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Elesha Coffman, Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics. By Rebecca L. Davis, Journal of Church and State, Volume 64, Issue 4, Autumn 2022, Pages 766–768, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/csac061
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It could be the beginning of a joke: Clare Boothe Luce, Whittaker Chambers, Sammy Davis Jr., Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, and Chuck Colson walk into a monograph. While sprightly and occasionally wry, however, Rebecca Davis’s book Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics is no joke. Rather, it is a confident, creative tour through some of the most interesting public religion stories in post-World War II American history. Each of these famous figures, and more who pop up in the book’s six compact chapters, chose to change his or her religion. Members of the wider public cheered or scoffed; the converts experienced some combination of liberation, torment, success, professional disaster, new community, or alienation. Unsurprisingly, white men who converted to conservative Protestantism had smoother sailing than women, people of color, or Americans who chose other religious traditions.
Davis tells the individual stories deftly, but she also aims to paint a big picture. As she writes in the prologue, “Far beyond their importance to particular religious traditions or as life events for the individuals concerned, these conversions galvanized associations between spiritual, sexual, racial, and political authenticity” (p. 11). Americans reacted to high-profile conversions because they felt that they, as citizens, had a stake in the religious makeup of the nation. Which faiths should enjoy the approbation that came with celebrity adherence? How much religious diversity could the republic accommodate? And, if religious identity was mutable, was stability possible for society or even the self? These questions were especially salient as the United States lurched through decades marked by McCarthyism, civil rights activism, feminism, foreign wars, and political party realignment.
