Public Confessions
The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Personal reinvention is a core part of the human condition. Yet in the mid-twentieth century, certain private religious choices became lightning rods for public outrage and debate.
Public Confessions reveals the controversial religious conversions that shaped modern America. Rebecca L. Davis explains why the new faiths of notable figures including Clare Boothe Luce, Whittaker Chambers, Sammy Davis Jr., Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, Chuck Colson, and others riveted the American public. Unconventional religious choices charted new ways of declaring an "authentic" identity amid escalating Cold War fears of brainwashing and coercion. Facing pressure to celebrate a specific vision of Americanism, these converts variously attracted and repelled members of the American public. Whether the act of changing religions was viewed as selfish, reckless, or even unpatriotic, it provoked controversies that ultimately transformed American politics.
Public Confessions takes intimate history to its widest relevance, and in so doing, makes you see yourself in both the private and public stories it tells.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Davis (More Perfect Unions) wows with this sterling history of mid-20th-century religious conversions and the social issues surrounding them. Clare Boothe Luce, a playwright and Connecticut congresswoman, argued in the wake of her 1946 conversion to Catholicism that only that faith would work as a bulwark against "the infectious thrall" of communism. Cold War dichotomies propelled Alger Hiss's accuser, Whittaker Chambers, to renounce communism for Quakerism—and Davis also stresses how his conversion papered over his homosexuality. Harvey Matusow, "a staggeringly prolific government informant" who admitted to fabricating lies about prominent media figures being Communist Party members, joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and, Davis contends, "embodied the modern American search for a religious ‘identity' as an object of adult self-knowledge." She also details the racism Sammy Davis Jr. experienced after his conversion to Judaism, as well as how Muhammad Ali's joining the Nation of Islam caused rumors that he'd been brainwashed. Davis creates a propulsive image of American life in her depiction of "how religion mattered to democracy, mass culture, and authentic identity" during a time of many highly publicized conversions. This impressive work captures a fraught period in American political and religious history with a clear eye and insightful reasoning.
