There were three major voices that stoked the fires that led to the reemergence of American evangelicalism in the late 1940s and 1950s. Two were of the preaching-revivalist tradition and principally concerned with the eternal destination of their listeners: Baptist evangelist Billy Graham and Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen. The third was Norman Vincent Peale. Although he called himself an evangelist that adhered to evangelism’s implicit call for conversion, Peale’s educational and theological development eventually led him to embrace a “new Christian emphasis.” In later years he called it practical Christian living which was “…attuned to the inner life…[and] was presumed to be a better solution to the needs of modern Americans.”[1] Out of Peale’s theology centered on practical Christian living arose the therapeutic gospel that was adopted by many evangelical ministers and churches over the last half of the twentieth century and dominates American evangelicalism in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
Peale occupied a unique position on America’s religious landscape during the two decades following World War II. Peale was politically conservative and therefore perpetually at odds with the liberal establishment, both political and theological. Yet, by his own admission he was theologically liberal. Peale was not enamored by the liberal social gospel as well as their neglect of the practical work of the ministry. Even though personally a theological liberal, in 1924 he critiqued his seminary education and said the school had failed to adequately link the scripture with “the knowledge of the present…to enable me to go out and preach—to strengthen and amplify the message which I feel I have.” Although he claimed to champion the “old-fashioned gospel story,” he significantly altered its message with humanistic principles and practices, both secular and spiritual. When issues or conflicts arose within the church, his theological perspective was consistently revealed as he sided with the liberals rather than fundamentalists.[2]
Norman Vincent Peale was born in 1898 to a minister father and his wife in Bowersville, Ohio. Clifford Peale had been a successful physician and at one time was the health minister for Milwaukee. Having once felt the call to the ministry, he ignored it for a while, but his health broke and required an operation that left him near death. Peale survived and believed the Lord had spared him. Encouraged by his mother, Peale left the practice of medicine and became a Methodist minister. He served in a number of pastorates in small Ohio towns and moved to Cincinnati in 1902 when Norman was four. In 1913, the Peale his family moved from the Cincinnati suburb of Greenville to the small town of Bellefontaine, Ohio, where Norman graduated from High school in 1916. In the fall his parents took him to Ohio Wesleyan University, a Methodist college in the small town of Delaware.[3] Norman Peale received his B.A. degree in June 1920. Following fifteen months working as a reporter for the Detroit Journal, Peale enrolled at Boston University, and upon feeling an affirmation of his call to the ministry, he soon switched his enrollment to the university’s seminary.[4]
As a child Norman was very sensitive and painfully shy. To help their son overcome his extreme bashfulness, Norman was often asked to recite poems for family gatherings or groups of friends. But his extreme shyness caused Norman to frequently hide in the attic when he saw visitors arriving at the Peale home.[5]
Peale’s shyness continued to plague him in high school and followed him to Ohio Wesleyan. One professor approached Peale about his shyness and told him to ask Jesus to help him overcome his shyness and to also read the works of well-known psychologist William James. Another professor suggested that he read the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. One biographer wrote that Peale’s discovery of James and Emerson “…eventually became part of his mental equipment and then a lifetime fascination…[They] remained lasting intellectual companions because they counted for something in Peale’s own life,” and he often sought validation for his own ministry in their views.[6]
Emerson’s Transcendentalism and its spiritual humanism was a comfortable fit with Peale’s practical Christianity. Emerson outlined Transcendentalism in Nature, published in 1836 and was credited as being America’s first native-born philosophy. Historian Paul Johnson described Transcendentalism as “a Yankee form of neo-platonism, mystical, a bit irrational, very vague, and cloudy.”[7] The philosophical message of Transcendentalism links the source of all knowledge to the inner self of intuition and imagination.
People, men and women equally, have knowledge about themselves and the world around them that “transcends” or goes beyond what they can see, hear, taste, touch or feel. This knowledge comes through intuition and imagination, not through logic or the senses. People can trust themselves to be their own authority on what is right.[8]
Peale linked Emerson’s belief that knowledge about man and his world comes from the mystical intuition and imagination found within man to James’s secular humanism which promoted the practical and experiential science of psychology. James is known as the father of American Psychology and wrote its seminal text in 1890, The Principles of Psychology. Eventually, James, his colleagues, and his students at Harvard developed American psychology as a science which emphasized the self as opposed to the soul. It was a pragmatic and experiential science of the mind that could be channeled along therapeutic lines to benefit mankind. The Christian concept of habits is the particular ways of living that define man in relation God. However, through psychology James redefined habits “as a process of personal and social growth toward an ever-better, ill-defined, integrated personality.”[9]
Through the work of James and his fellow psychologists, psychology infiltrated and eventually overwhelmed mainline Protestantism. Keith Meador described this development as a baptism of Protestantism in psychological rationalism and practicality.
In the 1920s, mainline Protestant seminaries began teaching the concept of “self-realization,” which conceived of the self as an entity whose fulfillment and full potentiation were paramount within the spiritual life. As a result, helping people “adjust” and “adapt” in service of the self became the goal of pastoral counseling. Through continual adjustment and adaptation, people would grow in their perceptions and come closer to the ultimate goal of self-realization.[10]
Although Peale did not wholly embrace James’s or Emerson’s views, those views became important reference points for Peale’s practical Christianity and its therapeutic gospel message expressed through his ministry of preaching, teaching, lectures, speeches, magazines, and books.[11]
While at seminary, Peale’s shyness, fear of speaking before classmates, and feelings of inferiority continued to haunt him. Yet, away from seminary, Peal expressed great joy on weekends when preaching as a student to “a church full of dedicated people.” But when he returned to seminary on Sunday nights, he wrote that, “My conflicts returned, my inferiority reasserted itself and I froze up until the next Friday I went happily off to my church again.”[12]
While still at Boston University’s seminary, Peale became a student pastor at a church in Berkeley, Rhode Island in 1922. Upon graduation from seminary in the spring of 1924, Peale was called to St. Mark’s Church in Brooklyn which was later relocated and renamed King’s Highway Methodist Church. In April 1927 Peale was invited to University Avenue Methodist Church in Syracuse, New York. There he met and married Ruth Stafford who would be his wife for sixty years. In March 1932, Norman and Ruth made their final move to the Marble Collegiate Church, a Reformed Church in America congregation with a history dating back to 1628. Located on New York City’s prestigious Fifth Avenue, the imposing and elegant 1500-seat church surrounded by skyscrapers had declined to only 200 regular attendees but had a huge endowment. The move to Marble Church necessitated that Peale make a theological shift from Methodist Arminianism to the hard determinism of Calvin within the Reformed Church. In her biography of Peale, Carol George wrote that Peale never truly left his Methodist roots but created and perfected a unique ministry and syncretic message that cut across many denominational lines.[13]
With a handsome salary, lifetime tenure, three-month annual vacation, and duties that required only preaching three times each week and service as the senior administrator, Peale saw Marble Church as an opportunity to create a personalized ministry. This included two small books written by Peale in 1937 and 1938 (The Art of Living and You Can Win) which were products of his immersion in the literature and beliefs of metaphysical spirituality (religious science).[14]
Beginning in 1942, while still serving as senior pastor of Marble Church, the pace of Peale’s life increased dramatically as he was continually called to speak before various religious, political, business, and industry gatherings around the nation. Peale founded Guideposts magazine in 1944 which became the most influential transmitter of Peale’s message, an “organ for a great, positive Christian movement” which summarized his ideals of “Americanism, free enterprise, and practical Christianity.” In 1950, the Foundation of Christian Living became the center of the Norman and Ruth Peale’s religious empire.[15]
By the 1950s, the painfully shy little boy born in 1898 in the small Ohio town of Bowersville had become a nationally celebrated churchman, social commentator, self-help guru, author, and spokesman for a vast constituency of Americans. It was Peale’s 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking that propelled him to the pinnacle of his already amazing career. The book was perfectly timed to capture the uplifting wave of Christianity in America during the late 1940s and 1950s. The book emphasized self-empowerment and peace of mind which was especially appealing to generations attempting to “catch up” with life following almost two decades of turmoil caused by the Great Depression and World War II.[16]
The Power of Positive Thinking resonated with a vast and diverse audience of businessmen, middle-aged women, and the unchurched. Carol George summarized one reviewer’s favorable opinion of the book, “It was friendly, unpretentious, and concerned about the misery cause by spiritual poverty. In its ebullient, upbeat tone, it belonged more to the success genre of New Thought literature than the inspirational variety…” The book provided a remedy for many people who believed they were sick and in need of care. Believing they could not be fully productive contributors to society, they willingly embraced Peale’s practical Christianity and its therapeutic message of positive thinking.[17] Peale’s book landed on the New York Times bestseller list in 1952, the year of its publication, and stayed there for 180 weeks.[18]
By 1957, Peale was reaching an estimated thirty million people through his preaching, syndicated newspaper column, weekly radio program, Guideposts magazine, three published sermons monthly, and his book sales.[19] Peale’s thirty million was the same number as the weekly television audience reached by Bishop Fulton Sheen’s at the show’s height during the late 1950s.[20]
While Sheen was reaching the millions through the medium of television, Peale and Billy Graham were using an array of media to reach their millions. Graham, the neo-fundamentalist, had little in common with Peale, the neo-modernist. The one thing they had in common was that both were preaching to a much wider audience than just their professed denominational adherents. Although having a wide and somewhat overlapping audience, their respective platforms were seemingly at opposite ends of the field. Graham was an unrepentant premillennialist, political conservative, and fundamentalist who believed in the authority of the scriptures, Christ’s virgin birth, the atoning death of Christ, His bodily resurrection, His second coming, and salvation by faith through grace. Peale’s theology was far closer to modernism. Peale was initially suspicious of the younger evangelist but had a change of attitude following their first meeting in Switzerland in 1955. Peale became a supporter of Graham’s Manhattan crusade planned for 1957 and served on the blue-ribbon committee with other clergy and prominent citizens that helped organize the crusade which lasted sixteen weeks (see Chapter 15). Peale was delighted with the results of the crusade as were most of the participating clergy.[21]
A fascinating incident happened during one of the nights of the crusade. At the end of the service, Peale joined hundreds of others as they moved toward the platform in response to Graham’s invitation to make another “commitment” to Christ. Peale later called his renewed commitment that night as a “second blessing” in which he “went deeper” into the faith.[22] This was reminiscent of a similar commitment made twenty-four years earlier when Peale and his wife were vacationing in England. Peale had completed two years at Marble Church and was exceptionally discouraged. While sitting in a lovely hotel garden in Keswick, Norman felt himself a failure and expressed to Ruth his doubts about continuing his ministry at Marble Church. He felt his message was not “getting through” to the congregation and despaired at his lack of results in the church’s growth. Ruth Peale waited a few moments before she spoke. When she began talking to her husband, she did not coddle or sympathize with him but spoke words of encouragement that he so often had spoken to thousands of others. Peale listened to his wife, was encouraged, and agreed that he should stay at Marble Church. He called his renewed commitment at Keswick a “rededication” and often fondly remembered that moment as one of the most profound and rewarding experiences of his life.[23]
Peale retired from Marble Church in 1984 after fifty-two years of service and fifty years after he almost quit while at that small hotel garden in Keswick.[24] He died on Christmas Eve in 1993 at the age of 95.
Norman Vincent Peale appears to have been a good and decent man. He cared deeply for his fellowman and accomplished much that was good. However, his theological perspectives and prescriptions were flawed because they were fundamentally opposed to the doctrines and teachings of the Bible. As will be seen in the next two chapters, Peale’s practical Christianity left a dual legacy to the evangelical church of New Age spiritual humanism and the therapeutic gospel of the Church Growth movement.
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
[1] Carol V. R. George, God’s Salesman – Norman Vincent Peale and The Power of Positive Thinking, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 85.
[2] Ibid., viii, ix., 46, 49, 50-51.
[3] Arthur Gordon, One Man’s Way, (Pawling, New York: Foundation for Christian Living, 1958, 1972), pp. 4, 9-10, 19, 33, 39, 45.
[4] George, pp. 39, 40-41.
[5] Gordon, p. 21.
[6] George, pp. 33, 36-37.
[7] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), p. 405.
[8] “Transcendentalism, an American Philosophy,” U.S. History. http://www.ushistory.org/us/26f.asp (accessed October 9, 2015).
[9] Keith G. Meador, “My Own Salvation,” The Secular Revolution, Christian Smith, ed., (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 271, 283, 294.
[10] Ibid., p. 295.
[11] George, p. 37.
[12] Ibid., p. 52.
[13] Ibid., pp. 54-56, 58, 66, 68-69, 76.
[14] Ibid., pp. 75, 86.
[15] Ibid., pp. 103-104.
[16] Ibid., pp. 128-129.
[17] Ibid., p. 137.
[18] Ross Douthat, Bad Religion – How We Became a Nation of Heretics, (New York: Free Press, 2012), p. 52.
[19] George, p. 131.
[20] Douthat, p. 41.
[21] George, pp. 147-148.
[22] Ibid., p. 148.
[23] Gordon, pp. 172-176.
[24] George, p. 238.
