Isocrates once said that “the argument which is made by a man’s life is of more weight than that which is furnished by words.”[1] Threading together lives with words, in postwar U.S. politics advocates and movements have used a communication strategy with a long history—the conversion narrative. The presence of conversion stories in politics reveals their persistence as a persuasive form. Influencing top government figures, these stories have even been instrumental in the creation of public policies. My purpose has been to ascertain how public discourse might be broadened or constrained by the features and functions of political conversion stories. Exploring several prominent autobiographies led to a conclusion that political conversion narratives are largely propagandistic, anti-deliberative forms of rhetoric assuming various guises in public affairs.
Propaganda is most free to cast its spells in our lives when we lose sight of how rhetoric works. Indeed, Longinus once stated that “no [rhetorical] figure is more excellent than the one which is entirely hidden, so that it is no longer recognized as a figure.”[2] Similarly, conversion texts model persuasive ideas and practices for audiences in tricky, unobvious ways. The features of conversion rhetoric tend to do such a comprehensive job of making one’s politics a foregone conclusion that little space is left for human agency or argument. In other words, these texts challenge the very concept of deliberation through their respective methods of communication. A polarized and polarizing, extreme left to right rhetoric (and vice versa) tends to proceed from conversion stories,[3] explaining why there do not appear to be many stories in public affairs titled, for instance, “the political transformation of an ex-moderate.”
Conversion narratives also speak to the workings of religious and secular discourses in modern societies. They negotiate the lines between church and state by using a traditionally powerful religious form while only providing general nods toward specific religious sentiments in the public arena. Public figures have double-coded their rhetoric in this manner in attempts to improve their images, justify a monumental identity change, and make their political work more effective. A number of implications follow from the body of work examined in the preceding chapters.
To develop an interlocking vocabulary and a set of criteria for dealing with conversion narratives and similar stories, I identified several themes emerging across this book’s cases. By teasing out these rhetorical operations—and, as Wills’s case suggests, some ways in which they might be bypassed—we learn how networks of converts can influence our public culture as well as the standards that can be used to evaluate these types of messages as public arguments.
The books of Chambers, Podhoretz, and Horowitz demonstrate that conversion narratives work with other rhetorical devices and resources in ways that have not yet been deeply explored. Conversion rhetoric merges with these textual devices to create discourses whose qualities can be considered greater than the sum of their parts. Morgan Marietta writes that “while it is an important normative point that all arguments reduce in the end to value justifications, it is an important empirical point that some arguments arrive there more quickly and immovably than others.”[4] This book’s cases highlight such examples of absolutist, immovable public arguments in varying guises. They ultimately use the structure of the conversion form to amplify other textual features toward totalizing ends.
Chambers uses the conversion form to reinforce conspiracy rhetoric, for example, putting his political conversion and the vast context of his life experience in the service of unsupported assertions. The sheer length of his story allows him to gloss over a wealth of needed detail in support of his conspiracy claims. In the end, the structured conversion experience gives authority to these random speculations, making the convert a bearer of special knowledge in a way that cannot be confirmed or argued against. Similarly, Podhoretz spends so much of his narrative criticizing his opponents’ type of communication that he rarely addresses their actual complaints. The conversion narrative works with a civil persona that relieves the author of considering others’ claims of injustice while providing support for his own conclusions. Horowitz further crosses conversion between an old and a new life with devices such as maturity to herald his adult authority while diverting the reader from his opponents’ claims, dividing others’ childish status from the convert’s credibility.
The all-encompassing workings of political conversion discourses show how textual form and content can interact to create ideologies. Dan Hahn reminds us that rhetorical form is often overlooked as a persuasive commitment to “certain ways of thinking, of viewing the world . . . that are not necessarily implied by the substance of the discourse.”[5] The conversion form directs content in particular ways and urges audiences to repeat its structure in their own rhetoric. This book has illustrated that figures also look to the evidence of their contexts, to the paths traveled by other converts, for forms to follow and adapt. On the other hand, that Garry Wills, who was implicated in the same social circles as the other three authors, managed to think through and avoid conversion rhetoric’s absolutist pressures illustrates that breaks can be made in these networks of influence.
Generally speaking, this book’s first three case studies typified political conversions analogous to three modern modes of religious thought: deduction, reduction, and induction. Outside political spheres, religionists have themselves developed different strands of conversion rhetoric in denominational histories. David Hempton finds that varying conversion forms have played out within Christian practices, for instance: “Moravian conversion narratives, as befitted the roots of the tradition in late medieval piety, are more quietist and agonistic” than “Methodist conversions,” which are “characterized by charismatic joy and spontaneous ecstasy.”[6] The three general types of political conversion in this book’s first three cases similarly emphasize the variety of forms and divergent methods of argument that these tales may take.
In colloquial terms, Chambers’s deductive political conversion narrative is a wolf in wolf’s clothing, asserting an overt transcendent vision that has little place for reason and reasonability in public discourse. Podhoretz’s case, however, is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. By asserting a public concern for intellectualism and public debate, his rhetoric would seem to make an important contribution to public discourse. But the narrative exhibits propagandistic qualities, even by its own standards, with Podhoretz elevating an onslaught of self-referential expertise unaccountable to others.[7]
By contrast, Horowitz’s narrative is a wolf in ewe’s clothing, co-opting feminist and standpoint rhetorics to serve his conservative cause. Like Podhoretz, Horowitz engages in seemingly deliberative terms like reflexivity. Yet when these terms are put in the service of a unidirectional conversion, the narrative’s anti-deliberative qualities emerge more clearly. As such, although there are various modes that these narratives may take, each text ultimately asserts an a priori public vision that admits little place for new knowledge or others under its form, constructing concepts like reason and reflexivity under an anti-communicative framework.
In the three different modes of religious thought that the autobiographies parallel, each story has specific views about the relationship between reason and emotion, highlighting how differing contexts might constrain how conversion stories can be told. Between reason and emotion, Chambers lands far more on emotion’s side. Podhoretz uses a dichotomy between reason and emotion in Breaking Ranks (BR) that mostly frames his conversion in terms of reason. Horowitz’s turn to experience is very much an attempt to bridge this dichotomy, or transcend it, so that reason is not opposed to emotion. While Podhoretz distances himself from 1960s rhetoric, Horowitz uses it to make his case. Many movements of the 1960s were, sociologically speaking, efforts to recover the whole human person.[8] Feminists reacted to the split that gendered and compartmentalized public understandings of these phenomena—for example, that men operated in the realm of reason while women acted purely on emotion. There is a sense in which many student antiwar activists responded to this gendered dichotomy, too, as a division highlighting the technocratic realism and government expertise that originally gave the Vietnam War momentum.[9] Whether conscious about it or not, Horowitz in his conversion story appropriates some 1960s movement rhetoric to build the narrative’s inductive guise in his 1990s context.
The degree to which Chambers and Horowitz use certain kinds of experience as evidence also appears to influence their choice of conversion types within their respective contexts. Chambers’s story was told at a time when the generational issues that Horowitz identifies were not as current. Chambers also does not rely upon the psychological rhetoric of the self in the same way as Horowitz, instead fashioning a Manichaean form well suited to his Cold War environment. Political conversions can thus exhibit unique characteristics in responding to different situational demands.
Political conversion narratives tend to undermine public communication by locating knowledge deep inside or outside human beings. The authors’ implicit theories of human communication elevate internal experiences or external motives to such a high degree that public communication processes are marginalized—a problem that Wills’s book brings into even sharper focus. The autobiographies of Chambers, Podhoretz, and Horowitz place little faith in communication to effect political change, constructing valid decision making almost wholly in terms of inner personal experiences or outer spiritual forces. Robert Asen says that models of the public sphere should not assume “a subject with a fixed set of desires that cannot be modified through dialogue.”[10] Political conversion narratives tend to assume fixed outcomes in advance and are more about discovering internal and external essences to be adhered to than the creation of tentative political truths.
Chambers attacks the use of one’s intellect from a variety of angles. His autobiography is made part of a deterministic, divine master plan, and he uses nature as a rhetorical resource to transfigure the material world in terms of a dualistic spiritual realm making human speech unnecessary. Through a fateful vision promoting civic escapism, Chambers loses faith in human communication. By implying that intuition is superior to human reasoning, Chambers suggests that interlocutors best communicate with signs rather than symbols. In Witness, symbols exist solely to be aligned with “true” or “correct” courses of action. At the same time, one’s self-sealed inner experience guides public affairs, as prefigured under transcendent realities.
In a much trickier way, Podhoretz undermines public communication by using the conversion form to cast high intellectual standards as axiomatic. Ideas exist as immutably prior to and beyond the variability of the political realm, so that reason becomes an expert-driven, technical concept to which only a special few have access. Podhoretz prioritizes reason to rein in participatory politics, asking citizens to defer to those who have the time to think about political issues rather than those who act impulsively. BR necessitates an association between intellectualism and the telling of the convert tale, tying reason to the authenticity of one’s confession—so much that presentations of genuineness become more important than one’s reasons. At critical points in BR where we might expect the author to stop attacking others and discuss their views, little discussion ensues. Just as Dave Tell finds that modern, secular practices of “confession” often forgo a faith in rhetoric, illustrating how for many communicators, “the depths of the self are too personal and too real to be adequately disclosed through the conventions of speech,”[11] the conversion form forgoes much of the intellectual reasoning that the narrative expects.
More about independently finding one’s way from wrong to right universal criteria than collaboratively creating standards for the public good, Podhoretz narrows conceptions of human rhetoric, castigating a variety of practices—such as the diatribe—in favor of strict civility in all matters. The reductive conversion form works to reduce the messages of Podhoretz’s opponents to a paradoxical form of public expression: characterizing others as recklessly expressive as well as mute, effectively incapacitating others as undeveloped persons who are yet to become civil advocates who can be taken seriously (a framing that the author shares with Horowitz, although the latter takes the resource to a whole other level). Podhoretz further narrows deliberative space by arguing that attitude without content is bad and that dissenters who think that they know the truth are also bad—either way, only the convert comes out a winner.
Rather than engage in reasoning with others, Horowitz asks his readers to turn exclusively inward for insights about public affairs. Radical Son’s (RS) conversion structure and Horowitz’s understanding of reflexivity reflect a self-focused rhetoric that skirts public reason as a route to knowledge, instead taking issue with others for failing to look inside themselves. Horowitz’s maturity rhetoric is anything but forward-looking, however. Public deliberation involves a general understanding that the future can be changed through speech. But RS’s psychological language and reduction of opponents’ actions to an apolitical status—that is, as guided by deeply intransigent motives akin to biological diseases rather than reasoned opinions—forgoes such change. This psychologizing links an abnormal psychology of the Left to “fate,” while proposing that a conservative conversion involves a newfound agency. The narrative’s attributions of one’s reflexive ability or inability are deliberatively crippling, with the author maintaining that there is little point in dealing with the reasons of others who lack reflexivity.
American individualism has long threatened public discourse.[12] RS promotes individualism by asserting that the purpose of debate is a conversion in which politics begins and ends with one’s experience. From his work on religious activism, Jason Bivins concludes that “if one thing is central to the vitality of a democracy, it is that the contest over the issues and decisions of import to its citizens be continuous.”[13] Political conversions work to prevent this kind of endless argumentation. In these stories, experience and reality present themselves to human beings as simply factual and unmediated and therefore beyond the reach of public reason and reasonability.
In the end, political conversion narratives fail to account for the experiences of others, which do not necessarily need to be validated but might at least be addressed. Chambers characterizes left-wing intellectuals as shrieking birds (via its use of nature rhetoric), Podhoretz reduces leftists to mere shouters, and Horowitz reduces the same figures’ actions to simple psychological impulses. The individual, narrative, and psychological life experiences of others who hold contrary views are outside each conversion story’s scope. Without the possibility of being informed by others, the texts ultimately implicate social and political resignation.
We should be willing to give each author the benefit of the doubt that he had a genuine change of heart, based on an examination of his earlier life experiences. However, a problem with political conversion stories is that they tend to align these developmental standards with political positions. Each autobiography conflates the process of coming to new beliefs with a developmental end state, so that what Chambers, Podhoretz, and Horowitz mean by deliberation is a conclusion that one has already reached. In both biology and thinking, one has fully developed so that no further growth or learning about politics is necessary.
While reflection and experience can certainly constitute good reasons in the public square, they are not the only forms of knowledge. Part of maturity is seeing that one’s experience is also idiosyncratic, so that this knowledge needs to be tested against the larger, diverse social and material truths of the world. Each narrative essentially asserts: “I remember only those parts of my experience that lead me to where I am now, and I forget the other parts that complicate the picture.” Wills, on the other hand, widens political space through a text emphasizing rhetorical processes, human conventions, endless argumentation, and expansive identity rhetorics. If, as Thomas Farrell writes, “a rhetorical culture is an institutional formation in which motives of competing parties are intelligible, audiences available, expressions reciprocal, norms translatable, and silences noticeable,”[14] the way that people envision communication becomes critical to establishing the very conditions for public deliberation.
Political conversion stories are double-coded messages that negotiate church–state tensions. They give advocates a way to communicate in an evangelical fashion without bearing the costs that overt religious expression can carry in public. As mentioned, the authors use a conversion form that has been historically resonant with religious and secular audiences, making general nods toward faith beliefs to maintain a slight threshold of religious commitment while submerging specific religious content[15]—which many U.S. audiences find ill fitting for political discourse.[16] Political conversion narratives can thus function as forms of “invisible religion,”[17] promoting civil-religious behaviors fit for the U.S. context.[18]
While Chambers, Podhoretz, and Horowitz share a civil-religious strategy, the degree to which faith is advanced or submerged in each analysis varies. Chambers is the most explicit about his Christianity but still constructs a quasi-religious tale that is more about a generalized Manichaean universe, of good and God, rather than the articulation of specific tenets of the Christian faith. His prefiguring rhetoric additionally associates the progressive revelation characterized in the Old and New Testaments with a political-religious conversion. Podhoretz maintains a respect for “first and last things” in his narrative but does not go beyond this thin description to advance his intellectualism and non-fanaticism. Horowitz remains an agnostic in his faith but embeds religious messages throughout his conversion tale, such as references to New Testament verses and biblical figures. Despite the different degrees of civic or religious rhetoric, each author plays both sides of the civil-religious fence.
Curiously, Chambers, Podhoretz, and Horowitz compare their former paradigms to a false religion (and, in Chambers’s case, the use of one’s mind to a false religion) and their former colleagues to religious fanatics. The authors imply that any bad connotations about religion are entirely on their opponents. Podhoretz even uses “conversion” in a pejorative sense to talk about the change undertaken by his opponents while he advances his own political conversion. The writers claim a minimal threshold of religiosity to appeal to religious audiences but also frame their opponents as faith-driven fanatics in order not to appear too religious in their politics.
Via this strategy, converts can be everything to everyone. The authors infer that whatever religion the political convert still holds to involves true religious beliefs. The conversion narrative’s directionality and realism bear upon these beliefs by forcing divides between true or false religion/politics. Chambers, for instance, uses the conversion form to dichotomize political issues into an ambiguously religious and nonreligious framework, promoting developments such as the contemporary religious Right. Wills should not be considered the panacea to all the problems of conversion stories. Inasmuch as he sought a politics of convention over redemption, however, he was also the most explicit in discussing his own faith and the potential role of religion in the public square. Compared with the other writers, Wills tended to put his cards on the table more often than not in these matters.
Overall, the case studies teach us about the quiet power of religion in public life. To reiterate, a conclusion that these are civil-religious narratives is not intended to invoke a framework of legal determinism, where such accounts might be seen to follow strictly from founding documents or legal doctrines such as the disestablishment clause. It is to argue that such narratives are the outgrowth of a whole panoply of cultural performances in American history (of which founding texts and legal doctrines are certainly a part), where communicators have attempted to meet official and unofficial, paradoxical expectations over the roles of church and state in public discourse.
One of the more curious results from this project has been how, across the first three case studies, political converts paradoxically testify to both immense change and consistency in their public transformation. Wills also testifies to both consistency and change but largely to play with the ambiguities, contradictions, and paradoxes that such claims tend to manifest rather than as a natural, linear outgrowth of a principled and consistent past life. Looking back at their lives, converts perceive the end as already written at the beginning. Chambers, in particular, argues that his conversion was already prefigured in many of his past actions. Prefiguring creates a double pardon for the convert’s life, so that one can communicate that he or she never changed but also underwent a grand change. Similarly, Podhoretz uses the conversion form to tidy up contradictions and flatten out inconsistencies or inconveniences in his story.[19] Horowitz’s maturity and growth rhetoric further advocate that his political development was toward known ends. Hence, while political conversion autobiographies tend to assert a rhetoric of variability, the deeper conversion structure defines this variation in terms of change to only one option. This conversion strategy evades choice or innovation by asserting one’s conversion to a “new” life as a foregone conclusion—evidencing a complex, prefigured rhetoric of new choices. If the future is known in this way, there is little point in deliberating about it.
On one level, this type of discourse highlights another double-coding strategy. The conversion form frames the authors as experienced leaders at the forefront of public affairs, as well as marginalized, countercultural advocates.[20] Political conversion is one means by which “counter publicity” (or elite claims to oppression that co-opt the messages of socioeconomically disadvantaged groups) can be created.[21]
On another level, political converts maintain both consistency and change to deal with audience objections about political transformation. In U.S. culture, being “consistent” is a valued quality,[22] and changing one’s views, or “flip-flopping,” is often seen as evidence of self-interest or being unprincipled.[23] Chambers, Podhoretz, and Horowitz imply that as long as converts flop to the right side they should avoid these charges, and the conversion form’s religious undertones are recruited in this effort—absolving one’s political sins so that a grand change can be justified in the public sphere. Some claim that conservative victories in U.S. politics have been partly due to the movement’s narrative victories,[24] and conversion stories have likely contributed to this trend by constructing a totalizing structure incorporating both consistency and change.
Converts ultimately gain by embodying both sides of a political argument. As discussed, Horowitz’s maturity terms appeal to both the “strict parent” and “nurturant parent” frameworks that lie at the heart of U.S. liberal and conservative worldviews.[25] Horowitz’s use of both paradigms helps explain why he was the political activist to invent terms such as “compassionate conservatism” for Republicans, which simultaneously appeals to strict and nurturing frames. The bifurcated conversion form contributes to the formation of such double-coded rhetoric by straddling yet transcending old and new political languages to create a discourse incorporating both, while still serving a single political cause.
The larger the political chasm one crosses, the larger the potential for public praise or scorn. It can be risky when former supporters of a party, politician, or issue write a book providing alternative points of view, examples of which are not hard to find.[26] In such situations, the political conversion narrative offers an opportunity to maintain consistency and change but, as this book’s cases illustrate, typically at the price of asserting a certain type of polarized and polarizing rhetoric in public affairs.
The first three cases in this book revealed other paradoxical demands: asserting a complex, quantitative onslaught of various types of experience into politics, while also advancing reductionist, bifurcated discourses chaining out from the conversion form. Chambers’s dualism promotes what I term a “complex dichotomy,” where dogmatic arguments appear more intricate than warranted. At each turn, Chambers draws stark black and white divides reflecting the binaries of his conversion from an old to a new conservative Christian life, the political battle between East versus West, and, more largely, a Manichaean battle between good and evil. Given Chambers’s approximately 800-page journey, a lot of these black and white arguments about the nature of reality appear as complex, well-reasoned positions.
Podhoretz crafts a complex conversion tale by creating an impression that his messages avoid the simple binary conclusions attributed to his former colleagues’ practices. Following the conversion form’s bifurcating emphases, though, Podhoretz strains to classify any and all human agency that the political Left may evince as blindness and ignorance. Horowitz, too, uses the conversion form to dichotomize the Left and the Right on these matters across a series of divides between the old and the new, the concrete and the abstract, and conservative wisdom in the past versus what he perceives as liberal utopias about the future.
As a bifurcated experience between two poles of existence, the conversion form is therefore particularly amenable to the U.S. political context, which has almost always been based on a two-party system of government. As a type of rhetoric reinforcing this divide, conversion narratives tend to foreclose third and more options. The conversion form’s dogmatic tendencies might also be seen as contributing to an “us versus them” culture war mentality that has informed much public discourse in the postwar period. By largely reducing the universe to two options at each turn, political converts miss opportunities to invent and compromise in ways that do not fit within the parameters of the bifurcating mold, as Wills’s tale brings into focus. In other words, conversion’s dichotomizing features and functions leave little space for matters of degree. One’s personal and political choices are either in or out, meaning that further reflection, doubt, struggle, or interaction beyond the divides remain unnecessary. In conversion narratives, communication is not a driver of human experience but a means of aligning with or diverting from inner or cosmic realities that care little for human effort, will, or deliberation.
Conversion is more than an “experience” that one may publicly claim. It allows individuals to survey and know their political environment better than others. In this volume’s first three cases, conversion becomes a special faculty used to generate authority in politics. In Witness, Chambers suggests that he has direct access to unmediated truths as a result of his political-religious experience. Podhoretz is the most explicit, in naming the form of reasoning that each case study invokes “autocase history”—or the drawing of conclusions about one’s political environment from the evidence of personal experience. BR endows this experience with a godlike, intuitive faculty to know more than others. The author’s accuracy rhetoric, in particular, does more than describe the reality of events; it allows the political convert to make precise attributions of others’ motives, such as other intellectuals’ desire for attention and influence beyond other considerations.
In the vast, gradual turn from an old to a new life, this faculty ultimately makes political generalizations appear less like generalizations. In the context of other narrative features, such as the frequent use of medical metaphors, authors like Podhoretz rhetorically extinguish (rather than deliberate with) the “fevers” and “plagues” of others’ political beliefs. Nowhere does this special faculty become clearer than in Horowitz’s use of reflexivity, which he constructs as a special epistemological ability for self-criticism and awareness completely unavailable to those on the opposing side. Reflexivity allows Horowitz to see into the true nature of things and know more than others, building authority as a guide to the times. Relative to public deliberation, this revisionary ability begins and ends with the convert, becoming a resource for asserting one’s righteous, directionally laden path to self-validated truth.
In each of these cases, readers are rarely treated to any insight on how the authors know others’ chief motives beyond the point that, because they were themselves on the other side of the political divide once, they have the authority to know about others’ present motives and interests. The conversion form is hence used as a way to know more than one can know, involving a new intuitive ability to judge the political world without broader data.
In argumentative terms, these political conversion autobiographies tend to engage in hasty generalizations, an insight that became apparent in many reviewers’ objections to the books. One critic argued that Horowitz “has no right whatsoever to project his own particular lifetime’s angst on to a worldwide movement in order to discredit millions of decent people who sought a better, more just world.”[27] Another wrote that the author “inexplicably seems to believe that the history of counterrevolutionary thought begins with him.”[28] One reviewer even writes of both Chambers and Horowitz that “the two had a flair for the dramatic, equating their life stories with the rise or fall of Western civilization.”[29]
Conversion as a special projective faculty raises a further contextual problem. Attwood finds that “those who have experienced an event and bear witness to it have come to be regarded as the most authentic bearers of truth about the past, indeed as the embodiment of history,” often replacing professional historians as arbiters of record. The goal of witnessing about the past has especially shifted from “the acquisition of historical knowledge” to “the transmission of pasts to future generations in a way that creates a sense of a strong transgenerational link between the faces and voices of witnesses and those who listen to them.”[30] As a rhetorical form, conversion blurs autobiographical testimony with history by not simply transmitting a past but, in propagandistic fashion, the past.[31]
Scholars have drawn attention to a possibility that the directionality in convert tales may be troublesome for public communication.[32] Across the first three case studies, time and identity worked together in this fashion. Political conversion stories possess essentializing qualities, propagating that humans act out history’s scripts in a predestined fashion. Chambers uses flash-forwarding techniques to tell readers that providence has been at work in his life. Podhoretz creates a picture of the world where universal ideas exist prior to and independently of anyone’s variable political thoughts. Horowitz spends so much of the narrative discussing his unidirectional conversion and Second Thoughts Project that he ignores the potential for third thoughts or even fourth thoughts to enter the picture. RS asserts that the political conversion involved a period of revision but that Horowitz’s political understandings are now firm, undermining the endlessly reflexive standard that the narrative asserts. On the other hand, Wills’s book does not fall prey to a bounded sense of time or a fixed understanding of political identity, offering the possibility that alternate beginnings or senses of self might be forwarded through creative communication.
Following the directional conversion pattern, the first three authors in this project assume that only knowledge that has stood the test of time is valuable in public affairs. Podhoretz communicated “I’m a complex thinker” by telling readers that his political conversion was no quick decision. Through the conversion form, gradual reasoning is fit to political contexts where publics might expect leaders to engage in gradual, reasoned judgments.[33] Yet time-based, directional emphases make such discourse a foregone conclusion, one in which deep, fundamental identity change moves from a bifurcated wrong to a right in politics. Here conversion’s temporal metaphor (change from an old to a new life) crosses with the directional metaphor of politics (change from left to right, or vice versa) to reinforce an accurate, essential political identity. The conversion narrative makes the directional journey to the right about “rightness,” but an issue of revisability arises—as argumentation itself is set within a lengthy, storied framework, the possibility for public amendment appears diminished.
A deliberative problem is that political conversion narratives are fine with choice, so long as the right choice is made. A parallel product/process issue exists in how these stories construct open-mindedness as good, so long as it leads to Truth, a problem that Wills’s discourse avoids. The traditionally dogmatic attributes of the conversion form fashion a rhetoric of open-mindedness glossing over the discourse’s intolerance. The narratives further fix time and identity through youth/adult devices, especially through Horowitz’s generational advocacy and Chambers’s and Podhoretz’s appeals to parenting their children. Chambers and Podhoretz bookend their narratives with letters to their children, just as Horowitz often uses letters between his father and himself throughout RS.[34]
The public letter device has historical precedent. Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography begins with a public letter to his son.[35] There are also connections between the development of autobiography and different stages of biological growth. Patricia Spacks finds that autobiographies in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries emphasized different periods of life—maturity, childhood, and adolescence, respectively[36]—themes with which the first three case studies work. Chambers urges his children to get in line with a transfigured, foreordained universal reality. Podhoretz and Horowitz parallel biological development with political development, so that one’s beliefs can be seen as dissonant or accordant with human nature. Horowitz, in particular, says that his conversion was from a condition of non-reflexivity (childish naïveté) to a redemptive condition of reflexivity (adult reflection). In each case, the stories bring together biology and directionality, with history moving to vindicate each author’s politics in a way that circumvents the possibility of ending up in different places.
Although deliberation scholars such as David Ryfe find that stories can be connected to efforts at successful deliberation and meaningful civic values, the features and functions of particular types of stories thus matter for public communication.[37] Laura Black argues that some narrative types can inform deliberative encounters, including “transformation stories” that are characterized by “mixed, contradictory, or changing emotions” of “personal and social transformation.”[38] These stories can help an individual entertain doubts through the mutual exploration of political topics. At least in this book’s cases, however, political conversion narratives are a type of transformation story working toward an opposite purpose.
In this regard, other political practices bear similarities to political conversion stories. Richard Crosby writes about the modern drive to sign “oaths” in U.S. politics:
Whereas traditional political argument in the democratic tradition meant to create openings for action, oath rhetoric is circumscriptive. It locks individual identity within a hermetically sealed ideological system. Those who refuse the oaths are treated as apostates who have no place within the system. The result is a political culture based on the affirmation of allegiance rather than the deliberation over and creation of policy.[39]
In the same way, conversion experiences can reduce the possibility for open and robust public discourse through directional and self-sealing performances.
The autobiographical medium itself affords Chambers, Podhoretz, and Horowitz the opportunity to combine the conversion form with a wealth of detail that reinforces the anti-deliberative aspects of their stories. In short, the deliberative problem is not with autobiography but the way in which autobiography serves and is served by conversion. In Chambers’s case, information about nature in the autobiography reinforces the authenticity of the conversion narrative, grounding his abstract political-religious dualism in concrete detail—and making the conversion journey appear a part of the natural progression of his transfigured universe. Each of these choices contributes to an overall picture of public deliberation, as Chambers infers that there is little malleability or hope in the development of future policies.
For Podhoretz, the autobiographical medium plays an important part in constituting conversion and accuracy. As a red herring, the sheer depth and breadth of detail afforded in the narrative thwarts attention from how BR has little evidence and few citations for many of its political conclusions and sometimes makes misleading claims. These problems become more acute, given Podhoretz’s implication that converts have a precise and proportionate sense of where particular issues hit the mark or go awry, especially on topics such as U.S. race relations. The lack of citations in Witness (except for references to such figures as Dante and Shakespeare) and the lack of sources in RS follow from each author’s use of conversion as a special faculty.[40] There is little need to go to other sources or others’ experiences when one’s epistemological vision single-handedly does away with the rest of the world.
In Horowitz’s case, the conversion form and psychological experience rhetoric draw lines between an old, abstract sociological worldview and a new, concrete psychological-narrative orientation that limits attention to others’ experiences as a route to political knowledge. Both Chambers and Horowitz state that their political conversions were partly wrapped up with a move to more autobiographical modes of writing. It is noteworthy that, in Witness, Chambers says that he had to learn to write a new and “unnatural” journalistic form,[41] a point that Horowitz used and adapted in his story.
The divide between sociological and psychological-narrative writing gives us insight into why so many conservatives seem to have written political conversion autobiographies. Autobiography is a form well suited to nonstructural, individualist, narrative ways of thinking, providing a powerful medium for the convert’s persona. At least from this volume’s cases, political conversion tends to create little room for sociological and biographical-narrative modes to work together. Ironically, Martha Watson finds that authors who construct grand personal mythologies through autobiography may actually make their lives inaccessible and hard to emulate.[42]
Autobiography authenticates knowledge forms such as testimony and experience, which, in these cases, amplify the propagandistic qualities of conversion stories. Gabrielle Spiegel writes that testimony provides “the promise of a certain emotional and gestural vividness—a vividness strongly reinforced by the customarily oral form of its delivery—that operates to transform into a virtually transparent form of transmission.”[43] Although testimonies can make important contributions to public discourse, as a form of evidence they can appear unmediated and free from persuasion. Stories are particularly impervious to statistical modes of reasoning, as formulaic structures where “an image of a single child can stir the world while millions can go hungry unnoticed.”[44] Autobiographical testimonies, experiences, or stories are not necessarily bad forms of reasoning, but they can circumvent other forms of reasoning under the conversion form’s influence.
The contemporary applications of this kind of discourse are far-reaching. Adam Curtis finds that neoconservatives have used a number of deceptive political campaigns with similar techniques: constructing “reality out of fragments of evidence,” regarding the “USSR in the 70s” and “Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction [in the 2000s]. They took fragments and knitted them together and they did it with such force because they believed it was important.”[45] This technique need not be limited to those on the right, of course, and conversion narratives demonstrate a variety of methods that authors of any ideology could employ to leverage autobiographical rhetoric toward movement claims.
Conversion narratives are nexus points between identities and movements. In election contexts, Robert Huckfeldt, Paul Johnson, and John Sprague find:
The conversion of any single individual to a particular candidate’s cause is not only important in terms of a single vote or a single unit of social influence. It is also important in terms of the enhancement and attenuation effects that it creates throughout the networks of relationships within which the individual is imbedded, quite literally transforming entire patterns of social influence.[46]
Far from being isolated texts, this volume’s cases show how conversion narratives are as much “we” as “I” experiences.[47] Political conversions draw from others’ stories and are cited across the public realm as support for individuals’ claims to belong to one movement or another. They carry authority for many convinced that someone’s having made a grand, life-altering switch in political paradigm or party affiliation provides conclusive proof for devaluing other perspectives. Additionally, conversion narratives are highly effective ways to stage a rhetorical “comeback” within and between movements.
There has been little development of the role that political converts play within social movements.[48] As others have noted, the deliberation literature also needs a better “theory of citizenship that focuses on identity.”[49] Political conversion narratives are performances that speak to both areas. Empirical evidence suggests that citizens are often motivated to deliberate by opportunities to perform “identity and identification,” rather than for strictly instrumental or other reasons.[50] Anthony Giddens argues that, in late modernity, a person’s identity is bound up with “keeping a narrative going,”[51] which may be one reason that citizens feel a need to tell and retell stories of conversion within movements. Opportunities for these types of “expressive rationality” are “relevant in late modernity where civic engagement has changed along lines of increasing reflexivity and individualization.”[52] Overall, political conversion narratives provide examples of expressive rationality embedded within networks of influence.[53]
Much about the U.S. conservative movement’s formation can be gleaned from these tales. Witness’s dualistic emphases were critical to the development of Cold War language influencing Presidents Reagan and Nixon. Podhoretz’s intellectual conversion carried influence among politicians and policy makers and was central to the neoconservative movement’s creation. Horowitz draws inspiration from and cites both Witness and BR in his autobiography, but goes much further by marketing an entire industry of networked political conversions. This rhetoric of transformation, “party-switching,” and being a “turncoat” continue to inform public culture. As mentioned, Zell Miller, a longtime Democratic senator, stood before the public at the Republican National Convention in 2004 and proclaimed his support for conservative president Bush. Miller never announced that he had switched parties, nor did he write an autobiography evidencing his fundamental change, but there are clearly elements to his performance that carry rhetorical weight—demonstrating how the influence of Chambers, Podhoretz, and Horowitz continue to find traction in politics, since “life informs and is informed by stories.”[54] The power of political conversion partly arises from communal calls to repeat performances, just like religious conversions where “endlessly repeated stories about how our ancestors had been converted were the very substance of our lives, the daily confirmation that who we were made ultimate sense.”[55] And as Walter Fisher notes, stories do more than simply order human experience; they bid audiences to come dwell in them.[56]
The choice to use this communication strategy has much to do with nods toward transcendence in political conversions to the right. In recent decades, the Right has traditionally been the place where faith appeals are made and carry impact, particularly in the development of conservatism after World War II.[57] Historical conversion discourse often worked with “Truth” as a possibility, especially in the classical world, where Platonic conceptions of reality were guided by the gradual or immediate casting off of old illusions for new, otherworldly certainties.[58] As Wills’s story shows, religious beliefs and concerns for truth can and should be a part of public discourse. From a deliberative viewpoint, however, the extent to which advocates use such truths to open or close space for further rhetoric within and outside their movements is certainly worth underscoring.
These narratives manifest a number of contradictions that have emerged between their theory and practice. Chambers’s post-Witness shifts in belief and attitude highlight a tension between the stringent positions in his book (e.g., dualism) and experienced disagreements within his own movement. This contradiction would perhaps be greater had Witness been written in more recent history, as other fundamentalist forms of discourse have emerged in politics with which Chambers might be less supportive.[59] Podhoretz engages in performative contradictions, such as the belief that others should not use Nazi analogies (while he employs his own) and BR’s passionate case for a cause, engaging in the very kind of advocacy for which it critiques others. The fairness of Podhoretz’s metaphorical choices in characterizing the Left is questionable, as are the clustering of others under ad hominem characterizations, which would appear to lack the accurate, critical nuance that Podhoretz so often asserts as an essential deliberative criterion.
BR’s intellectual guise leads to a deliberative contradiction at the center of these objections: Podhoretz positions rationalistic discussions of public policy within a political conversion narrative—reserving an exclusive right to make “aesthetic judgments” in the public sphere. Morality is not offered to leftists in the same way that Podhoretz performs these criteria for the Right, only drawing boundaries for the convert’s idealism in political affairs. RS, too, exhibits tensions in making others accountable for their previous acts, while Horowitz attributes purity to himself in his early life and as a Marxist. In the same way, the autobiography asserts that a reflexivity in line with one’s immutable nature is best, making human communication conform to a directional pattern that downplays the potential for further political choices.
The tensions exhibited in performing political conversion narratives ultimately illustrate the difficulties of maintaining dogmatism in the public sphere. Authors are forced into making paradoxical claims that show little awareness for the pressures wrought by their use of the totalizing conversion form in a contingent political terrain. There is always a potential to be too fanatical or to misconstrue one’s opponents or issues in public debate. In this regard, the conversion experience that the first three authors call for is insufficient for a viable politics; it does not always guarantee the right outcomes and, as the end of Chambers’s life suggests, is not necessarily the way toward political progress.[60] On the other hand, Wills’s story provides insight into how these contradictions can be interrogated through a rhetoric that commits to, but is not bound by, political identity choices—with a focus on political commitments as ongoing processes over and above the reified weapon conversion stories can so easily become.
Although the four autobiographies in this book had a unity justifying their study as a trajectory of rhetoric, many other autobiographies and political conversion accounts are out there, so I am not claiming to universalize these findings. To examine the issues that conversion texts raise for public discourse, this volume focused on the trees rather than the forest. To extend the scope of inquiry about political conversion, one promising avenue could include narratives that focus on identity politics and race and ethnicity (such as former Bush administration official Linda Chavez’s An Unlikely Conservative) or post–September 11, 2001, political conversions (such as Joshua Key’s The Deserter’s Tale).
A larger sample of autobiographies and stories of political conversion or party-switchers could be amenable to statistical analyses covering identity changes. Indeed, there are already some data in political science about these larger dynamics. From an aggregate perspective, for instance, “about one-third of the 16 United States representatives who switched [political parties] since 1980 lost the next election for either their House seat or another office. Others, however, have become influential and admired members of their new party.”[61] Senator Arlen Specter and Congressman Michael Forbes, who both changed from Republican to Democrat, only to be ousted in their next election campaigns, exemplify such trends.[62]
In this project, some generalizability was sacrificed for the unique and interrelated contributions of the authors and autobiographies examined. Yet these narratives’ intertextuality and anti-deliberative qualities show that there may be some generic qualities to political conversion narratives as a whole. The autobiographies were also all by relatively elite public writers, forgoing nonelite accounts that could further illuminate the contours of this type of communication. Since each case study was in book form, a question remains about what political conversion narratives look like in other types of media, such as television, radio, or on the internet.
Comparative political conversion narratives may also provide a rich source of material for analysis. Are there other countries or places where these types of tales are told to justify and navigate one’s political worldview or policy choices?[63] To this point, scholars have found that conversion narratives are mostly a Western phenomenon. D. Bruce Hindmarsh writes that Protestant missionaries had a difficult time implementing their religious conversion forms in non-Western societies, where the notion of “sin” was less a part of the historical context.[64] Donald Lopez notes how “belief” is a Christianized notion unavailable in many Eastern religious practices. As a historical development, “belief” was fashioned as an assent to propositions, dividing subjects in ways unfamiliar to many non-Western societies.[65] Ultimately, the religious conversion form is “a distinctive confluence of cultural circumstances in the eighteenth-century English-speaking world.”[66]
At the same time, the conversion narratives covered in this book were all by individuals who make a living as writers, and writing opens up possibilities for conversion that other modes of communication may preclude. Gerald Peters argues that “it is no coincidence that [the Christian apostle] Paul was a writer. Conversion of the kind that he undergoes depends on the ability to make oneself into a subject through one’s writing, and to be able to sustain this image of the self through the production of permanent traces.”[67] The conversion form’s bifurcating tendencies between old and new lives advance these divisions in Western contexts. But with globalization and the adaptation of Western forms in other societies, political conversion narratives may have found their ways into other cultures across the world.
Some may object that the argument that political conversion narratives are propagandistic raises a question about whether these stories should be written at all. Surely these stories make some contributions to public discourse, such as giving us critical details about ex-Communist experiences. Should a book like Witness even have been introduced into public life? An answer to this question partly depends on how the story is taken up and how an author wants the story to be received. We can appreciate these stories as simply autobiographical and as one among many testimonies and individual experiences in the civic realm. Yet it is another matter to look at their persuasive features as expanding or constricting deliberative space.
Relatedly, it may be asked whether conversion forms in religious discourses are anti-deliberative. Wills’s Confessions of a Conservative partially helps us find a way through this question by focusing the dogmatic language qualities at issue with these kinds of narratives, rather than any religious or nonreligious designation that might be attributed to them. Wills’s tale uses religion a lot, especially in drawing upon Augustinian texts to explore political positions. At the same time, spheres of private religious faith would appear to suit conversion rhetoric better than more political contexts, since pluralism is generally less expected within many faith groups. In sacred spaces, one can be a Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist, among other choices, but not all of these at the same time (universalist congregations excluded). In political spaces, to avoid a war of all against all, one has to be more than any single religious identity can contain to find the kinds of compromises that Wills notes are necessary even to have a politics in the first place.
Transformation narratives invite readers into, as Wayne Booth notes, “a world infinitely truer, realer, than the one I will fall back into after listening,”[68] so there is danger in how citizens may perceive conversion’s terms of ultimate allegiance (regardless of more secular or religious inflections) as bearing on political circumstances. Scholars have asked, “[W]hat happens to the promise of the totalizing narrative, what vicissitudes must it undergo, when the belief in a logocentric, metaphysical authority disappears?”[69] However metaphysical or not, it is doubtful whether the concept of conversion can be separated from such forms of authority, whether they are validated by externally religious or internally essential constructs. Peters finds that
a mechanism [conversion] once connected to metaphysical verities has become enmeshed in the totalizing web of state or corporate power. Paradoxically, individuals who believe they are liberating themselves from external authority by confessing their individuality are only making themselves subject to the kind of authority they are trying to overcome.[70]
In other words, in a major irony, a form of communication most focused on asserting one’s new political change is actually one of the least suited to political and ideological liberation. Many calls to conversion are simply pronouncements to “get with the program” rather than remain open to different political possibilities. Wills provides his readers with a way through this issue, urging us to commit to processes and identities that are, in effect, the most free to continue learning and growing.
Looking forward, a few final observations are in order. First, messages about political transformation and repositioning beckon more public accountability. Thomas Farrell says that “the very aim of rhetorical theory has always been to define and articulate a vision of what the highest potential of rhetorical practice might be.”[71] Cold War rhetoric often had a harmful effect on public participation, as “deliberation became secondary to patriotism,” spawning a culture of expertise and secrecy.[72] Political converts assert individualistic messages of change in the public sphere, using largely patriotic and monologic appeals that reinforce the status quo, often placing transcendent standards and personal experience at a discursive impasse in public affairs.[73] Public discourse can be constrained through forms of reasoning that individualize deliberation and judgment, “privilege expert over everyday knowledge,” and bring brute necessities into contingent affairs.[74]
Second, religion and secularity are not discrete concepts. Addressing the long-debated question, “What is Athens to Jerusalem?”[75] authors of political conversion narratives position their messages in a liminal space between faith and politics. In the 1940s and 1950s, the use of civil religion escalated in the United States, reflecting tensions for religion’s presence as well as absence in politics. The Constitution has no references to God, and Article VI, Section 3 states that “no religious test shall ever be required as qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”[76] Yet communicators persist in using transcendent appeals in the civic realm, often choosing to make their messages both civil and religious to negotiate these barriers. Political conversion stories reflect these larger trends, similar to other methods for using religiously inflected terms in politics.
President Clinton, for example, made national “rebirth” the central theme of both his inaugural speeches; additionally, the language of “faith” and family” is often used in politics as a double-coded signal that resonates with religious citizens and secular audiences alike.[77] In political contexts, such discourses exhibit elasticity and polysemy, straddling the church–state nexus by bringing a consuming order to one’s experience while remaining faithful to the evolving nature of cultural and political disestablishment. Even activists such as Jerry Falwell and his followers build explicitly religious rhetorics that would seem to be the antithesis of many public figures’ more implicit, civil-religious strategies. Susan Harding documents:
Heterogeneity not homogeneity, hybridity not purity, fluidity not fixity, characterized [Falwell’s] movement at every level. One’s identity as a Bible-believing Christian was not narrowly defined or stationary; there were dozens of culturally distinct ways of being “born again,” and more emerged every day. Nostalgia, mimesis, parody, pastiche, double-voicing, intertextuality, and deconstruction were all at work in the cultural texts of Bible believers.[78]
Religion and secularity may be mobilized by different individuals for varying purposes; but in practice, humans always evolve and adapt these messages in subtle ways.
Third, while political conversion can be performed across ideologies, the fact that these political transformations have mostly been from the left to the right in U.S. politics is of no small consequence. One study of presidential debates from 1976 to 2004 found that Republicans employed sacred rhetoric far more frequently and across a wider range of issues than Democrats, who have tended to focus on numbers and plans rather than “values.” This has given Republicans an “absolutist advantage” in public discourse invoking “nonnegotiable convictions rather than reasoned consequences.”[79] Empirical research further supports a “valorization effect,” where audiences view leaders who use a priori, absolutist discourse as “more principled, virtuous, and determined than others,” so that “Democrats are publicly committed to doing what is best, while Republicans are publicly committed to doing what is right.”[80] Conservative victories during this period may be linked to the resonance of these types of principled messages. This book has highlighted how absolutist forms can be constructed in many different guises, with conversion stories often structuring nonnegotiable convictions in a manner that appears negotiable.
Fourth, political conversion narratives play a vital role in the maintenance of political paradigms. Political movements rely on these advocates to preach to their own, ritualistically reinforcing current party platforms. The work of speaking to and governing millions of citizens is difficult. Political converts provide vivid models for why voters should continue to support a political party. They personify counterarguments against the political opposition and are resources to draw from in gauging, disassembling, or co-opting adversaries. In an age of information overload, political converts act as quick heuristic cues to why the other side(s) should be discounted, as embodied evidence for the failure of other political causes.
Fifth, the personalization and tabloidization of politics that were heightened with the advent of radio, television, and other media can be related to the forms of communication in these autobiographies. Many scholars have argued that U.S. politics is becoming a less deliberative, celebrity-driven society where politics is increasingly focused on identity[81]—and these autobiographies parallel the rise of image-driven media ecologies. The very wrappings of these narratives in “book” form invites readers to see them as more authoritative than other types of media. Yet they largely perpetuate modern media norms for, as mentioned in the introduction, “the present, the unusual, the dramatic, simplicity, action, personalization, and results.”[82] Studies show that political candidates’ personal characteristics tend to influence citizens more than their policies.[83] These norms help us understand why Obama campaign volunteers were trained to tell conversion stories instead of guiding citizens through policy proposals,[84] and why we find these political tales throughout bookstores, reflecting broader trends in which conversion narratives play a part.
The circulation of political conversion through digital media further stands to amplify such rhetoric. One prominent conservative blogger made a Los Angeles Times headline for creating an online post titled “Ten Reasons I Parted Ways with the Right,” which generated controversy in the blogosphere.[85] Strategies like conversion can break through a cluttered media environment,[86] and recent studies in social media and online electioneering underscore a striking finding with relevance to the conversion narrative and deliberation: “We are potentially moving from swing states to swing individuals, employing savvy marketing professionals to attract these persuadables and mobilize these supporters with little semblance of the slow, messy deliberative practices enshrined in our democratic theories.”[87]
In fact, the internet is now replete with stories of political conversion, such as Josh Passell’s “My Friends Don’t Know I’m a Conservative” in the Boston Globe, the New Yorker’s coverage of former Westboro Baptist Church member Megan Phelps-Roper finding a new life outside the religious and political movement, Jack Camwell’s “Political Conversion: I Think I’m a Libertarian” on the author’s blog, or many videos now being uploaded to YouTube, such as Gulbirk’s “My Political ‘Conversion.’”[88] If individual influences become more pronounced in new media spaces, conversion and similar rhetorical forms may play an even greater role in future elections and their aftermath.
Political conversion narratives are here to stay. Both historical and contemporary, stable yet evolving, they show little sign of exiting the political stage. Ultimately, the convergence of lives and words in conversion tales constitutes a powerful communication strategy. And so long as we find ourselves as targets of these and similar persuasive appeals, soberly identifying and disassembling the pretensions of such efforts will remain a critical task.
Isocrates, Antidosis, trans. G. Norlin, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 279.
Quoted in Chaim Perelman and Lucille Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 171.
In this regard, Bushkoff’s remarks about Radical Son are telling: “[B]ut the extreme leftist turned extreme rightist overlooks the essence of democracy: moderation, balance, toleration, a willingness to live and let live. Without these, democracy is impossible.” Bushkoff, “60s Radical Still Shuns Moderation,” 13.
Morgan Marietta, “The Absolutist Advantage: Sacred Rhetoric in Contemporary Presidential Debate,” Political Communication 26 (2009): 391.
Hahn, Political Communication, 70.
David H. Hempton, “Enchantment and Disenchantment in the Evangelical Tradition,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 36 (2008): 44.
That is, Podhoretz deflects public reason by constructing a narrative between personal and technical reasoning. See G. Thomas Goodnight, “The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument: A Speculative Inquiry into the Art of Public Deliberation,” Journal of the American Forensic Association 18 (1981): 224–25. Steffensmeier and Schenck-Hamlin report that much of the deliberation literature shows that nonexperts argue in narrative terms while experts tend to use more traditional forms of deliberation, although in their study citizens tended to use both. Timothy Steffensmeier and William Schenck-Hamlin, “Argument Quality in Public Deliberations,” Argumentation and Advocacy 45 (2008): 22.
See Albert and Albert, eds., The Sixties Papers.
See Edw. Morgan, The 60s Experience.
Asen, “Toward a Normative Conception of Difference in Public Deliberation,” 290.
Even a religionist such as Jimmy Swaggart unconsciously drew from secular traditions rather than a traditional Augustinian view of confession emphasizing public, political speech beyond the self’s solipsism—in the same way that I find Wills uses Augustine. Swaggart’s implicit rhetorical theory praises unreflective speech, deemphasizing language use in favor of natural, “simple effusion from the depths of self” and equating “inarticulateness and authenticity.” Ultimately, “the more human Swaggart became, the less politically accountable he remained.” Dave Tell, “Jimmy Swaggart’s Secular Confession,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 39 (2009): 126, 137, 142. Political conversion rhetoric is also similar to civic epistemologies grounded in notions of “uncertainty” that tend to bypass deliberation. See Marcus Paroske, “Deliberating International Science Policy Controversies: Uncertainty and AIDS in South Africa,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (2009): 148–70.
See Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, xvii; Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy 6 (1995): 65–78.
Bivins, The Fracture of Good Order, 175.
Thomas B. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 1.
This civil-religious rhetoric extends the framework developed in Domke and Coe, The God Strategy. These findings also speak to interdisciplinary research exploring secularization in modern societies. Chaves writes that secularization should not be understood as the decline of religion in the modern world but the “declining scope of religious authority” across society’s institutional spheres. Mark Chaves, “Secularization as Declining Religious Authority,” Social Forces 72 (1994): 749. Hamilton extends this view: “People look to political institutions and processes for justice and for better conditions, not to the Church or to the life hereafter. The state is expected to provide for those in need. The Church has lost its educational role and with it its ability to promote its message and itself. The role of the Church in defining moral standards has declined now [so] that parliaments and politicians increasingly concern themselves with such questions.” Malcolm B. Hamilton, The Sociology of Religion: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1995), 173.
R. Hart and Pauley eds., The Political Pulpit Revisited.
Luckmann, The Invisible Religion. At the same time, religion in the United States has evolved toward “inwardness, subjectivity, the experiential, the expressive, [and] the spiritual,” rather than public and communal causes. In effect, “the discourse on spiritual ‘journeys’ and ‘growth’ is now a province not just of theologians and journalists, but of ordinary people in cafes, coffee bars, and bookstores across the country.” Roof, Spiritual Marketplace, 7.
Many societies have not developed civil religions to the same extent as the United States. A. Johnson, The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology, 39.
For example, Podhoretz claims that his new political beliefs were actually more in line with what he previously believed, and finds much consistency between his long literary education and turn to conservatism. Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks, 172, 171.
This conclusion parallels Dorsey’s finding that in modern American autobiographies, conversion experiences have “socializing function[s]” but often portray a “separateness” or mark of “estrangement,” too. Dorsey, Sacred Estrangement, 10.
Asen, “Ideology, Materiality, and Counterpublicity.”
Robert B. Cialdini, Influence: Science and Practice, 5th ed. (New York: Allyn & Bacon, 2008).
Slain, “So . . . He Is a Flip Flopper?” par. 1.
Robert C. Rowland and John M. Jones, “Recasting the American Dream and American Politics: Barack Obama’s Keynote Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 93 (2007): 427, 430.
See Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant!
Ben Smith, “Bush Backer Pens Pro-Obama Book,” Politico, June 16, 2008, www.
politico.com/news/stories/0608/11099.html.
J. Coulter, “Why I Am Not a Right-Winger,” 113.
Stephen Schwartz, “The Curious Case of David Horowitz,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1998, http://articles.latimes.com/1998/oct/11/books/bk-31283?pg=1, par. 4.
Jas. Roberts, “Disillusioned Radicals,” 265.
Bain Attwood, “In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, ‘Distance,’ and Public History,” Public Culture 20 (2008): 79, 86; emphasis in original.
See ibid., 89.
Branham, “The Role of the Convert,” 418; Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion.
See also Fabj, “Intolerance, Forgiveness, and Promise in the Rhetoric of Conversion”; Spencer, “The Rhetoric of Malcolm Muggeridge’s Gradual Christian Conversion.” Popkin finds that “changes in voters’ party identification are generally slow, often even glacial; but changes in their comparative assessments of how well parties handle different problems, or what groups the parties stand for, can be rapid.” Popkin, The Reasoning Voter, 56. Griffin suggests that autobiographies are particularly fitting for studying gradual conversion, as there is much room for rhetoric to play a subtle role in conversions that occur over a period of time. Ch. Griffin, “The Rhetoric of Form in Conversion Narratives.”
Chambers also frames his story around young people’s reactions to his work, as when a young man came up to Chambers after the August 25 Hiss hearing and told him that his statements were meaningful to the younger generation. Chambers, Witness, 695. While Horowitz doesn’t use the letter device from the start, he does focus the first few pages of RS on the young generation and their vulnerability to a world in flux. Horowitz structures his entire autobiography around the relationship between his father and himself and frequently provides admonitions to his children about their political futures. Podhoretz additionally sets his sight on youth, in calling Lillian Hellman’s play Scoundrel Time silly and dangerous, especially for its possible impact on naïve youth. Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks, 318. Kimmage argues that Podhoretz shifted Chambers’s emphasis away from “the intellectual as revolutionary or reformer or rebel” to “the intellectual as parent, passing wisdom on to an immature younger generation.” Kimmage, “Whittaker Chambers’s Witness and the Dilemma of Modern Conservatism,” 961.
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Frank Woodworth Pine (New York: Henry Holt, 1916), 3.
Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Stages of Self: Notes on Autobiography and the Life Cycle,” in The American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Albert E. Stone (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1981), 45, 54, 59.
David M. Ryfe, “Does Deliberative Democracy Work?” Annual Review of Political Science 8 (2005): 63.
Laura Black, “Deliberation, Difference, and the Story: How Storytelling Manages Identity and Conflict in Deliberative Groups” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2006), 130.
Richard Benjamin Crosby, “Oath Rhetoric, Political Identity, and the Case of Jon Huntsman,” Argumentation and Advocacy 49 (2013): 195.
One reviewer of Radical Son writes that “one thing about this book that agitated me was the complete lack of sources.” Michael Rohm, “Interesting, but Horribly Flawed,” Amazon.com, October 16, 2005, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews/0684840057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&show Viewpoints=1, par. 1.
Chambers, Witness, 477.
Watson, Lives of Their Own, 112.
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time,” History and Theory 41 (2002): 157.
John Durham Peters, “‘The Only Proper Scale of Representation’: The Politics of Statistics and Stories,” Political Communication 18 (2001): 440, 439.
Koehler, “Neo-Fantasies and Ancient Myths: Adam Curtis on The Power of Nightmares.”
Robert Huckfeldt, Paul E. Johnson, and John Sprague, Political Disagreement: The Survival of Diverse Opinions within Communication Networks (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 121–22.
See also Booth, “The Rhetoric of Fundamentalist Conversion Stories,” 393.
For a few examples, see Jasinski, Sourcebook on Rhetoric, 375–76; L. Griffin, “A Dramatistic Theory of the Rhetoric of Movements,” 464; Bormann, Cragan, and Shields, “An Expansion of the Rhetorical Vision Component of the Symbolic Convergence Theory,” 1–2; Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric,” 142.
Jakob Svensson, “Expressive Rationality: A Different Approach for Understanding Participation in Municipal Deliberative Practices,” Communication, Culture & Critique 1 (2008): 213.
Ibid., 214. Svensson finds that “instrumental” and “communicative” visions of rationality fail to grasp citizens’ motivations for public participation. In instrumental accounts of rationality, people communicate in pursuit of their own interests, performing cost/benefit analyses in public. In Habermas’s communicative rationality, interpersonal discussion moves people beyond their subjectivities, coordinating interests and multiplying understandings in an ideal speech situation. Ibid., 214–15.
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 54. Brown also traces how a lifestyle and identity politics have become more important with the decline of the nation-state: “Since the collapse of a vital liberalism in the 1980s in the United States and elsewhere, the dominant conceptions of activist politics have been a left-wing pursuit of racial and sexual liberation and self-expression, and a right-wing advocacy of ‘traditional values’ and unregulated capitalism.” Richard Harvey Brown, “Global Capitalism, National Sovereignty, and the Decline of Democratic Space,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5 (2002): 353.
Svensson, “Expressive Rationality,” 217.
This finding illustrates a point about rhetoric more generally: “[W]e are what we have consumed; we take in whatever takes us in, and we are forever altered.” Booth, Modern Dogma, 166.
Guy A. M. Widdershoven, “The Story of Life: Hermeneutic Perspectives on the Relationship between Narrative and Life History,” in The Narrative Study of Lives, ed. Ruthellen Josselson and Amia Lieblich (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993), 2.
Booth, “The Rhetoric of Fundamentalist Conversion Stories,” 368.
Fisher, “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm,” 6. Hardy also relates that “we dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative.” Barbara Hardy, “Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach through Narrative,” Novel 2 (1986): 5.
See Domke and Coe, The God Strategy.
See Plato, Republic, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. Cooper, trans. Grube, 1132–55.
Hyrum Lewis notes: “Chambers’ theory looks particularly mistaken in the 21st century as the West finds itself at war not with a ‘Godless’ foe, but with groups whose very religion drives most of their animus toward the West. Would Chambers have taken the side of radical Islam in its war against the West because many of them hailed from premodern, god-centered societies? Probably not, and yet his theory would have allowed no other position.” H. Lewis, “Sacralizing the Right,” 121. It is hence ironic that another reviewer argues that Chambers’s fight against Communism applies to a worldwide fight against Muslim jihadists who “want to impose their values and beliefs on everyone else by force, not debate.” “Witness,” FirstPrinciples.US, n.d., www.firstprinciples.us/sections/synopses/books.witness.asp (no longer available), par. 20–21.
One should not overlook the tensions experienced by religious converts, too. Hempton finds that many evangelical “disenchantment narratives” come from cognitive dissonance about the Christian scriptures, which have a lot of violence, judgment, and notions of eternal punishment in them. Many disenchanted Christians also struggle with the limiting of human agency in much evangelicalism. Hempton, “Enchantment and Disenchantment,” 52–53.
Dan Balz and Chris Cillizza, “Sen. Arlen Specter Loses Pennsylvania Primary; Rand Paul Wins in Kentucky,” Washington Post, May 19, 2010, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/18/AR2010051805561.html?hpid=topnews; Carl Hulse, “Risks of Switching Parties Are Clear,” New York Times, January 3, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/us/politics/03cong.html?pagewanted=print, par. 5.
Hulse, “Risks of Switching Parties Are Clear.” At the same time, I have defined political conversion narratives in terms of one’s public assertion of or justification for changing from one political ideology to another. This definition precludes broader ways in which conversion may be conceived. For instance, when someone switches from a pro-choice to a pro-life position on abortion, without any change in political or party identification, a kind of conversion may still be said to have happened. If the term “conversion” were broadened further, other potential aspects of the phenomenon could also be targeted.
See, e.g., “Breaking Ranks: Andreas Papandreou, American Liberalism, and Neo-Conservatism,”
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, March 14, 2006, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/breaking-ranks-andreas-papandreou-american-liberalism-and
-neo-conservatism.
D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Donald S. Lopez, “Belief,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 21–35.
Hempton, “Enchantment and Disenchantment,” 45.
G. Peters, The Mutilating God, 128.
Booth, “The Rhetoric of Fundamentalist Conversion Stories,” 386.
G. Peters, The Mutilating God, 162.
Ibid. Peters clarifies further: “Although society may be in the process of becoming more unified at the geopolitical level, it is also becoming more culturally and politically fragmented as various interpretive communities seek to attain their autonomy through the very totalizing strategies they repudiate at the more encompassing level. . . . Thus, in the name of cultural, sexual, or racial empowerment, the conversion narrative becomes the very means by which more complex, superior cultural unities become forestalled.” Ibid.
T. Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture, 3.
Thomas Kane, “Public Argument and Civil Society: The Cold War Legacy as a Barrier to Deliberative Politics,” Argumentation 15 (2001): 112.
See also Palczewski, “Public Policy Argument and Survivor Testimony.”
Elizabeth Britt, “Dangerous Deliberation: Subjective Probability and Rhetorical Democracy in the Jury Room,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 39 (2009): 103.
Quoted in Jeffrey Hart, “What Is the ‘West,’” Hoover Digest 1 (2002), www.hoover
.org/publications/digest/4484246.html (no longer available), par. 27.
In Domke and Coe, The God Strategy, 141.
Ibid., 59, 110.
Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell, 274.
Marietta, “The Absolutist Advantage,” 388.
Ibid., 388–89, 406.
See R. Davis and Owens, New Media and American Politics; Popkin, The Reasoning Voter.
Shinar, “The Peace Process in Cultural Conflict.”
Kathryn M. Doherty and James G. Gimpel, “Candidate Character vs. the Economy in the 1992 Election,” Political Behavior 19 (1997): 177–96; Carolyn L. Funk, “Bringing Candidates into Models of Candidate Evaluation,” Journal of Politics 61 (1999): 700–20; P. Goren, “Character Weakness, Partisan Bias, and Presidential Evaluation,” American Journal of Political Science 46 (2002): 627–41.
J. Hill, “Obama Basic Training,” par. 7.
James Rainey, “Blogger Parts with the Right,” Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2010, A2; Charles Johnson, “Ten Reasons I Parted Ways with the Right,”
Little Green Footballs, November 30, 2009, http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35243_Why_I_Parted_Ways_With_The_
Right.
See Richard A. Lanham, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
David Karpf, “The Internet and American Political Campaigns,” October 2013, www.cfinst.org/pdf/papers/08_Karpf_Technology.pdf, 7.
Adrian Chen, “Unfollow,” New Yorker, November 23, 2015, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/conversion-via-twitter-westboro-baptist-church-megan-phelps-roper;
Josh Passell, “My Friends Don’t Know I’m a Conservative,” Boston Globe, September 9, 2012, www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2012/09/08/friends-don-know-conservative/6cZz78ANMMgs5uQeEnt6yI/story.html;
Jack Camwell, “Political Conversion: I Think I’m a Libertarian,” Christian Fearing God-Man, January 13, 2012, http://christianfearinggod
man.blogspot.com/2012/01/political-conversion-i-think-im.html; Gulbirk, “My Political
‘Conversion’ (PART 1),” YouTube, February 25, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=
Y2M0VvKjLJ0 (no longer available).