversions forced Americans to grapple with precisely what religion was as the national climate changed.
Incidents like entertainer Sammy Davis Jr.'s conversion to Judaism or Cassius Clay's conversion to the Nation of Islam served a two-fold purpose. First, these new faiths certainly did something for the person who joined them. Clare Boothe Luce found in Roman Catholicism a satisfyingly stable institution in a world that seemed for her both personally and politically adrift. Davis Jr. saw in Judaism a culture of intellect and endurance that spoke to his identity and his needs; Cassius Clay found the same in the Nation of Islam. Davis's attention to popular understandings of psychology serve her well here.
But second, these conversions thrust the meaning of religion into the public eye and inspired an ongoing debate about what religion was for and what it should do. Davis's book is particularly good at illustrating how the media seized upon these stories, dramatized them, and aided the converts as they fashioned modern versions of the hoary old “conversion narrative.” Chuck Colson cooperated in a rather plodding but deeply earnest film about his transformation. Luce's multipart personal account gave McCall's magazine the best-selling issues in its history. The film, with its slick polish and saccharine theme song, did not merely demonstrate the media savvy of the burgeoning neoevangelical movement but also stressed that changing one's life as Colson did was the liberated choice of a free American; Colson's conversion became a story of the interweaving of capitalism and faith, belief and democracy, as much as the story of a single human soul. Similarly, the polished Luce's decision to publish her story in the prestigious venue that she chose showed that Roman Catholicism could serve as the faith of a respectable, establishment America. As much as anybody, Luce helped to create the “Judeo-Christian” alliance that characterized Cold War America.
The analysis of the media's role in the creation of conversion narratives in these sections is provocative enough that I would have liked more of it; it is perhaps to Davis's credit that the book ranges so widely that one sometimes wishes the author would pause and dig in a bit more to some of the themes she unearths. Regardless, the abstracts of these cases reveal that even if it is a weakness, Davis's ability to weave compelling stories out of multiple strands of postwar American culture is also a strength. She has things to say about capitalism, consumerism, electoral politics, entertainment, and foreign policy, but perhaps most compellingly about the cultural impact of psychiatry and psychology, and how these disciplines created a new way of understanding the self and its relationship with the health of democracy.
Davis trains her lens on the twin concepts of identity and authenticity. These ideas entered American culture through the work of psychological theorists like Erich Fromm and Erik Erikson, and were magnified as Americans came to presume that they were essential to the functioning of democracy under the threat of communism. Movies like The Manchurian Candidate popularized not entirely legitimate concepts like brainwashing, which linked totalitarian politics to the obliteration of the presumably authentic self. Hence the pursuit and enactment of that self became an act of national pride and a signifier of freedom. Religious conversion seemed a particularly powerful way to do that. And when the press examined the conversion of some Americans, like the former Cassius Clay, to uncomfortable or threatening faiths, the language of authenticity and identity were useful tools of invalidation. Conversion was a sign of liberty when it involved a legitimate religion; a sign of brainwashing when it did not.
Davis's charting of these processes makes this book essential to understanding the rise of therapeutic language and how it became essential to understanding so much about American culture in the twentieth century—so much so that I wished it were somewhat longer. But that her arguments can seem somewhat truncated is testament to their power, and her work here shows us fruitful paths that remain to be followed.
