I. Introduction
It was a cold winter day late in 1953, and nine-year-old Barbara Holt was on her way home with her mother from a Sunday evening church service in Lansing, Michigan. Just a few months before, the Soviets had detonated their first boosted fission device, serving notice that the United States’ monopoly on the deadliest weapon in human history would not last long. As both sides rushed to build thermonuclear bombs of unprecedented power, a new arms race beckoned. In these perilous times, many families were like the Holts. They went to church and found comfort in their faith. But faith could bring fears of its own. Barbara’s mother was listening to the radio. Barbara “wished she would turn it off.” It was another one of those radio preachers. She tried to tune it out, but the “deep concern” in the preacher’s voice made her listen. She heard the preacher say that everyone who sinned against God faced “eternal death and torment in hell.” Barbara knew she had done many bad things. She thought to herself, “some day I [am] going to have to go to hell.” This “frightened” her terribly. She sat in silence as they drove through the gathering darkness toward home. She heard the preacher say that God offered a “no strings attached” gift of salvation to everyone who believed in Jesus. She wished “desperately” to talk to her mother about this, but she felt “too frightened to do so.” Finally, at bedtime, she gathered her courage and asked her mother to “explain exactly how to accept God’s gift.” She followed her mother’s instructions to say a sinner’s prayer, and it worked. “Even at the tender age of nine I knew that something had happened inside me, that I would never be the same again,” she recalled over ten years later. “All of a sudden there was a very real feeling of peace in my heart.” Significantly, this inner feeling of peace is how Barbara knew she was saved.Footnote 1
Barbara’s experience had a long lineage in America, stretching all the way back to the Puritans.Footnote 2 Generations of children before Barbara had asked what they must do to be saved, and had wondered how they could know for sure that they were safe from the torments of hell. These questions were intensely personal and emotional. As Lincoln A. Mullen has argued, the growth of revivalism in the nineteenth-century United States made conversion more individualistic and affective than ever before. Like Barbara, converts needed only to say a prayer and feel a change in their heart to know they were saved. The decisive evidence of conversion was no longer “sacramental but experiential,” bringing subjective emotion to the very center of conversion.Footnote 3 By the time Barbara was growing up, the passing down of conversion stories in evangelical communities had created a “script” for this special experience.Footnote 4
I am not the first to speak of a conversion script, but insights from the history of emotions highlight the crucial affective aspects of the script that scholars have overlooked. The evangelical conversion script did not just provide language to describe conversion or theology to explain it. It prescribed an emotional code. This code becomes visible when we take Medievalist Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of “emotional communities” and apply it to the modern United States. As Rosenwein has argued, people live in communities that establish “systems of feeling.” These systems do more than teach norms of emotional expression; they shape the experience of feeling itself. Evangelical children lived in communities that passed down religio-emotional scripts, teaching kids what to feel and how to feel it. Evangelical conversion was, by definition, individualistic, but it took place in emotional communities that molded the individual experience at every turn. A social infrastructure of interpretation, language, practices, and community support created religious emotion.Footnote 5 For example, through the handing down of religio-emotional scripts, children might know not only what it meant to “accept Jesus into your heart,” but also understand quite precisely how their hearts were supposed to feel once they made that decision. Fortunate were those evangelical children, like Barbara, whose conversion experiences produced the expected feelings. Children whose feelings did not match the script of their emotional community faced a much harder quest for assurance of salvation.
This article brings together scholarly conversations that have too often been separated. Historians of evangelicalism have been strangely silent on childhood itself, while historians of childhood have tended to neglect the religious dimensions of modern American childhood.Footnote 6 I place childhood at the center of evangelicalism and evangelicalism at the center of American childhood, and introduce the history of emotions into both. How has evangelicalism been constituted not just by belief, but by emotion? What did evangelicalism feel like from the child’s vantage point? These affective questions intervene in the scholarly definition wars about the term “evangelical.”Footnote 7 The historiographies of emotion and childhood help us to see that there is indeed a distinctive evangelicalism in American history that is distinguishable from mainline Protestantism by its emphasis on the appropriateness of intense religious emotion as a rite of childhood. The very thing many Protestants had long sought to avoid in the nurture of children was the crisis and catharsis script of emotional conversion that evangelicals sought to promote.Footnote 8 Attitudes toward religious emotions were often more reliable guides to the boundaries of communities than official pronouncements of belief. Children who might have only the fuzziest idea of the theological distinctions that supposedly set apart denominations were intuitively aware of the systems of feeling in which they lived. I call these emotional communities evangelical, not because of the finer points of their theology or their political commitments, but because of their distinct emotional scripts.
Emotional norms were not the only variables in play, as midcentury evangelicalism’s intense investments in whiteness make clear. Despite sharing many theological beliefs and similar assumptions about religious emotion in childhood, conservative black and white Protestants remained estranged from one another. Indeed, even as white evangelicals pursued a heartfelt faith, they accused black Christians of being too emotional. They imagined white Christianity as rational and thoughtful, and black Christianity as childlike and irrational.Footnote 9 Part of the burden of white evangelical conversion in these years was the need to achieve emotional catharsis while retaining the rationality and masculinity imagined as inhering in white Christianity. This article focuses on childhood conversion among white evangelicals in particular, who made their racial-emotional balancing act all but invisible to the children of their communities. Though race and gender shaped the emotional script, white evangelicals acted as if they were simply following the plain words of Scripture.
Whether she knew it or not, when Barbara Holt prayed by her bedside and asked Jesus to save her, she reenacted a script familiar to generations of children before her. Her words can be understood as a particularly powerful form of what the historian of emotions William Reddy has called “emotives.” Emotives are speech acts that do not just report emotion but affect the experience of emotion itself.Footnote 10 We have probably all felt the power of emotives. For example, you might suddenly begin to cry when you say something out loud. You did not know you were going to cry, but the moment you said, “I am so sorry,” you intensified and clarified a feeling. Your own words changed your experience. The proof of the emotion, even to ourselves, may well be in the naming and performing of it. This is no less true of religious emotions. Barbara did not feel a rush of peace in her heart until she said a prayer out loud, telling Jesus she was sorry for her sins. But emotives are unpredictable in their effects. They can misfire, producing unintended consequences. What if children followed the script as best they could, but did not feel the relief they were supposed to feel? A prayer that was supposed to produce peace could instead result in despair.
The emotives of the evangelical conversion script faced a new competitor during Barbara’s childhood in the explosive rise of modern psychology. “By any measure,” James Hudnut-Beumler has written, “the 1950s deserve the title of the ‘Psychological Decade.’” Few aspects of American life escaped the reach of this suddenly pervasive and supposedly authoritative science.Footnote 11 It was now possible to see religious fear not as a vital force leading to conversion, but as a pathological kind of anxiety that harmed children. The kind of hellfire preaching that drove Barbara to her knees in prayer could cause other kids to be driven to therapy. As a mainline Protestant complained, he knew of several children who “required psychiatric treatment” after unwittingly being subjected to evangelical child conversion efforts.Footnote 12 The rise of the therapeutic, psychological self could make evangelical childhood conversion seem downright perverse, or even unintelligible. In postwar America, the self was increasingly understood as the site of hidden depths, mystery, and fulfillment, the very qualities that had previously been imagined to reside in a transcendent God. This self might be sick or healthy, and in need of adjustment, which could be achieved by looking inside. It was certainly not wretchedly lost and in need of divine rescue from outside itself.Footnote 13 In this cultural climate, “‘How can I be happy?’ was a much more attractive question to ask of religion than ‘What must I do to be saved?’”Footnote 14 The children of evangelical households continued to ask the latter question and seek assurance of their salvation. But their descriptions of their predicament often showed an unmistakably narrower horizon shaped by the former question. They began to exhibit a therapeutic brand of interiority, as if the rearrangement of feeling was the decisive thing Jesus accomplished on the cross.
Thus, Barbara’s conversion occurred at a time when the thick continuities in the evangelical conversion script were beginning to show signs of strain. Postwar America was the age of the bomb and the age of the psyche. Scientists had unlocked the secrets of the atom, and psychologists were unveiling the mysteries of the self. Both of these epochal shifts began to impinge on childhood conversion in evangelical communities. Evangelical kids soon found themselves caught between the horrors of the bomb, the traditions of an emotional script that might use fear to promote conversion, and the gathering force of therapeutic psychology that sought to cultivate feelings of well-being. While evangelical adults seemed to imagine that kids who lacked assurance of salvation were experiencing a problem of belief, I argue that children’s attempts to work out their own salvation exposed the paradoxes at the heart of evangelical conversion. Salvation was said to be an objective spiritual reality, but it was discerned with extraordinary subjectivity, through the emotions of the heart. This tension took on new significance in the age of the bomb and the therapeutic, as the pursuit of inner peace emerged as a challenger to more transcendent claims of salvation as peace with God. In this way, even as the children of the 1950s and 1960s tried their best to follow a tried-and-true conversion script, they subtly aligned evangelicalism with the new therapeutic psychological self of postwar America.
II. Atomic Judgment
Embers were still smoldering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when a Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor in Knoxville, Pennsylvania declared that the bomb’s “terrifying roar,” with “heat so intense that every living thing within miles is seared and burned to a crisp,” clearly foreshadowed the words of the Apostle Peter: “the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat.”Footnote 15 Surely, Americans were living in the last days. Just months after the dropping of the bombs, the evangelist Vance Havner told a large crowd of fundamentalists at Moody Church in Chicago that he would not join the chorus sensationalizing the atomic bomb, because there was no need to do so. “Every moment IS sensational, whether we like it or not, because every minute is loaded with such fantastic, unearthly possibilities,” Havner said.Footnote 16 Did these unearthly possibilities cause parents and their kids to contemplate the otherworldly future waiting for their eternal souls? Havner certainly hoped that they would, and urged fundamentalists to redouble their efforts to seek revival. The fundamentalist magazine Grace and Truth summed up the high spiritual and personal stakes of the nuclear age: “The new bomb presents a potent reason why men and women everywhere should accept Jesus Christ as their Saviour now.”Footnote 17
Kids were included in this urgent call to repentance, and there is reason to think their spiritual fears became more intense in the nuclear age. People were talking about the end of civilization – and preparing for it with nuclear fallout shelters and duck and cover drills. In November 1950, Parents Magazine reported on a recent study that asked nine-year-old kids about their biggest fear. The author claimed that the children’s responses were nearly unanimous: “bombs.”Footnote 18 The end of the world felt like a concrete possibility, and it did not take a great leap of imagination for children to wonder if they were ready for it. As Paul Boyer has argued, the “bomb’s corrosive impact on the externals of life pales in comparison to its effect on the interior realm of consciousness.”Footnote 19 Evangelical religiosity mixed with the atomic age to produce what I call a spiritualized nuclear consciousness. As evangelical adults linked the bomb to images of God’s final judgment and proclaimed the urgency of salvation, they challenged children to examine themselves to see if they were ready for the end of the world.
It would be easy to paint a one-sided portrait of evangelical kids and their parents as numb with anxiety, the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation looming just on the edge of consciousness. This seems unrealistic and is not true to the diversity of responses seen in sources from this era. The mass media age created powerful messages about what a person was supposed to feel. Some young people pointed out that fear had become the expected emotion of the moment, but insisted that their faith protected them from it. One young man’s poem made use of the refrain, “I should be afraid,” citing everything from “hydrogen bombs” and “fifth column[s]” to “germs” and communism. Though “civilization could be destroyed in a matter of hours,” this Assemblies of God teenager was unafraid because his loving “heavenly father” promised him eternal life and “His Spirit makes me feel it is true.”Footnote 20 Such responses suggested the comfort some youth found in their faith, while also indicating how pervasive discourses of fear had become in the nuclear age.
With startling speed, pastors and revivalists and youth leaders seized on the bomb as a metaphor to teach spiritual truths. In Turlock, California, Pentecostal kids launched “an all-out declaration of Christian Atomic warfare against Satan,” pledging to do their part in the “bombardment” of the town with gospel tracts.Footnote 21 In another case, the youth magazine of the Assemblies of God invited teens to “set off a veritable CHAIN REACTION” for Christ by giving their money to fund gospel tracts for the mission field.Footnote 22 Meanwhile, church leaders returned to the nuclear stockpile again and again for new metaphors to spice up their sermons and advice columns. The devil was the “arch nuclear physicist” who “bombard[ed] the atomic structure” of the human soul, splitting it apart.Footnote 23 Jesus at his transfiguration shone like the light of an atomic bomb.Footnote 24 The Holy Spirit was “God’s Geiger Counter,” which kept believers safe from “Satan’s Gamma Rays.”Footnote 25 “Atomic Energy in Christ” was the theme of one 1946 Youth for Christ rally.Footnote 26 A youth leader urged Pentecostal teenagers to examine their influence on their peers, which was like radioactive fallout.Footnote 27 These metaphors shaped a spiritualized nuclear consciousness, teaching children to associate atomic power with spiritual danger and opportunity.
Though some atomic metaphors were undoubtedly silly, the most potent spiritual use of the bomb was far more ominous. “Are you afraid the atom or H-bomb will snuff out your life?” asked Hart R. Armstrong to Assemblies of God youth. “Jesus said: ‘Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.’”Footnote 28 Revival preachers were especially eager to exploit the bomb as a new object lesson in God’s judgment. Less than three weeks after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Southern Baptist revivalist Jesse Hendley seemed to luxuriate in the destruction of Japanese bodies, the way they “disintegrated” and “evaporated” and were “terribly and miserably burned.” Hendley wanted his audience, children included, to know for sure that God was responsible for this destruction, and God would do worse than this in the end. The bomb was only a picture in miniature of the earth’s final destruction under God’s unyielding wrath. All those who rejected Christ would be “kept alive unto the ages of the ages” to burn forever in “The Lake of Fire.”Footnote 29 For young children who could only understand such imagery in literal terms, the effect could be overwhelming.
Southern Baptist revivalist Eddie Martin likewise blended biblical narrative with the latest atomic science in sermons such as “The Atomic Bomb and the End of the World,” first delivered in early 1946. Everyone seemed to be afraid of the new bomb, Martin said, but he urged his listeners to fear instead “being caught in the awful release of God’s judgment when He destroys the world with the atomic principle.”Footnote 30 The only rational response for children who heard these messages from trusted adults was a relentless fixation on making sure they avoided this judgment no matter what. As the Pentecostal Evangel put it, “No price would be too great to pay to avoid hell.”Footnote 31 The cost of being wrong meant sinking forever through an unending ocean of fire. The bomb, by confronting all Americans with what Susan Sontag called “inconceivable terror,” became the perfect metaphor for revivalists to drive home the inconceivable terror of eternal hell.Footnote 32
Among the most disturbing aspects of early Cold War revivalism were the sermons emphasizing God’s pitiless vengeance on children in particular. In one sermon, Eddie Martin linked the story of Noah’s flood in the sixth chapter of Genesis to the atomic age, describing a long-suffering God who became “heartless” and “merciless” once the time of judgment came. As Martin looked out on the children and parents in his audience, he exclaimed, “There were thousands of little children alive in Noah’s day. God drowned the children. God treated them like he did the harlots and the drunken adults.” Martin relentlessly pursued his theme of a “pitiless” God who made no allowance for childhood innocence. He wanted his audience to feel it in their bones and see the pictures of suffering in their mind’s eye. “When the little tots were seen struggling in the arms of hysterical parents, God could have called the whole thing off, but he didn’t,” Martin said. “He poured out His wrath and paid no attention to their tears.” Martin’s preaching profoundly violated the mainstream culture of postwar childhood on two counts: he declared that children were not innocent, and he deliberately tried to scare them.
Martin’s emphasis on God’s “pitiless” judgment on the children of Noah’s day was a prelude to the point that Americans were living on the cusp of a greater day of judgment. “He will split the atoms of a[ll] the elements of the universe and with one great wave of terrible destruction God will destroy the ungodly and cleanse this filthy, blighted, sin scarred…globe of ours,” Martin declared.Footnote 33 In another sermon fragment from this era, Martin compared Noah’s flood to the horrors of the Second World War. “Hear the screams of the tortured victims inside the horrible German prison camps,” he urged his audience. Even the Nazis’ cruel work did not compare with “the greatest of all tragedies” when God’s global flood of destruction came and “Children were snatched forever from their mothers’ arms.”Footnote 34 There is little question that this terrifying style of preaching got results. Some children, like twelve-year-old Cecil, said a sinner’s prayer simply because they “wanted to go to heaven.” What would a kid not be willing to do to avoid the horrors Martin described? Other children seemed to gain a more positive emotional catharsis. Eleven-year-old Martha prayed too, and was said to be “very happy” and thought she would “be happy for ever.” Fourteen-year-old Freda could not “explain it, I just feel clean all over.”Footnote 35 These emotional communities did not see the stoking of religious terror in childhood as aberrant or harmful. It was only part of the intense religious emotion expected of childhood.
Revivalists also offered deeply emotional and vivid messages that played on childhood fears of abandonment and parental fears of losing a child. As Martin pictured the “Great White Throne Judgment” described in the book of Revelation, he imagined family members being able to see and talk to each other as the saved and the damned went their separate ways. “Goodbye, Mother! Goodbye, Father! Goodbye children!” Somehow at once maudlin and grotesque, Martin’s message was nothing short of terrifying. “Family circles will be broken, eternally,” he warned.Footnote 36 The nuclear age confronted children with concrete questions about separation from loved ones. In the event of a nuclear attack, what if they survived and their parents died? Exactly as revivalists like Martin intended, this question was really only a microcosm of the larger question about eternal destiny and how this destiny interacted with family ties. One Southern Baptist teen put a finger precisely on the problem when asking about family members who were not Christians. If “all the family will not be united in heaven, what will heaven be like?” The Bible promised an eternal rest free from sorrow, but this child could not imagine being “completely happy” if the whole family was not together. The teen was assured that heaven was a place of joy and peace because the believer was with Christ, not because of union with family members.Footnote 37 While the answer was supposed to be reassuring, it raised the awful prospect that family separation was not a temporary condition of a sin-scarred world but was in fact an eternal feature of God’s plan.
It is little wonder that fire and brimstone revivalism made some kids anxious. A spiritualized nuclear consciousness heightened children’s fears about the state of their souls, but these fears remained difficult to name. One teenager admitted, “Every time I hear a sermon on death or the second coming of Christ, I feel real funny inside and wish that people wouldn’t talk about such things. Why do I feel this way?” It would have been a considerable emotional risk for this young person to explore the “funny” feeling in detail, because fearing the end of the world could easily be taken as evidence that one was not saved. Yet to critique the sermons that produced these feelings would have been just as risky. So the child’s question implicitly assumed the problem was with themselves rather than with the sermon: “Why do I feel this way?” The advice column’s response to this teen started with a gentle note of understanding. It was only natural that young people with their whole lives in front of them might not want to think about death. Then the hammer dropped: “if you have a great fear of death, it might be a very good indication that you have not had a definite experience of salvation.”Footnote 38 What was this definite experience of salvation supposed to feel like? It is time to take a closer look at the emotional script of conversion.
III. The Emotional Script of Conversion in the Age of the Therapeutic
In the Acts of the Apostles, there is a famous scene in which the Apostle Paul’s jailer asks, “What must I do to be saved?” Evangelical communities in the therapeutic age tried to answer this question and teach the answer to their children. But they also changed the question. The doing remained important, but feeling mattered a lot too. In the archives and advice columns and periodicals of midcentury evangelicalism, one can almost hear the children of evangelical households asking, “What must I feel to be saved?” As adults shared their testimonies of conversion, as preachers appealed for sinners to come down the aisle, as magazines printed inspiring stories of salvation, children learned what a normal conversion looked like and felt like. Before the conversion, the struggling sinner might feel anguish and guilt, restlessness and fear. Then, usually through a definite prayer, there came a sudden infusion of peace, often followed by feelings of joy and contentment.
It is important to note that the emotional script of conversion was not identical from one community to another. It was like a children’s game that is commonly played with some house rules. You knew the gist of the game, but you also knew that someone else might play it slightly differently. Southern Baptists were more likely to emphasize following through on the conversion with baptism and church membership. Pentecostal communities were more likely to emphasize the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Some fundamentalist communities made a strong distinction between salvation itself and the assurance of salvation, which might come later. Some communities were comparatively restrained in their outward expression of emotion, while others were exuberant. What all tended to share in common was a very strong sense of before and after, with a decisive moment separating the old self from the new self. The before and after were not just two spiritual epochs – from damned to saved – but two emotional regimes. Whether the convert cried and writhed on the floor, or whether they quietly bowed their head in silent prayer, the script suggested they would experience an unmistakable shift in inner feeling.
In a sense, none of this was new. Generations of converts had testified that the rescue of a lost soul was such a dramatic and transcendent shift in the very nature of things that it was bound to have interior effects too. John Wesley famously felt his heart “strangely warmed.” The Black abolitionist Olaudah Equiano wrote that he “felt an astonishing change,” accompanied by joy and weeping. The evangelist Charles Finney likewise wrote that he “wept aloud with joy” and “bellowed out the unutterable gushings of my heart.” These accounts did not, however, reduce conversion to inner peace. Instead, they described seeing theological truth with new clarity, often through a heightened sense of reality coming from outside themselves. Wesley was listening to a reading of Martin Luther’s preface to Romans when he suddenly gained the conviction that God had saved him “from the law of sin and death.” Equiano recalled God “break[ing] in upon my soul with his bright beams of heavenly light,” so that “I saw clearly with the eye of faith the crucified Saviour bleeding on the cross.” Finney described a sense of meeting Christ “face to face” that was so powerful he did not realize until later that it was only a state of mind. “It seemed to me a reality, that he stood before me.” The Holy Spirit surged through him like “waves of electricity,” and he recalled “distinctly that it seemed to fan me, like immense wings.”Footnote 39 The relatively porous selves of the revivalist movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remained open to the inbreaking powers of visions and spirits. The more buffered selves of the American twentieth century spoke less often of exterior forces coursing through them and more often of a simple feeling inside.Footnote 40 That feeling, rather than serving as a gateway to theological truth, was validation in itself. As one fourteen-year-old girl put it in 1950:
There’s something in being a Christian –
This something is deep in the heart.
There are feelings in being a Christian.
That from the soul will never depart.Footnote 41
In the age of the therapeutic, it was easier than ever before for a subtle displacement to occur, making such indefinable feelings nearly synonymous with the reality of salvation itself.
There was also a growing sense that none of the religio-emotional anguish that might accompany a conversion should happen to kids in the first place. If the self of the 1950s was apt to be sick rather than sinful, this was all the more true of the selves of children. Americans were bombarded with images of children as innocent cherubs, who, if they were sick, were only sick because others had made them that way. Barbara Holt’s belief that she was a sinner destined for hell violated this increasingly powerful image of the child as fragile, innocent, and in need of protection. The roots of this imagined child go back centuries, but by the nuclear age, it was becoming dominant due to rising living standards and parental expectations, and new ways of thinking about child development.Footnote 42 Popularizers of the latest research in child psychology warned that religious instruction could profoundly damage children if not done in a developmentally appropriate way. Milton J.E. Senn, director of the Child Study Center at Yale University, noted that Americans seemed to be rushing to religion in the 1950s for relief from the pressures of modern life. In the pages of Woman’s Home Companion, he warned parents that he often encountered children in his practice who “faint in church or refuse to go from intense fears and guilts stimulated there.” Parents had to beware of “older approaches to religious education based on rigid moralism and threats of punishment.” Thankfully, many churches were developing religious instruction compatible with “our increasing knowledge of child development and child psychology” so that children could have wholesome religious education “without neurotic feelings of guilt.” At a professional conference Senn even warned that Bible instruction for young children should be avoided!Footnote 43
Many evangelicals considered these fighting words, but they did not live in a bunker set apart from the influence of modern psychology. Even evangelical Sunday School curriculums might proudly advertise their lessons as both “solidly evangelical” and “built on the principles of sound child psychology.” Such lessons claimed not only to teach “meaningful worship” but also allowed the “release” of “pent-up energies” in children.Footnote 44 Some parents, remembering the religious pressures they faced as children, wanted to make sure their children were not pressured to respond to the gospel at too young an age. Others frankly declared that their young children were not terrible sinners and should not be made to feel that they were.Footnote 45 Traditionally, such concerns would have made little sense. Puritan parents, for example, were reminded that their children were horribly wicked, and that unless they were saved from God’s wrath, it would have been better for them to have never been born.Footnote 46 In such a climate, any tool, however fearful, that might bring a child to repentance was viable. Seventeenth-century Puritan parents could not possibly worry about giving their kids guilt complexes or neuroses. Evangelical parents in the age of the therapeutic could, and sometimes did.Footnote 47
Evangelical parents also participated in the increasingly self-conscious parenting of the therapeutic age. With experts perched on their shoulders, evangelical parents were not immune from asking, “Am I doing it right?” The most famous expert of them all, of course, was Dr. Benjamin Spock. His Commonsense Book of Baby and Child Care sold nineteen million copies in the two decades after 1945. It defies belief to suppose that none of these copies, complete with Spock’s low-key popularization of Freudian ideas, were sitting on the nightstands of evangelical parents.Footnote 48 Though Spock’s first edition had nothing explicit to say about the religious education of children, it had an enormous amount to say about fear. Fears “of the dark, of dogs, of fire engines, of death, of cripples.” It seemed that the modern child was a terribly delicate creature, a veritable bundle of anxieties and fears that the unwary parent could make worse “through battles over such matters as feeding and toilet training” or “scary stories or too many warnings.”Footnote 49 Parents were learning that childhood fear was a deeply threatening force that could harm their children for life if they were not careful. This fragility had obvious implications for spiritual fears and the emotional script of conversion.
Though Spock would eventually become something of a bogeyman for conservatives upset about so-called “permissive parenting,” the reality of parenting on the ground in the early Cold War era seems to have been less polarized. Even the fundamentalist Moody Monthly could casually write of parents in its audience, “We keep Spock and [Arnold] Gesell on our bookshelves and refer to them at every little crisis.”Footnote 50 One wonders how many evangelical parents shared the synthesis offered by Mrs. Mary Stephens, a Presbyterian pastor’s wife in Pennsylvania: “As far as children’s moral and spiritual life is concerned, my Bible and the teachings of Jesus Christ stand first. But I also need Drs. Gesell and Spock that I may understand their physical and psychological reactions.”Footnote 51 Even when evangelicals criticized mainstream parenting advice, they often presented it as a force that was already inside their camp. In The Christian Herald, Elizabeth Logan Davis presented an apocryphal mother spouting all the latest in expert parenting advice. The mother was terribly afraid of giving her children “repressions” and so avoided disciplining them harshly. Of course, she had Dr. Spock on her bookshelf. “As excellent as these volumes are,” Davis pointed out, “they are only part of the story of child nurture.” Too many parents seemed to have forgotten that what children needed most was precisely what these new parenting books did not provide. “When ponderous tomes on ‘child psychology’ let you down, why not try that unfailing Source Book of all wisdom, the Bible?”Footnote 52
But there was no denying that the Bible had new competitors. By the 1960s, it had become possible for even a fundamentalist publication to print material describing spiritual doubt as only a symptom of psychological disturbance. The evangelical psychologist Clyde Narramore counseled a woman who doubted her salvation and had come forward “about twenty times” for altar calls over the years. In the world of evangelical conversion, nothing better illustrated the unpredictable effects of emotives than the failed altar call. Coming forward when the preacher invited sinners to come to the altar was a brave, embodied, public act. It was likely to conclude with a whispered sinner’s prayer – the ultimate, desperate emotive that might deliver a soul from anguish to joy. But when it misfired, the fallout could be deeply painful. In many communities, the emotional script of conversion was so clear on this point – the prayer was supposed to issue in emotional relief – that the failure to experience something less than delight could be experienced as a crushing blow. The traditional response to doubts about salvation emphasized proper belief; if the woman had come forward twenty times for altar calls, she clearly misunderstood something. But Narramore inverted the equation. “It is hard to believe right when you don’t feel right,” he counseled. His experience had convinced him that “many people who are unsure of their salvation are suffering from emotional or mental problems.”Footnote 53 As such psychologically informed opinion filtered down to ordinary evangelicals, it left the conversion script in a state of flux.
Some evangelicals tried to chart a path between experts like Senn, who stripped away the need for conversion, and fundamentalists like Eddie Martin, who gleefully used fear to induce conversions. In the pages of the evangelical Eternity magazine, Sunday school curriculum writer Eunice J. Fischer wrestled with questions such as the appropriate age of child conversion, how a child absorbs religious concepts, and how best to evangelize children in developmentally appropriate ways. She described children as emotional beings who had the capacity to feel God’s love before they understood it. Fischer believed the Holy Spirit “appeals first to the child’s emotions,” and adults should too, enveloping children in an atmosphere of love that would prepare them to understand the gospel message. An emphasis on creating a climate of feeling rather than communicating doctrinal precepts aligned well with the psychological age. She believed children did still need to be told the fundamental story of human sinfulness and Christ’s redemption so that they would be converted during childhood, but that it had to be done very carefully. For example, if you told children they needed to be washed in Jesus’ blood, they just might believe you, and what good would a bloodbath do? “True – the plan of salvation itself could not possibly make a child neurotic, for Christ is the only One who can wipe out guilt and fear,” Fischer declared. “But the presentation of the plan of salvation can undoubtedly make a child neurotic.” To say this was to already concede a lot of ground to mainstream expertise.Footnote 54
Fischer was unusual in that it was her job to think about these things, and she took account of how modern psychology might shape religious instruction. For many ordinary evangelical parents, the assumption that their children should experience an emotional crisis leading to conversion remained intact. There was supposed to be a definite turning point when the sinner passed from death to life and anguish turned to joy. The crisis might come for even very small children. One mother described her four-year-old son, who “started to weep and weep” during “bedtime devotions.” She “asked him what was wrong.” “I want Jesus to come into my heart,” the little boy said.Footnote 55 While some parents might have found the intense weeping of a four-year-old disturbing, here the mother presented it as a joyous event leading to the child’s salvation. Children, too, might go through their own dark nights of the soul. This seems to have been especially true in Pentecostal communities, where a sinner might spend hours in a grueling spiritual, bodily, and emotional ordeal culminating in a cathartic release of the burden of sin and the infusion of divine peace.Footnote 56 Conversion was not something to take up lightly. It was a crisis.
The crisis conversion was the prototypical conversion, and those who lacked it were at times at pains to explain why their conversion was nonetheless equally valid. Sometimes the lack of a crisis conversion in childhood came back to haunt adults decades later. One Southern Baptist man’s decades of church membership and two baptisms paled in comparison to his inability to “remember a definite time or place of conversion.” This was no small thing. He found that his growing doubts were damaging his “physical and mental health.” He felt “a longing for something I do not have or feel.” The endorsement of his church community and the fulfillment of outward rites were no match for the absence of proper feeling. This distressed man’s experience was outside the script, and he knew it.Footnote 57
Those who did experience a crisis conversion often testified that their prior emotional anguish was vanquished by an intense feeling of inner peace at the moment of conversion. It was these happy endings that really gave the conversion script its great power. The bleakness of life before salvation was described in lots of evocative and emotional language, but the joyous conclusion reframed and contained that ordeal, confining it to a past that was now over and done with. At a glance, most stories seemed to be variations on the classic theme of conversion expressed in John Newton’s hymn Amazing Grace: “I was blind but now I see.” Evangelical conversion narratives certainly embraced this line, but the subjective components of conversion now loomed larger than ever before. In the age of the psychological self, the metaphor was less about scales falling from eyes to see an outward reality more clearly. Now, the inner self was reborn to feel anew. Salvation became almost synonymous with a subjective experience of inner peace. “I felt horrible, but now I feel great,” does not quite have the same ring to it as Newton’s famous hymn, but it better captures the essence of evangelical conversion’s emotional script.
The emotional script of conversion might be experienced at a Sunday morning church service, or a revival meeting, or a youth gathering. But in the evangelical literature of the early Cold War, there was absolutely no question where the conversion script ought to be enacted. The ideal setting was inside the Christian home as loving parents led their children to salvation. The conversion of a child was a “parent’s greatest joy and gravest responsibility.”Footnote 58 The centrality of the home in childhood conversion belies the notion that evangelical Protestants were slower than the mainline in turning their focus to family issues.Footnote 59 Evangelicals were no less interested or engaged in the family. Rather, they expressed that concern in characteristically evangelical ways. Above all, parents were told to have regular family worship in their homes, with the ultimate goal of leading their children to make a definite decision for Christ. What youngsters, enveloped in their parents’ prayers and the warmth of family worship, would not want to become God’s children? This was exactly how it worked for John Bjorkstam, who grew up in an Evangelical Free Church family. He attributed his conversion before the age of ten to daily devotions and fervent prayers on the part of his parents. He credited them with creating “an almost total environment in which [God] was worshiped and glorified.” John thought this home atmosphere made it “most improbable” that he would do anything other than convert.Footnote 60
Ominously, this “total environment” was becoming more difficult to sustain. Parents felt the increasingly frenetic pace of modern life and found it hard to avoid the rising pressures of mass media and youth culture that threatened to crowd out family worship. Through the 1940s and 1950s, church leaders repeatedly sounded the alarm: the Christian family was not what it used to be. Norman V. Williams warned that in just forty years the percentage of Christian homes practicing “regular family worship” had declined from 50 percent to 5 percent.Footnote 61 It is not clear where Williams got his data, but there is evidence that family worship had indeed been declining for decades.Footnote 62 Some commentators wrote with pastoral concern about the changes in modern life that might make building the family altar more difficult. But others knew exactly where to place the blame and felt that evangelical parents had no excuse. Williams declared that “Parents who do not have daily family worship are soul and character murderers to their children.”Footnote 63 If the home was the essential site of conversion, but most parents were not in fact having regular times of family worship, where did that leave the children? The question of eternal salvation, with all its potential terrors and comforts, was theirs to ponder and decide.
IV. Children Working Out Their Salvation
Evangelical children and youth were not merely passive sponges absorbing the messages parents and preachers tried to teach them. They took an active role in interpreting their faith and trying to figure out what it meant for them. This could be true of very young children as well as older kids. One little Southern Baptist boy was scared of going to sleep because he was having bad dreams. His mother suggested praying at bedtime, so he did. The next morning, he was brimming with excitement. “It worked! It worked!” he called. “God didn’t let me have any bad dreams.” For many, God was not a distant deity to be believed in, but a person to be felt close at hand. Sinister spiritual forces might also be present in the routines of everyday life. One five-year-old boy lost his temper and began pounding the floor while trying to perform the big-boy task of dressing himself. Suddenly, he stopped and shouted, “Get behind me, Satan!” His command seemed to work, as he collected himself and calmly finished getting dressed.Footnote 64 Inquiring after the sincerity of these childish displays of religiosity is a fool’s errand. The point is that children were learning a code of religious emotion, appropriating it and adapting it as only kids can. Whether children feared for their salvation or found comfort in it, what probably stands out to many modern readers is how many of them experienced a relationship with God as an integral part of their emotional life. There is abundant evidence of high spiritual and emotional intensity in the lives of evangelical kids in the early nuclear age. This spiritual vitality would become harder to sustain in the decades ahead, but for now, as America’s kids grew up under the shadow of the bomb, God was at their side, lighting the way.
It would be deeply misleading to portray salvation as only a source of anxiety for children. The story is incomplete without emphasizing that for many children, their relationship with God was a source of deep comfort and assurance. Take, for example, the Southern Baptist teens in the 1950s who wrote poetry about their relationship with Jesus. There was Barbara Gilliam’s “Seek Jesus,” which urged young people to look to Jesus no matter what they were going through, and repeatedly declared “he’s always near!” There was Ramona Hughes’ “Jesus Is My Saviour,” which embraced Jesus not only as savior but as a “dear and loving friend.” How did Ramona know Jesus was her savior? “I can’t express it right,” Ramona wrote, but “I know it in my heart.” A feeling – indefinable, authentic, and personal – defined her relationship to God. Betty Morgan wrote a poem about kneeling in prayer in the evening, having “no need to fear” because God “assures me I am safely in his care.” Other poems expressed a sense of self-abasement that directly contradicted therapeutic assumptions about the self. Donna Bancroft wrote that “without the Lord,” she would be “an empty shell,” just “drifting [i]nto that eternal hell.” But the point of the poem was that she did have the Lord, and therefore felt rest and peace.Footnote 65
If a sense of security defined the spiritual emotions of some youth, for others, fear and anxiety loomed large. Indeed, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that doubts about salvation and questions about how to be assured of it were very widespread in this era. As postwar publications increasingly adopted a model of engagement with their readers based on relevance to real life more than didactic instruction of an ideal, doubt emerged as a key theme.Footnote 66 When Robert G. Lee wrapped up his years of answering reader questions for the Southern Baptist Home Life magazine, he highlighted spiritual doubt as one of the through-lines of his tenure: he had been asked about assurance of salvation “hundreds of times.”Footnote 67 Lee’s go-to answer was to quote key passages of scripture and urge the doubting person to believe them. The Standard, the magazine of the Baptist General Conference of America, noted in 1958 that lack of assurance of salvation seemed widespread, and that this was “especially true among our young people.”Footnote 68 Similarly, Reverend Wes Johnson, an Evangelical Free Church pastor, wrote that young people had asked him questions about assurance of salvation “many times.” After years of fielding these questions, Johnson believed the key was to go back to the Bible. Read it and believe it!Footnote 69 These responses did not account for the realities of the emotional script and mistakenly assumed that young people were wrestling primarily with a problem of belief.
What Lee, Johnson, and other adults seem to have failed to recognize was the slippage occurring in the very meaning of salvation. In the age of the therapeutic, the happy feelings said to be a result of salvation increasingly became a goal in itself. In this milieu, negative feelings fueled chronic doubt. Kids of evangelical households led the way in exploring these new frontiers of spiritual angst. Some advice material for kids tried to warn them away from a misplaced focus on feelings, but failed to reckon with how paradoxical their religio-emotional messages really were. A Pentecostal youth magazine warned kids, “your feelings can fool you.” It described a kid who had a joyous conversion experience and “felt he was walking on air.” But when this feeling inevitably faded, he promptly began to doubt his salvation. He had made the classic error of mistaking “feelings for faith.” The article urged teens to stay steadfast in the lean times and “Never forget you belong to God.”Footnote 70 As reasonable as this advice was, the faith over feeling message clashed with the emotional realities of the conversion script. When therapeutic feeling was evidence of faith, it became difficult for some young people to comprehend a faith that transcended feeling.
To an outside observer, children fearing that they were not saved might seem odd. If you wanted to be a Christian and took the appropriate steps to identify as a Christian, then surely you must be a Christian! But the children of these emotional communities knew very well that the matter was not so simple. Salvation was an invisible, interior experience. True, salvation was supposed to produce external fruits, but those fruits could be faked. So the surest evidence of salvation came from within. The significance of this fact for the child’s emotional life must be recognized. In homes where the conversion script operated, even young children might spend substantial emotional and mental resources contemplating the state of their eternal souls. Some children were so troubled about their salvation that they wrote letters asking for help. Surely, many of them must have thought, their denominational leaders would know what to do. One fifteen-year-old Southern Baptist boy confessed, “I don’t think I am really saved.” On the outside, he was doing everything right. He went to church three times a week, read his Bible, and prayed every day. But none of this frenetic spiritual activity could overcome the overwhelming emotional fact: “I am still scared.” This fear seems not to have been the result of his doubt, but the cause. If he really was saved, why did he not feel peace? Wasn’t fear itself evidence that something had misfired? In the age of the therapeutic, a lack of inner peace seemed to be damning evidence against him.Footnote 71
This line of thought goes a long way toward explaining the otherwise puzzling phenomenon of children testifying that they desperately wanted to be Christians, but were quite sure that they were not. One Southern Baptist teen named Helen began her letter precisely this way: “I’m a girl fifteen years old and I’m not a Christian. I want to be more than anything.” Her local pastor had already tried to lead her to salvation, but she “got so mixed up and discouraged I didn’t know which way to turn.” Now she was turning to a magazine advice column. “Would you please help me?” she asked. We may well wonder whether Robert G. Lee’s response helped her. He said it was all so simple. She had merely to believe and trust in Jesus.Footnote 72 Did Helen read this response with a sigh of relief or a frustrated groan? It does not seem presumptuous to speculate that Helen’s pastor had already told her to trust in Jesus! What Helen apparently did not have was a clear feeling of trust. How could a child will this feeling into being?
The problem could get especially thorny for children when it dawned on them that maybe they had been faking. Some children growing up in evangelical homes said and did all the right things, giving every appearance of being Christians, only to realize, often to their own horror, that they were not. This could feel like a trap that was very difficult to get out of. This seems to be what happened to an Assemblies of God girl named Norma, who called herself “one of the most miserable teenagers living today.” She possessed all the right credentials: “I have Christian parents and have gone to church all my life. I have been taught the way of salvation; I have read my Bible and prayed every morning.” It is not clear how Norma came to be so certain that she was not a Christian, but the emotional script seemed to be evidence against her. She longed to have “the true born-again experience” and the “love, joy, and peace” that would go along with it. In the absence of those wonderful idealized feelings, she concluded that all her spiritual activity “doesn’t seem to do much good….deep in my heart I am so miserable I can hardly stand it. I have never accepted Jesus as my personal Saviour. I have just been a miserable hypocrite.” Now Norma was really stuck. “I want to get down on my knees at the altar and give my heart and life to Jesus, but Satan and my pride won’t let me after all these years I have claimed to be a Christian.” If she came forward now, her parents and entire community would need to reevaluate years of her life. She would be exposed. It is easy to imagine that her loved ones would have responded with joy and understanding. But it is just as easy to imagine why Norma was terrified. She wanted “the whole world” to know she was “a real Christian.”Footnote 73 But before the whole world could know, Norma had to feel it herself.
In the questions of kids like Helen and Norma, we begin to see glimmers of a suffocating interiority. Eclipsed is the old sense that in the moment of salvation, something objective out in the world has been transformed. Being saved is still discussed, but the emotions attached to salvation evince signs of becoming more therapeutic and less transcendent. A Southern Baptist teen unwittingly exhibited the new therapeutic impulse when trying to figure out if they were saved or not. They had thought they were, but at church one day a parishioner’s conversation about the “sudden change in your heart” that accompanied salvation raised new doubts. “I can’t remember feeling a sudden change,” the teenager lamented. About two years later, the teen responded to an altar call, but “still did not get that sudden change. This really worries me,” the teen wrote. Part of what stands out in this anonymous letter is that the teenager did not articulate what being saved might mean beyond the feeling itself. They did note that their parents were “very good people who always go to church” and were “both saved.” But moral behavior and church attendance were, of course, classic false hopes for salvation that evangelicals preached against. This young person seemed to have only the foggiest theological idea of what salvation might entail, but knew the emotional script quite well. If salvation was not basically a feeling, what could it possibly be?Footnote 74
The adult’s response to the teen’s question tried to have it both ways. It pointed out that many people did not have dramatic and sudden conversion experiences, and that this was ok. But then it told the story of a Baptist minister who, as a young man, had also doubted because he lacked a dramatic conversion. This minister had been advised to say a sinner’s prayer, and when he did so, “he felt a peace in his heart.” Thus was his original conversion “sealed.”Footnote 75 This advice reached out with a comforting hand, but then bound the child anew: not all people experience a sudden change, but here is how to feel the peace you are looking for. The obvious difficulty was that the teen might try to say a sinner’s prayer (yet again!) and still not feel the peace the minister in the story felt. It was, after all, the failed altar call attempt that led to the youth’s angst in the first place. Religious emotives were high-risk, high-reward propositions, and their unpredictable self-altering effects were only dimly understood even in the communities that practiced them. It did not appear to occur to either the doubting teenager or the answering adult to question whether a subjective sense of inner peace ought to be the decisive evidence of following Jesus.
Nearly all these threads are summed up in the wonderfully evocative recollections of Wayne Olson, an Evangelical Free Church layman who wanted to help those who wrestled with the same kinds of doubts he had. In Wayne’s story, we see emotives misfiring, the power of emotional communities to shape religious experience, and the difficulties evangelicals had in coming to terms with the paradoxes of their conversion stories. Wayne was eight months old when the stock market crashed in 1929. He grew up on a farm in Nebraska. Enormous dust storms swept the plains in those terrible years, but one of Wayne’s most vivid memories involved a far more subtle experience. One ordinary evening when he was about ten, he came into the house and could not find any of his family. The house appeared to be deserted. His fear grew as he “rushed from room to room calling out the names” of his loved ones. The sickening realization washed over him: perhaps the rapture had happened, and he had been left behind! This experience led Wayne to seek salvation.Footnote 76
During the war years, the young teenager began to doubt his conversion. The trouble was that he kept “hearing people testify to the wonderful feeling of their security in Christ” but was unable “to identify a similar feeling within” himself. Wayne had a keen analytical mind and was good with numbers, but could he feel the religious emotion the community around him expected him to feel? He tried very hard. He recalled riding his bike up and down the star-lit street one night while his family slept, pondering the words of the eighth Psalm: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?”Footnote 77
Early in the atomic age, an evangelist came to preach at Wayne’s church. Wayne felt “torn” as the evangelist called for sinners who needed prayer to raise their hands. Wayne had tried so hard to seek God, but he still “did not feel” that God had “accepted” him. Like Norma, Wayne feared being exposed in the eyes of his church community. With everyone’s heads bowed in prayer, he decided he could risk raising his hand. But the evangelist pulled a classic bait-and-switch after the prayer, inviting “that young man who raised his hand to come forward.” Wayne felt “embarrassed” but went forward as instructed and knelt in front of the church. After the prayer, someone asked him, “Now, don’t you feel wonderful?” But Wayne did not feel wonderful at all. His emotive act had misfired, and his emotions had betrayed him again. He did not feel the peace he was supposed to feel.Footnote 78
One day in the early 1950s, Wayne was driving a tractor across the farm and memorizing a scripture verse.Footnote 79 As he thought about its meaning, he was so “shaken” that he climbed off the tractor and knelt on the ground. He felt that God did not come to him in an ecstatic display of emotion or fiery sign, but in a still small voice (1 Kings 19). At long last, he finally had the assurance he had craved since childhood. All this time, he had thought that he was seeking God. Now it felt to him that God had been seeking him. Looking back on his experiences, Wayne could confidently declare that the boy who had confused assurance of salvation for a mere feeling now had indeed gained an enduring assurance based on the truth of God’s word. Yet, for all its power as an inspiring conversion memoir, Wayne’s story is not nearly as tidy as he tried to make it seem, especially if we imagine that the reader was a kid struggling with doubt. Wayne’s newfound assurance seemed to transcend feeling, but upon closer examination, it does so in a quite limited way. Wayne did not take a cold, rational look at things and decide that facts trumped his feelings. Instead, he had a profound life-altering spiritual experience, one that he seemed powerless to manufacture. His confidence did not produce the experience; it flowed from it. Inadvertently, Wayne’s story left the paradox of the conversion script unresolved. He spent years searching for inner peace, and had finally, dramatically, found it. It was precisely the lack of this kind of experience that left so many kids feeling anxious and afraid. Operating beneath the surface of explicit theological claims, the emotional script of conversion produced joy for some and chronic doubt for others.
V. Conclusion
Growing up evangelical in postwar America required kids to navigate intense religious emotion in a confusing climate of cross-pressure and mixed messages. The bomb made kids more afraid – fears many evangelists and youth workers were eager to capitalize on – and the psychological age made fear itself more troubling. The emotional script of conversion contradicted calls for faith based on the words of scripture rather than the subjectivity of feelings. Evangelical children repeatedly heard that salvation was a matter of facts rather than emotion. They were told to trust the Bible more than their hearts. But their emotional communities also taught them that salvation produced an incredible inner peace, an experience unlike any other. In their homes, they might face mixed messages of crisis conversionism and therapeutic psychology. Fearful children struggled to reconcile these confusing and often-contradictory signals.
Consider Barbara Holt’s conversion on that cold winter night in 1953 in light of something that happened less than twenty years later. The evangelical psychologist Bruce Narramore wrote a popular parenting advice book that melded evangelical theology and contemporary psychological insights about childhood development. With chapter titles such as “Self-Image: The Key to Your Child’s Adjustment,” the psychologist reminded evangelical parents that the major task of childhood was the development of a positive self-image.Footnote 80 The assumption that parents would pass down their Christian faith to their children remained, but a dramatic shift in emphasis was unmistakable. It was terribly important that your child felt ok. This stunning juxtaposition – between Barbara Holt’s need for salvation and the evangelical child’s need for self-esteem, less than twenty years later – is a small indicator of the ways in which a model of religious emotions based on crisis and catharsis through conversion was beginning to break down.
Postwar kids’ struggles to know they were saved was not just a story of continuity with prior generations who had wondered the same thing. It was evidence that the psychological turn in American life was affecting everyone. Even as evangelical emotional communities battled against mainline Protestants’ discomfort with highly emotional religiosity, they unwittingly participated in what Philip Rieff called “the triumph of the therapeutic.” While messages of fear and atomic judgment persisted, when one looks deeper, one finds evangelical communities in tune with the therapeutic age. The evangelical insistence on a subjective inner experience of transformation was deeply aligned with the increasingly autonomous psychological self of postwar American culture.Footnote 81 No longer defined in relation to family and community, increasingly unconstrained by outward duties and group obligations, the great task of life in postwar America was becoming the fashioning of oneself.Footnote 82 As Rieff wrote in 1966, “That a sense of well-being has become the end, rather than a by-product of striving after some superior communal end, announces a fundamental change of focus in the entire cast of our culture.”Footnote 83 Thus, ironically, the intensity of evangelical kids’ search for inner peace signaled the draining away of transcendence in American life. In this story, evangelicalism emerges not as a subculture defined by belief, nor merely a political movement, but a set of vibrant emotional communities living in creative tension with the deepest currents of desire, affect, and change in American culture.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Joseph Creech, Lucas Kelley, Colleen Seguin, Tal Howard, and the Sodalitas community at Valparaiso University. The author would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and those who engaged with this work at the ASCH annual conference.
