The Shift from Character to Personality in Mainline Protestant Thought, 1935–1945

Abstract

“Growth is as essential in human personality as it is in a stalk of corn,” wrote the pastor of First Community Church, Columbus, Ohio, in 1935. His remark typified the changes underway in mainline American Protestantism as it digested empiricist theology, Christian realism, psychoanalysis, and world events from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s. In those years the terms of discourse about what it takes to make a strong democracy gradually shifted from “character”—the traits, attitudes, or behaviors of an individual that publicly express private conviction—to “personality”—the inner, psychodynamic organization of an individual that expresses itself socially in relation to God and other people. Prominent religious educators debated it; pastoral counselors put it into practice. Popularization of psychotherapy in the denominational presses brought the language of “personality” and the psychological dimension of human existence into the lexicon of the mainline churches by the end of World War II. Earlier in the century in the face of mass immigration America's churches had extolled the merits of “character” and “character education” as the chief way for mediating private conviction and public action that would preserve democracy, but in the late 1930s they sounded this theme in the new key of personality: promoting the inner growth and freedom of each individual would safeguard America from moral decay and totalitarian regimes.

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