Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life

How did Norman Vincent Peale’s blockbuster bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking capture the hearts and minds of millions of Americans, reshaping the nation’s spiritual landscape?

Near the height of Cold War hysteria, when the threat of all-out nuclear war felt real and perilous, the American minister 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 “religio-psychiatric” clinic and movement has never been told. Award-winning scholar 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 fueled a massive rise of religiosity and religious nationalism by orchestrating major changes in a nation newly defined as living “under God.” This blurring of the lines between religion and medicine would reshape religion and the self-help movement as we know them in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.