Saving Families from Secularism: The Role of the Suburban Marriage in Postwar Catholicism

Although scholarship routinely challenges popular claims that the postwar period represented the golden age of family life, less work has problematized the related myth that sees it as the pinnacle of American religion. This article complicates the view of the religiously devout suburban family by exploring how its growth contributed to mid-century Catholic anxieties about secularism. In addition to needing to build new parishes as families availed themselves of state policies and moved to the suburbs, Catholic leaders confronted a newly middle-class laity whose daily lives appeared more “American” than “Catholic.” To explore these tensions, the article compares two movements—Cana Conference Movement and Christian Family Movement—that attempted to stabilize families and re-Christianize America by spiritualizing laity’s domestic lives. The article illustrates how the daily lives of Catholic homes simultaneously operated as the battleground to fight these converging problems and the site for a solution as the movements mobilized couples and taught them that marital happiness would help them reach holiness. Overall, the article offers insights into a period when religion and state aligned to promote a domestic ideology that signaled the American way of life.