Abstract
Religious conversion once commanded much scholarly attention in the sociology of religion. The seemingly massive appeals of the so-called “cults” or “new religious movements” to young people triggered a good number of excellent sociological studies, followed by some careful examinations of dropouts, returnees, and switchers across conventional religions or Christian denominations. Since the 1970s, however, much of academia and mass media have been preoccupied with the resurgence of fundamentalist Christians or the broader Religious Right in American politics. As a result, the phenomenon of born-again Christians is rarely studied in reference to the literature of religious conversion. In this regard, Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics, by historian Rebecca L. Davis, makes an important contribution in profiling some celebrities and famous individuals in their conversions to diverse religions, including Roman Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, and Evangelical Christianity.
The book begins with a description of individuals who wrestled with Communism (which has religion-like features), Roman Catholicism, and Protestant Christianity in the 1930s to the 1950s, moves on to storytelling about Black and White celebrities converting to Judaism or Islam in the 1960s, and ends with portraying some born-again Christians since the 1970s. The Prologue opens with a vivid description of the conversion of Clare Boothe Luce in February 1946. “Pain and hope led her to this cathedral and to the man facing her. In moments he will cast out her demons, consecrate her conversion, and baptize her a Roman Catholic” (p. 1). The man of the cloth was Fulton J. Sheen, a well-known Catholic priest, who became a bishop later. Clare Luce was an acclaimed playwright, one of the seven female members of Congress, and the wife of Henry Luce, the founder of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines who was a Presbyterian born to missionary parents in China.
Clare Luce’s highly publicized conversion to Roman Catholicism happened in a time when Protestantism was still the cultural establishment in the United States. However, anti-Communist campaigns reduced the sectarian tensions between Protestants and Catholics. “Sheen and Luce insisted that their faith provided the best defense against Communist persuasion. They argued that the truths of Roman Catholic theology upheld democracy” (p. 2). Meanwhile, Protestant preachers “argued that Christianity was humanity’s last buffer against the rising Communist tide” (p. 24). Indeed, that extends to Judaism as well. “Starting in the 1930s, members of interfaith coalitions argued that Jews, Catholics, and Protestants shared ‘Judeo-Christian’ values. Those values helped forge American democracy; American democracy likewise depended on a defense of the freedom of conscience” (pp. 4–5).
Following Chapter One on Clare Luce, titled “A Catholic Message for America,” Chapter Two, “Cold War Disclosures,” examines the conversions of Whittaker Chambers along with several other former Communists and Soviet spies. Chambers was born into a Quaker family, joined the Communist Party in the 1920s, and engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. However, the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 became the last proof for Chambers and others that Soviet-style Communism inevitably devolved into totalitarianism. It drove him against Communism, and he began to expose Soviet spies in the U.S. government.
Chambers was baptized into an Episcopal church in New York and eventually wandered back to a Quaker community in Maryland. In his autobiography Witness, published in 1952, Chambers explains that religious conversion saved him and faith in God empowered him to escape the Communist underground and build a new life as a writer and family man. “When ex-Communist authors described journeys into and out of Communism, they traced a pattern of conversion and apostasy. They ‘converted’ to Communism because Communism itself constituted a totalizing, religion-like worldview, the writings of Marx substituting for the Bible as a sacred text” (p. 44). “These ex-Communist narratives described faith as instrumental to the decision to abandon Communism; the authors derived strength from God to resist the party’s hold” (p. 45). The author notes that sociologist Will Herberg had a similar conversion away from Communism, ended up back with Judaism, and then articulated the shared values of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew in 1955. These are important points that have become rarely seen in the more recent literature.
Davis also highlights how Whittaker Chambers played a key role in taking down Alger Hiss, who had been a high official in the State Department and an elite supporter of the New Deal. Hiss was accused of spying for the Soviet Union and eventually sentenced for perjury. At times, the author seems sympathetic toward Hiss as a leftist, while discrediting Chambers for his conservatism and the hiding of his gay sexuality before his conversion. Overall, the Communist threats seem to be largely written off by the author as exaggerated fears played up under the witch-hunts of the McCarthy era. As far as I can tell, this tendency of denial has indeed become common in academia, especially since the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Following the line of Francis Fukuyama’s “the end of history,” many academicians in the United States appear to believe that Communist ideology, even if it was dangerous, evaporated at the end of the Cold War, even though one-fifth of the world’s population has remained under the iron grip of a Communist Party that is indeed totalitarian with a global reach, and its threats to liberal democracies have increased in recent years.
Clearly following a leftist line, Chapters Three through Five are framed in terms of race, gender, and sexuality and are critical of conservative religious coalitions in American politics. The framing issue or biased political position aside, it is actually interesting to read about Black entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. and White celebrities Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor converting from Protestantism to Judaism in the 1960s, Black boxer Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali to Islam (the Nation of Islam in particular, although later he changed to Sunni Islam) in the 1960s, and Chuck Colson (a former advisor of President Richard Nixon) and several others to Evangelical Protestantism in the 1970s. These highly publicized conversions variously attracted and repelled many people, as described by the author. As time goes on, however, it has become accepted by the American public as normal for Americans to convert to these and other religions. The author details the initial disbelief of Ali’s conversion by his own father and the media. Eventually, however, Davis admits that “Ali represented the greatness of American athleticism and the strength of American religious freedom when he lit the Olympic torch in 1996 in Atlanta” (p. 176). Given the eventual acceptance or affirmation of Muhammad Ali by the American public, I think it is right to say that religious freedom in the United States has in fact been enlarged to be inclusive of various religions. As a matter of fact, the anti-cult paranoia also died down by the 1990s.
Religion in America has changed greatly in the twentieth century. In recent years, a significant proportion of Americans have given up self-identification with any religion. Which secularisms have substituted for their past religion? How much has Communism or militant atheism crept up on American society or politics again? What about religious conversions in other parts of the world, especially in post-Communist Eastern Europe and the rapidly developing economies of East and Southeast Asia? This historical study serves as a call for scholars to carry out more objective, unbiased, social scientific studies of conversion across religions and religion-like secularisms in the United States and around the globe.