Gary Scott Smith chairs the History Department at Grove City College and is the author of Religion in the Oval Office: The Religious Lives of American Presidents (Oxford University Press, 2015), Heaven in the American Imagination (Oxford, 2011) and Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush (Oxford University Press, 2006).
They danced. They sang. They shouted and cried for joy. Had their team won the Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup? Had they won a giant Powerball lottery? No, but their lives had been transformed. A well had been dug…