During the 20th century, some prominent Americans underwent a religious conversion that became integral to the narrative of their lives. The figures selected for this study list heavily to the right, to homophobia and patriotism. This pastiche examines society's political perception of public conversions but little of the religious journey of conversion. Davis (history, Univ. of Delaware) identifies this phenomenon as conservative Christian ecumenism in the Republican Party. In the 1940s and 1950s, the fashionable Clare Booth Luce and the bland Whitaker Chambers had little in common except their anti-Communism and conviction that liberals were fellow travelers. Conversion, with its sense of authenticity and belonging within a community of believers, became an ideological antiseptic for former Communists such as Chambers and Louis Budenz. When Sammy Davis Jr. converted to Judaism, he said his new faith best expressed and affirmed what he already believed. Muhammad Ali defied a white establishment's expectations of what it felt a good boxer should be. Being Muslim meant being an outsider--until it did not--and George W. Bush gave Ali the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005. Chuck Colson held that individual redemption was the key to national renewal. A darling of the right, he began a vigorous prisoners' ministry without leaving neo-liberalism, military power, and patriarchy. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Daniel A. Brown, emeritus, California State University, Fullerton

Historian Davis (More Perfect Unions) wows with this sterling history of mid-20th-century religious conversions and the social issues surrounding them. Clare Boothe Luce, a playwright and Connecticut congresswoman, argued in the wake of her 1946 conversion to Catholicism that only that faith would work as a bulwark against "the infectious thrall" of communism. Cold War dichotomies propelled Alger Hiss's accuser, Whittaker Chambers, to renounce communism for Quakerism--and Davis also stresses how his conversion papered over his homosexuality. Harvey Matusow, "a staggeringly prolific government informant" who admitted to fabricating lies about prominent media figures being Communist Party members, joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and, Davis contends, "embodied the modern American search for a religious 'identity' as an object of adult self-knowledge." She also details the racism Sammy Davis Jr. experienced after his conversion to Judaism, as well as how Muhammad Ali's joining the Nation of Islam caused rumors that he'd been brainwashed. Davis creates a propulsive image of American life in her depiction of "how religion mattered to democracy, mass culture, and authentic identity" during a time of many highly publicized conversions. This impressive work captures a fraught period in American political and religious history with a clear eye and insightful reasoning. (Oct.)