The Norman Rockwell painting on the cover of Amy Laura Hall's fine study of modern Protestant domesticity says it all. A handsome young white couple, dressed in 1920s-era business-class attire, survey a set of architectural blueprints with rapt attention; their chubby toddler sits on the floor below, looking up from a tower of building blocks in adorable mimicry of the adult conversation going on above her head. Clearly, this is a picture of middle-class aspiration, an upwardly mobile couple planning their new dream house and their child's golden future. But in a much larger sense, Hall argues, the quaint little scene points to a troubling transformation in the nature of twentieth-century domesticity. Rockwell's flawless family of three symbolizes a shift toward a scientific standard of cleanliness and racialized perfection that stands in stark contrast to the random messiness of human family life.

Conceiving Parenthood is essentially a book of moral theology, a forceful critique of modern mainline Protestantism cast against a broad background of twentieth-century social change. Hall begins with an analysis of the “germ-free” home in the post-World War I era, urged on mothers by doctors, social scientists, and, of course, purveyors of Lysol. Not surprisingly, perhaps, she finds a clear racial subtext in this message that idealizes whiteness as the standard of moral as well as physical cleanliness. The analysis thickens with a discussion of “scientific motherhood” in a following chapter, as Hall mines a treasure trove of advertising fodder—everything from baby formula and potty seats to the human specimens put on display at the 1934 Chicago World's Fair—to document the growing complicity between a culture-bound white mainline Protestantism and a decidedly unsentimental corporate scientific agenda for human “betterment.” Lengthy chapters centering on the eugenics movement and the embrace of atomic technology after World War II cement her case further, especially as they show mainline Protestant leaders cheering on each new technological advance, rarely pausing for ethical contemplation.

Hall defines her target audience as white, mainline Protestant churchgoers, or, even more explicitly, her fellow Methodists. She writes as an ethicist deeply concerned about the moral erosion of modern family life, as upwardly mobile parents urge and push their children toward ever-receding standards of middle-class achievement. Hall is sensitive to the array of difficult parental choices posed by drug companies offering pharmacological solutions to attention-deficit behavior or DNA research opening the possibility of genetic testing for chromosomal abnormalities, but she argues unequivocally for an ethic of compassion and risk. Of all people, she insists, the Methodist heirs of John Wesley, the preacher of “abounding grace,” should embrace all children and all families, regardless of their perceived potential for intellectual or social perfection.

In that sense, then, this book was not written for historians. Hall does an admirably thorough job of distilling a vast quantity of both primary and secondary literature, and her analysis of what look to be reams of parenting magazines and slick advertising brochures is a model of scholarly rigor. She has plumbed archival sources as well as contemporary websites for an astonishing array of visual material, which she discusses with humor and skill. But her primary burden is to mount an ethical argument, one in which history provides extra depth and power. This is not an unusual move—many a moral argument has appealed to the record of the past for justification. Still, Hall's obvious delight in discovering the past as it lies, and her consistent attention to the wider context behind her particular narratives, set her book apart.

Hall's argument does, however, raise some interesting questions for religious historians. To be sure, her narrative of mainline Protestant fecklessness is a familiar one, and on one level irrefutable; by all kinds of measurements, twentieth-century liberals failed to understand the scope of their institutional peril. But in a more nuanced way, the failure that Hall documents falls in a muddy area of intersection between class and religion where it is difficult to assign blame on the basis of any single factor, including weak theology. In what sense, for example, did Hall's early twentieth-century Protestant social scientists and doctors consider themselves to be Protestants, let alone Methodists, Congregationalists, or Baptists? In what sense did they ever see themselves acting in a consciously Protestant way? Or were they simply trained professionals with a smattering of an older denominational culture whose tenets they could no longer articulate? These are complicated questions, but certainly worth asking. The deeper question that Amy Laura Hall's book addresses to historians is about the erosion of specifically Protestant identity and the process by which an old and powerful force gradually ceased to be a dominant source of meaning in the professional marketplace.

Nevertheless, all readers—whether they are historians, Protestants, or anything else—will find Amy Laura Hall's book an immensely compassionate approach to the woes of modern family life. As we all worry and sigh over wayward children and dwindling retirement accounts, Conceiving Parenthood is a reminder that happiness comes from many sources, and that most of them come to us small and unexpected.