In Surge of Piety, Christopher Lane offers a compelling reassessment of the career of the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale. While the subtitle suggests a book focused primarily on Peale—author of the still-popular 1952 bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking (Simon & Schuster)—Lane presses far beyond the ministry of the reverend of New York City's Marble Collegiate Church to consider the complex relationship among religion, psychiatry, politics, and big business in twentieth-century U.S. culture. Through an introduction, six thought-provoking chapters, and a coda, Lane explores how Peale and his associates—especially the Cornell University-trained psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Smiley Blanton—helped shape public perceptions of religion and its relationship to mental health in the post–World War II era. Lane focuses much of his attention on the efforts of Peale and Blanton to use their American Foundation for Religion and Psychiatry to legitimate what they called “religio-psychiarity” in the eyes of ministers, researchers, and the general public. Faith in a higher power—preferably a nominally Protestant deity—became their precondition for mental health in an age of anxiety and depression and a way of “inoculat[ing]” Americans against the social disease of atheistic communism (5).

Lane, a scholar of Victorian literature and an English professor at Northwestern University, has written extensively on the history of mental health issues, including a study of the medicalization of shyness and edited volumes on the history psychoanalysis. Given these interests, it is hardly surprising that Surge of Piety shines as a tightly focused study of religio-psychiarity. Lane distinguishes his book from Carol V. R. George's excellent and exhaustive biography, God's Salesman: Norman Vincent Peale and the Power of Positive Thinking (Oxford University Press, 1993), precisely because he is less interested in Peale's “Positive Christianity” and more concerned with the “postwar borderland between religion and psychiatry” (4). Lane's chapters tend toward thematic—rather than chronological—explorations of conflicting views of religion and psychiatry. For example, his close readings of Blanton's sometimes contentious psychoanalysis sessions with Sigmund Freud provide insight into both Blanton's obsessive attempts to prove that faith can heal mind and body and Freud's reluctance to find anything psychologically useful in religious faith. Both men emerge as types—the advocate and skeptic, respectively—that reemerge throughout the text.

Lane argues persuasively that Peale's attempt to fuse psychiatry and religion had unintended consequences that reached far past Peale's well-known social and political conservatism. Through Peale's emphasis on religion as an important component of psychological health, the minister inadvertently helped propagate early scholarly research that detected positive psychological benefits in a personalized, interiorized religious commitment. Research promoted by Peale's foundation would, in Lane's words, come to see “a person's private religion . . . as a measure of reflection and maturity if it demonstrated an ability to tolerate religious differences and rein in extremism” (143). In short, in an ironic twist, Lane argues that Peale's efforts to promote a jingoistic, intolerant form of anticommunist Protestantism helped pave the way for secularized liberal religious ecumenism.

If Lane's text is exceptional for its exploration of the relationship between religion and psychiatry, it also marks an ambitious but not always satisfying attempt to contribute to a wave of recent scholarship on the fusion of religion and politics in the twentieth century. Throughout, Lane nods to the influence of Kevin Kruse's One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic, 2015) and therefore situates Surge of Piety within the context of a growing body of historiography marked by its effort to escape more conventional rise-of-the-Religious-Right narratives. Kruse's work—similar to recent studies by Darren Dochuk, Matthew Lassiter, Bethany Moreton, Kim Phillips-Fein, and Matthew Avery Sutton—explores a vast network of businesspersons, intellectuals, and clergy who cobbled together an anti-New Deal, postwar ideology of Christian nationalism out of bland Protestantism, anticommunism, and laissez-faire economics.

Lane contributes to this historiography by reminding readers that economically and socially “conservative” religion does not necessarily map to “conservative” theology. Like the theologically Congregationalist Reverend James Fifield profiled by Kruse, Lane's Peale is a social and economic conservative who holds an untraditional theology that mashes up self-help, Freud, and the Gospels into a messy stew that leaves many of his contemporaries scratching their heads. Indeed, in Lane's story, Peale frequently sounds more like Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard than evangelical mega-evangelist Billy Graham. Yet, as Lane makes clear, Peale's big-business-oriented Christianity likely did as much to prepare average Americans for the county's rightward drift as anything Graham ever did.

Even as Lane seeks to engage these broader political themes, he sometimes leaves key elements of the story undeveloped. This is especially clear in his chapter on “The Peale-Hoover-Eisenhower Empire.” There, Lane places Peale within the broader political context of the Cold War and documents how the reverend frequently found the “political world” to be “more accommodating” to his religious ideas than the business or religious worlds (96). Yet, Lane's description of the chapter's titular “empire” built by Peale, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and President Eisenhower amounts to little more than a few exchanged letters, a gifted book here and there, and some shared public opinions and appearances. Given Lane's emphasis on anticommunism and religion, his failure to give this chapter more archival and argumentative heft is unfortunate.

Even if such moments in the text left this reviewer wanting more, it should be noted that Lane's text clocks in at a taut 157 pages. The brevity is mostly an asset: Lane tells a tightly focused story built around Peale, Blanton, and their conflicts with academics and other midcentury critics of the attempt to fuse religion and psychology. If some portions of the text remain underdeveloped, Lane should nevertheless be lauded for doing so much so efficiently. In touching on conflicts over religion and science, the history of psychoanalysis in America, the secularization of liberal Protestant thought, and the emergence of Christian nationalism in the postwar era, Lane manages to cover a significant amount of ground while pointing future scholarship on Peale in new and interesting directions.