Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America, by Craig Harline

Abstract

Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America, by Craig Harline. Directions in Narrative History Series. Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 2011. xi, 301 pp. $27.50 Cdn (cloth). History is boring. Just ask Hollywood. The 1986 classic, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, captures the essence of the is boring theme that pervades American popular culture. In that movie, Ben Stein plays a high school teacher explaining the Great Depression's roots. As he drones on about Smoot-Hawley and Laffer Curves, students drool, sleep, and smack their gum; twas ever thus and ever thus shall be? Not if Craig Harline continues to write books like Conversions. Ostensibly a book about religious conversion and family relationships in the early modern and postmodern world, Harline's work is about so much more than this. The well-regarded historian of Reformation-era Europe penned a book that transcends narrow subfields and speaks to contemporary issues in a profound yet non-pedantic manner. Inspired by the diary of a seventeenth century religious convert that Harline unearthed in a Dutch archive, the author uses this rich document to bring the Reformation to life. With the journal writer, Jacob Rolandus, as the protagonist, the author depicts the young man's inner turmoil as he rebels against his Protestant family. We learn that the Rolanduses were not merely a Protestant family; they were veritable royalty of the Dutch Reformed Church. Indeed, the grandson of a famous Reformed preacher, Jacob Rolandus was expected to join the family business and do spiritual war with the Catholic Church. If Harline had merely recounted a tale of Jacob Rolandus' personal struggle of conversion and the convulsions it caused within his family, he would have produced a gem or a book. Indeed, as the author unfolds the narrative with a novelist's eye for detail and a master historian's understanding of the era. Fortunately, Harline is much too ambitious to settle for a standard monograph. Part of the Yale University Press book series New Directions in Narrative History, Conversions offers a novel form of storytelling. The author combines a history or a religious tumult from early modern Europe with a narration of a contemporary conversion. Intensely personal, Harline depicts the conversion experience of his Mormon Young Single Adult group leader, Michael Sunbloom. Alternating between chapters on Jacob Rolandus and Michael Sunbloom, the reader discovers that religious conversions, whether in the Reformation or the 1970s, wrought angst and pain in family systems. For a subculture so utterly devoted to toleration, anti-Mormon sentiment with the ranks of academia remains a curiously acceptable bigotry. In this way, Harline's narrative situates Sunbloom's conversion experience into perspective and exposes anti-Mormon bias for the unfounded bigotry it is. Centuries after the fact, modern readers easily recognize the hyperbolic nature of Catholic-Protestant venom. …