Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics by Rebecca L. Davis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics by Rebecca L. Davis Benjamin Baker (bio) Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics. By Rebecca L. Davis. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 248 pp. Public Confessions appeared as the United States was experiencing Covid-19 quarantines and pitched battles over national identity. Among Americans, the pandemic raised—or revealed, depending on how one looks at it—fierce disputes about the nature of freedom, democracy, and partisanship, while on other fronts Americans just as vigorously debated race, gender, sexuality, and cancel culture. Appropriately, then, Rebecca Davis's volume explores these very issues from the lens of high profile religious conversions of last century. What do Clare Boothe Luce, Whittaker Chambers, Sammy Davis, Jr., Muhammad Ali, Marilyn Monroe, Eldridge Cleaver, and Chuck Colson have in common? According to Davis, all experienced religious conversions ("confessions") in Cold War America that "moved claims of religious authenticity to the center of American political debates" and raised "questions of whether and how different kinds of faith variously anchored or undermined American freedoms" (4). Davis does not provide a working definition of the contested term "conversion," although there is rich material throughout the work to grapple with its meaning(s). Instead, in the prologue, Davis suggests that religious conversions discussed in the volume may be seen as "self-discovery," "self-invention," "self-transformation," or a kind of authenticity (1–11). [End Page 309] These notions of conversion are evident in Davis's treatment of religious conversion as not a single event, but rather a whole life lived up to the conversion event. This is in keeping with the long tradition of conversion narratives, with the requisite mention of St. Augustine, exemplar of the genre. However, discrete developments always seem to precipitate conversion, at least in retrospect. Consider Davis's subjects. Luce's daughter tragically died in a car accident in 1944, and Luce was nearing a mental collapse and attempted suicide twice. Chambers felt tremendous pressure from his double life as a Soviet spy and gay man. Davis, Jr. was nearly killed in a car accident in Los Angeles in 1954. Ali grappled with identity issues around being black in America. Colson was mired in the Watergate scandal and awaiting a legal verdict. Davis shows how these celebrities adroitly curated their personal religious conversions for the American public to further political ends. Luce presented Roman Catholicism as a democratic check to the peril of communism, with "Catholic converts [holding] the future for American power and democracy" (13). Likewise, Chambers claimed his conversion to Christianity caused him to inform on his Communist conspirators and champion conservatism. Davis, Jr. practiced and literally performed Judaism to achieve civil rights for African Americans. Ali used his conversion to the Nation of Islam to promote black power and freedom and critique American involvement in the Vietnam War. Colson parlayed his conversion to evangelical Christianity to promote white neoliberal masculinity. In an era when Americans questioned the compatibility of some faiths with democracy, namely, any faiths other than mainline Protestantism, these figures argued that their new faiths were quintessentially democratic. Public Confessions excels in demonstrating how these celebrity conversions, though from diverse backgrounds and varied faiths, all revealed essential aspects of American politics and ultimately shaped American identity. Luce shows how an America that was largely male chauvinist and anti-Catholic was moved, if only incrementally, to view women as serious religious figures and more than sexual objects, and to a consideration that Catholics could be genuinely American. Ali and Davis, Jr. defy the narrow possibilities that racism imposed on blacks and widened religious heterodoxy and political expression for African Americans. Colson demonstrates how white Christian men had the privilege to reinvent themselves despite epic wrongdoing and contributed to the rise and dominance of the Religious Right in the Reagan era and beyond. Public Confessions's strength is that it takes a complex era, group of individuals, and subject matter, and produces an intriguing volume for scholarly and non-scholarly audiences. It is the latest offering in a [End Page 310] growing literature that treats religious conversions as more than religious, per se, demonstrating their...