Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics

Abstract

Rebecca L. Davis's Public Confessions shows how religious conversions of public figures in the mid-twentieth-century United States were far more than individual changes of mind and heart. Instead, “religious conversions and the responses they elicited bore unique, political significance,” fueled by public debates about authenticity (pp. 10–11). While some Americans accepted these conversions, however unexpected, as modern embodiments of classic religious and patriotic ideals, others worried about manipulation. Davis begins with the politician and writer Claire Boothe Luce and her 1946 conversion to Roman Catholicism. While Catholic faith eased Luce's personal struggles, she also worked with the prominent cleric Fulton J. Sheen to contend for its democratizing power against communism. The second chapter profiles conversions of ex-Communists such as Whittaker Chambers to “redemptive Christianity and heterosexual monogamy,” the latter offering skeptical public evidence of authentic transformation (p. 44). Complicating compelling conversions, however, were the discomforting cases of dishonest ex-Communists such as Harvey Matusow and the American prisoners of war in North Korea who declined to return stateside in 1954, both the subject of chapter 3.