Surge of Piety : Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life / Christopher Lane.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lane, Christopher, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Peale, Norman Vincent, 1898-1993.

Peale, Norman Vincent.

Religion--United States--History--20th century.

Religion.

United States.

Reformed Church in America--Clergy--Biography.

Reformed Church in America.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (221 pages)

Place of Publication:

New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, [2016]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

The dramatic untold story of how Norman Vincent Peale and a handful of conservative allies fueled the massive rise of religiosity in the United States during the 1950s Near the height of Cold War hysteria, when the threat of all-out nuclear war felt real and perilous, American minister Norman Vincent Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking. Selling millions of copies worldwide, the book offered a gospel of self-assurance in an age of mass anxiety. Despite Peale's success and his ties to powerful conservatives such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, J. Edgar Hoover, and Joseph McCarthy, the full story of his movement has never been told. Christopher Lane shows how the famed minister's brand of Christian psychology inflamed the nation's religious revival by promoting the concept that belief in God was essential to the health and harmony of all Americans. We learn in vivid detail how Peale and his powerful supporters orchestrated major changes in a nation newly defined as living "under God." This blurring of the lines between religion and medicine would reshape religion as we know it in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

I. Religio-Psychiatry Arrives in New York

II. On the Couch with Freud

III. From Acute Shyness to "World Conquest"

IV. The Peale-Hoover-Eisenhower Empire

V. Psychiatry Goes to Church

VI. Religion and Mental Health Rebalanced

Coda. Faith as an Ongoing Force

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Feb 2020)

ISBN:

0-300-20373-X

0-300-22527-X

OCLC:

961456427