Table Of ContentPublic Confessions
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Public Confessions The
Religious Conversions
That Changed American
Politics
Rebecca L. Davis
The UniversiTy of
norTh Carolina Press
Chapel Hill
© 2021 Rebecca L. Davis
All rights reserved
Set in Miller and Walbaum types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Manufactured in the United States of America
The University of North Carolina Press has been a member
of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
Jacket photographs: (left to right) White House Special Counsel Chuck Colson,
ca. 1969. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; Claire Boothe Luce speaking at
Republican National Convention, 1944. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection; and Muhammad Ali at a
National Islam meeting, 1966. Photo © Roger Malloch / Magnum Photos.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Davis, Rebecca L. (Rebecca Louise), 1975– author.
Title: Public confessions : the religious conversions that changed
American politics / Rebecca L. Davis.
Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2021] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lCCn 2021010003 | isBn 9781469664873 (cloth) |
isBn 9781469664880 (ebook)
Subjects: lCsh: Conversion—History—20th century. | Religion and
politics—United States—History—20th century. | United States—
Politics and government—20th century.
Classification: lCC Bl2525 .D4235 2021 | DDC 322/.10973—dc23
lC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010003
Portions of chapter 4 first appeared in American Jewish History 100, no. 1
(January 2016): 25–50. Copyright © 2016 The American Jewish Historical
Society.
Letter from Erich Fromm to Thomas Merton quoted with permission
of the Thomas Merton Center and the Erich Fromm literary estate.
For Jonathan and Hannah
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Contents
PrologUe
Faith in Democracy 1
ChaPTer 1
A Catholic Message for America 12
ChaPTer 2
Cold War Disclosures 43
ChaPTer 3
The Fear of False Belief 67
ChaPTer 4
A Kind of Oneness with the Jewish People 92
ChaPTer 5
I Know the Truth 121
ChaPTer 6
Redemption 143
ePilogUe
Authentic Politics, Passing Faiths 175
Acknowledgments 181
Notes 187
Bibliography 211
Index 243
Figures
Clare Boothe Luce, 1944 15
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, 1952 23
Clare Boothe Luce in McCall’s, 1947 33
Elizabeth Bentley, 1951 50
Whittaker Chambers, 1948 53
Marilyn Monroe’s certificate of conversion, 1956 97
Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher,
with Rabbi Nussbaum, 1959 101
Sammy Davis Jr. and May Britt, 1960 108
Muhammad Ali at the annual Saviour’s Day
celebration in Chicago, 1974 140
Susan Atkins at her trial, 1969 144
Poster for the Born Again film, 1978 164
Prologue Faith in
Democracy
Picture the scene: The towers of Rockefeller Center cloak the gray stones
of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in afternoon shadow as a car slows to a stop by
the curb. Clare Boothe Luce, an acclaimed playwright, member of Con-
gress, and wife of publisher Henry Luce, alights. Fashionably lean and
expensively attired, she ascends several steps to a small plaza and passes
through a massive bronze door. On this Saturday in February 1946, a few
weeks shy of her forty-t hird birthday, she stands on the threshold of a new
chapter in her storied but privately troubled life. She has experienced too
much loss to be idealistic, but she now believes in redemption, for herself
and for the world. Pain and hope led her to this cathedral and to the man
facing her. In moments he will cast out her demons, consecrate her con-
version, and baptize her a Roman Catholic.
Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen is as meticulously clothed and coiffed as
Luce is. A silk skullcap covers his immovable black hair; his deep- set
eyes seem to blaze with intensity. For occasions such as this Sheen wears
his formal vestments: a floor- length black cassock and a long, narrow
stole that drapes downward from his shoulders. Famous for converting
ex- Communists, several world-r enowned musicians, and business titans
including Henry Ford II, Sheen is minutes away from his most celebrated
conversion of all. Luce and Sheen: even their names glow.1
Clare Boothe Luce was one of the most admired women in the mid-
twentieth- century United States, even if little remembered after her
death in 1987. Her actions that February day at St. Patrick’s Cathedral
made international news. Conversion to Roman Catholicism from Prot-
estantism was the consequence of her most intimate struggles, but she
and Sheen deliberately transformed it into a public confession of political
resolve. At a time when a majority of Americans suspected Roman Catho-
1
lics of being unpatriotic, 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.
To her critics, Clare Luce’s Catholic conversion was outrageous. It was
especially audacious coming from the wife of Henry Luce, the notably
Presbyterian son of missionaries and the publisher of Time, Life, and For-
tune. Surely, Clare was the victim of nefarious, authoritarian priests who
co- opted her free will. The barrage of irate letters she received in response
to the announcement of her conversion—an announcement she ampli-
fied in an article published across three spring issues of McCall’s maga-
zine in 1947—indicated how much her public expression of personal faith
pushed the acceptable boundaries of religious identity. So hostile were
so many of these letters that she even lost a deal with McCall’s to write a
regular advice column. The vitriol directed at Clare Luce presaged the up-
heaval that greeted other controversial religious converts in the decades
after World War II.
The religious conversions of certain well-k nown writers, entertainers,
athletes, and politicians elicited frenzied responses. The importance of
these conversions extended beyond questions of why certain faiths ap-
pealed to a particular individual or how believers experienced their spiri-
tual journeys. Some notable converts described how they discovered their
“real” self when they changed or discovered religion. Others spoke of
spiritual transformations. In doing so, they offered ways for other people
to imagine the outer limits of self- invention. Yet religious conversions
in the decades after World War II equally raised fears as well as hopes.
They provoked unsettling questions about the survival of individual au-
tonomy amid a seeming surge of mass conformity. Had a person truly
transformed, or were they “passing” or even brainwashed?2
Consider the example of Whittaker Chambers, a former Soviet spy.
Chambers rose to national notoriety in 1948, when he identified Alger
Hiss, a former State Department official with a sterling reputation, as
a member of the Communist underground. Over two trials that became
emblematic of domestic anti- Communist fervor, Hiss swore that he had
no connection to Communist espionage activities, but he was found guilty
of perjury and spent eight years in prison. For his part, Chambers cred-
ited his newly adopted Christian faith with inspiring not only his rejec-
tion of Communism but also, he privately confessed, the end of his sexual
interest in men. Liberals who defended Hiss were unconvinced. They cir-
culated rumors that Chambers was a “queer” and sought proof that his
2 Prologue
