A full-page ad in the September 30, 1946, issue of Life magazine shows a picture of a book called Peace of Mind being handed down from above by a male hand. “This New Best Seller,” the caption reads, “will help you find the happiness you have always sought.” Life readers may have wondered if the hand was supposed to be the author's, the publisher's, or the Lord's, but, in any case, it would have been Jewish. The author was a rabbi, the publisher was Simon and Schuster, and the God in question was the God of Moses rather than Jesus. The mysterious hand might have belonged to yet another Jew, as the book was the first religious best-seller to endorse Freud. In the advertisement, Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport testified that author Joshua Loth Liebman “shatters the long-standing myth that religion and psychology are necessary antagonists [and] proves that they converge upon a single goal—the enhancement of man's peace of mind.”

No churchgoer born before 1960 can forget the childhood thrill of hearing a missionary speak in church. The missionary arrived in native dress to thank the congregation for its support and, after the service, showed slides in the church hall. The audience sat transfixed, imagining what it might be like to eat termites in Africa, or beg on the streets in India, or study the Bible in a refugee camp. The usually mundane Sunday service became exotic and exciting, as the world beyond the United States suddenly seemed real. In an age before round-the-clock television news, and the immigration of Asians and Latin Americans even to small towns in the Midwest, the missionary on furlough was a major link between the world of North American Christians and the rest of the globe.

In 1949, the critic and controversialist Paul Blanshard launched a broadside attack on the Catholic hierarchy in the United States with the publication of American Freedom and Catholic Power, his harshly critical exploration of the Catholic church's involvement in American public life. An instant best-seller, American Freedom and Catholic Power went through eleven printings in its first year and continued to draw new readers throughout the 1950s. Blanshard's mission was to alert Americans to the movements of a Catholic hierarchy that was becoming, he charged, “more and more aggressive in extending the frontiers of Catholic authority into the fields of medicine, education, and foreign policy.” He reserved some of his most stinging commentary for the church's intrusion into the world of medicine.