“I feel real funny inside”: The Emotional Script of Evangelical Childhood Conversion in the Age of the Nuclear Bomb and Therapeutic Psychology

Abstract

Drawing on foundational work in the history of emotions, this article explores the significance of evangelical children’s search for salvation in postwar America. Reading midcentury denominational publications and children’s letters through an affective lens, this article asks how emotion, not merely belief, made evangelical childhoods. As evangelical communities passed down a conversion script teaching their children what to feel and how to feel it, kids found themselves caught between the horrors of the bomb, traditions that invoked religious fear, and the gathering force of therapeutic psychology that sought to cultivate feelings of well-being. While evangelical adults imagined that kids who lacked assurance of salvation were experiencing a problem of belief, I argue that children’s doubts exposed tensions inherent in the emotional script of conversion. These enduring tensions took on new significance in the age of the therapeutic, as the pursuit of inner peace emerged as a challenger to more transcendent claims of salvation as peace with God. Thus, even as the children of the 1950s and 1960s tried their best to follow a tried-and-true conversion script, their search for proper feelings recast the meaning of salvation itself and subtly aligned evangelicalism with the new therapeutic self of postwar America.