The evangelical approach to human experience is fundamentally artistic. Artists understand that you cannot speak about the general directly, but rather the human condition can only be illuminated through radical particularity: if one wants to declare the converting power of the Christian faith, then tell a story about a stuffy, officious son imposing a priest upon his reprobate father, the Marquis of Marchmain, as he lies dying. Likewise, evangelicalism believes deep in its bones that the truth is to be found in quirky, individual life stories—in the testimony, for instance, of a no-account, impoverished tinker harassed by malicious, internal voices. [1]

David Hempton's powerful and poignant new book, Evangelical Disenchantment: 9 Portraits of Faith and Doubt, is itself a work of art, humming along smoothly with the grain of evangelical attentiveness to personal narrative. His nine studies are the Victorian novelist, George Eliot; the reformer and brother of John Henry Newman, Francis W. Newman; the abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld; three American advocates for women, Sarah Grimké, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frances Willard; the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh; the English man of letters Edmund Gosse; and the African American writer James Baldwin.

It would be easy for a critic to challenge the choice of these particular figures, so let's begin with something easy. Hempton argues compellingly that evangelicalism needs to learn from the complaints of its "conscientious objectors and wounded lovers." His selections all offer the perspective of those who had a precise faith drain away and were left with only, at best, a vaguer spirituality. Many ex-evangelicals, however, have arrived at other dogmatic identities such as Mormonism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or Roman Catholicism (Cardinal Newman was no less disenchanted with evangelicalism than his freethinking brother). Introducing such figures would generate substantially different lessons for the evangelical movement to learn—indeed, sometimes antithetical ones to those evoked in this book.

Chapter 5, which presents Grimké, Stanton, and Willard (thus the only chapter that covers more than a single figure), is particularly problematic. Grimké fits the general theme of the book best, yet her youthful brand of Quaker spirituality means, as Hempton himself concedes, that she was "never a conventional evangelical." Stanton never had an evangelical identity to lose, and Willard never became disenchanted with hers.

This last point, I fear, will be lost on some people who encounter this volume. The very first sentence of Evangelical Disenchantment is: "This book is about the faith journeys of nine creative artists, social reformers, and public intellectuals who once were associated with the evangelical tradition, but who later repudiated that tradition." Yet Willard—one of the nine—did not remotely do any such thing. She did challenge "male interpretations of the Bible," but then so did, for example, her contemporary Catherine Booth, the Mother of the Salvation Army.

It is true that Willard's mature religiosity was "not without tension and complexity," but one would have to paint a caricature of evangelicalism for that not to be true of many of its representatives in good standing—from a founding father of the movement, John Wesley, on down. One wonders if Hempton put these figures in simply because he did not want women to be so badly underrepresented in his volume. Perhaps instead he should have explored the intriguing possibility that men have more often become disenchanted with evangelicalism than women.

Still, the portraits are the thing, and they are haunting. Consider F. W. Newman. His Oxford career was regarded as largely without precedent in its particular display of brilliance (a double first in classics and mathematics). He became enamored with evangelicalism in its most uncompromisingly biblicist form, the emerging (Plymouth) Brethren movement. Fired with zeal for the salvation of the world, he volunteered himself to be a missionary to Baghdad. Before arriving on the field, Newman industrially worked on adapting to this new culture by taking up smoking. The failure of this mission had a disillusioning effect on him. When fellow Brethren uncharitably accused him of heresy, this further alienating experience seems to have served as almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Francis Newman dissected evangelicalism in his Phases of Faith and then became an antivivisection reformer.

The (Plymouth) Brethren reappear in the portrait of Edmund Gosse, who wrote an indictment of his evangelical childhood which became a minor literary classic, Father and Son. As a youngster, Gosse bonded with his widower father by combining their formidable intellectual powers to endeavor to decode the true identity of the Beast in the book of Revelation. As an adult, he could only look back on such eschatological exuberance with embarrassment. As Hempton deftly puts it, "Edmund, whose literary stake in the world had increased, and who seemed on the brink of a dazzling career on planet Earth, had every reason not to wish for a rapture."

Vincent van Gogh's life story is as forceful as his paintings. What must it have been like dutifully to get out of bed one crisp autumn Sunday morning in 1876 and go to church, only to discover that he was the preacher? Underwhelming, apparently. Only after years of trying unsuccessfully to become a Christian minister did van Gogh eventually abandon this vocational path. If he came to think that Christianity was too outmoded to meet the needs of the day, nevertheless, as a true artist, he did not go around spouting such generalities. Instead, as Hempton insightfully explicates, he offered the world a sharply observed particularity, The Old Church Tower at Nuenen.

For this reader, the most moving portrait in this consistently engaging book is that of James Baldwin. He was raised on the harrowing street life of Harlem, the stepson of an abusive Baptist preacher man. Hempton vividly describes how an evangelical church became his city of refuge: "Tormented by sexual feelings he could neither understand nor control, fearful of a surrounding culture of pimps, drunks, and criminals, and subjected to endless harassment by white policemen, Baldwin forsook the bright lights of the city for the 'safety' of the theatrical rituals of the church."

This church was the Mount Calvary Assembly Hall of the Pentecostal Faith Church for All Nations. Its eminent senior pastor was Mother Horn (once again, demonstrating that a critique of male interpretations of the Bible is a tradition within evangelicalism itself). Baldwin was slain in the Spirit and, when restored to consciousness, heard the good news that he was saved. He soon was pursuing his own preaching ministry.

Baldwin's later ideological rejection of evangelical Christianity was absolute and thoroughgoing, making all the more resonant his continuing tribute to the visceral force of its piety:

There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing … . Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and glory that I sometimes felt, when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, "the Word."

Evangelical Disenchantment is a book that needed to be written, and David Hempton was the perfect person to do it. First, he is a superb scholar, doing the research with care and the analysis with real insight and sensitivity. (The only mistake that stood out was that he attributes the phrase "the dissidence of Dissent" to Matthew Arnold, while that critic was actually quoting Edmund Burke. I don't think this derivative citation will do unwary readers any harm, but finding it gave me an enormous sense of self-satisfaction.) Second, Hempton is unflinching enough to tell evangelicals what they do not want to hear, while sympathetic enough not to lose sight of the strengths of this Christian tradition.

There is a genuine cumulative effect to his book. Patterns do emerge from these portraits. Hempton observes that these people were often frustrated idealists. If I may augment this argument, it is also noticeable that many of them once championed an unusually strict or rigid form of evangelicalism. Although this detail is not mentioned in the book, George Eliot, at the height of her teenage evangelical phase, condemned Handel's Messiah as too worldly. Likewise, Theodore Dwight Weld is shown here rebuking the great evangelist Charles Finney for occasionally unwinding in his free time rather than relentlessly sustaining spiritual intensity: "I fear [revivals] are fast becoming with you a sort of trade, to be worked at so many hours every day and then laid aside." Setting the bar so high, it is hardly surprising that Weld eventually gave up and settled into a placid Unitarian fellowship.

Is evangelicalism today too accustomed to breezy, overconfident answers to contemporary intellectual challenges to retain some of its most thoughtful adherents? Is it too widely aligned with reactionary forces and the status quo to allow impassioned social reformers to stay in the camp? Does the evangelical movement demand so much prepackaged conformity from its supporters that it drives away some of its most creative followers? Let us pray.

Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford Univ. Press), and he is at work on a book about the Bible in the 19th century.

1. For an elegant elucidation of this claim, see Alan Jacobs, Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life (Eerdmans, 2008).

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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