Craig Harline daringly counters novelist L. P. Hartley's now shopworn axiom that “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” The guiding premise of Conversions is that families distant in place and time have similarly muddled through the heartbreaking betrayal of a loved one's apostasy from cherished religious commitments. Published through Yale University Press's New Direction in Narrative History book series, Conversions delivers a delicious page-turning account of two young men who defied their parents' faiths. The book's alternating chapters thread together the stories of Jacob Rolandus and Michael Sunbloom, whose lives are separated by nearly three and a half centuries. Rolandus, the son of a Dutch Reformed minister, converted to Catholicism and later became a Jesuit priest; Sunbloom left his suburban California parents' conservative Protestantism to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and later challenged both the religious beliefs of his parents and those of his new-found faith when he came out as a gay man.
Harline's self-reflective narrative about the research process and the personal memories it evoked provides connective tissue between the two accounts. (Sunbloom—a pseudonym—is a personal friend). For the most part, however, Harline is spare on didactic analysis, opting instead for a saturated prose that conjures shared themes between the two richly detailed accounts. Readers hear echoes of Sunbloom's sexual coming out, for example, in young Rolandus's declaration, prior to fleeing for neighboring Antwerp to live openly as a Catholic, that “he could no longer pretend to be one thing on the outside while another inside” (3). Harline narrates religious conversion and sexual realization, for both characters, in a language of self-discovery. As Sunbloom said of his attraction to the Mormon Church, it was an experience of “discovering what [I] have always been” (66).
The bloodshed and political intrigue that made enemies out of seventeenth century Dutch Catholics and Protestants make twentieth-century American culture wars look like a picnic. Still, both conversions placed family members on opposing sides of entrenched social and political divisions. Harline's sources place the broader conflicts within an intimate family frame: passionate letters between young Rolandus and his sister earnestly rehearse Catholic-Protestant theological polemic; Sunbloom's appeals for family acceptance echo fractious political sparring over gay rights. Here, however, is where Harline surfaces a salient dissonance between the two accounts. Alternating chapters, highlight the divergent choices of the Rolandus and Sunbloom families. The stormy written correspondence between Rolandus and his sister dwindled into silence, and Rolandus remained estranged from his Reformed family as he left Europe to participate in the Jesuit mission in the Americas. In contrast, telephone conversations, airplane trips, and emails facilitate the Sunbloom's continued dialogue, and over time Sunbloom's parents and many of his former Mormon friends gradually acknowledge and accept his gay identity. Seventeenth century theological invective and slow postal service stand in sharp contrast to twentieth century tolerance and incessant communication media.
A final chapter takes up the deferred analytical task and offers an interpretive framework for the two stories of conversion and family conflict. Harline judiciously refuses to interpret the different fates of these family dramas as a consequence of Western secularization or historical decline in sectarian religious conflict. Rather, he suggests that either account might have gone the other way. There are historical accounts of harmonious interfaith families contemporaneous with the Rolandus family, and certainly, families today continue to rupture because of differences in religious and sexual values. Family acceptance, or at least a grudging toleration, was a viable option for both periods, Harline argues, and he turns to sociological theories of identity to account for how families successfully manage relationships with members that surrounding communities see as deviant. Families that accept an “Other” as a one of their own, Harline argues, must challenge and re-prioritize a “primary identity” (as Dutch Protestant, Mormon, and so forth) to incorporate the excluded identity of the estranged family member within a broader “master status.” For the Sunbloom family, Harline's model for successful relationship reconciliation, the salient identity for the estranged Other was “loved family member,” and they incorporated their son's different gay identity within a more encompassing commitment to family cohesion (249–51).
Harline has given us a meticulously researched, engagingly written, and creatively interpreted historical account of conversion and family conflict. I am sure that it will be a valuable and thought-provoking addition to graduate and undergraduate courses on Reformation history, religion and sexuality, theoretical approaches to conversion, religion and family, and historical methods, to name the most prominent of the themes Conversions insightfully illuminates. I expect that it will also have a useful circulation outside of the academy among readers who recognize themselves and their own friends and families in Harline's empathetic historical narrative about conflict, difference, estrangement, and family love. Very highly recommended.
