In the absence of Exit Interviews, an important source of insight for organisations and movements haemorraging recruits and support, David Hempton has done what's the next best thing. Evangelical Disenchantment is a phenomenon that goes back to the early generations of the movement and has remained a significant outcome for many who put their hands to the plough and looked back – or looked elsewhere. What makes this book so interesting and challenging for contemporary evangelical self-understanding is the account it gives of faith found and lost, of the weaknesses and strengths of Evangelicalism viewed through the lenses of human personality in cultural context.
George Eliot combined intellectual power, moral imagination, philosophical rigour and psychological insight, making her a formidable opponent with previous insider knowledge. Francis W Newman was the brother of John Henry Newman. His experience as a missionary in Baghdad, his encounter with the Muslim world, his disillusion with millenial theology that looked to the Christianisation of the globe, the anti-intellectualism of fellow evangelicals, pushed him towards a position much more open to modern advances in knowledge. He came to see Evangelicalism as pathologically scared of the mind, holding to an infallible Bible often at the cost of authentic spirituality, trusting in Christian evidences, naively unquestioning of core dogma, and unchristianly hostile to those like himself who could no longer sign up to a faith demanding detailed doctrinal rectitude.
Theodore Dwight Weld was one of the great anti-slavery patriarchs of the 1830's and a convert of Finney's revival activities. He broke with Finney over whether priority should be given to revivalist conversionism or reformist zeal in transforming the social and moral life of the nation.
Three women activists, Sarah Grimke, Elizabeth Cody Stanton and Frances Willard are treated in one chapter.
Why?
Hempton acknowledges that such women are an essential though largely missing part of a more truthful, alternative, and as yet unwritten history, a required corrective to the distortions of male-focused narrative. But from the writings and accounts these three women Hempton builds a composite picture of the crucial connection and eventual conflict between their feminist principles and the biblically underwritten constraints imposed on them by church sponsored theology and politically legitimated male empowerment in society. My next post will review this chapter along with the last chapter on James Baldwin, sub-titled Evangelicalism and race.
The chapter on Van Gogh on secularisation (the focus of the previous post on January 31) is followed by a careful and balanced exploration of Father and Son, one of English Literature's classic accounts of Victorian childhood. By the time Edmund Gosse wrote Father and Son, he was established as a literary critic and writer of independent mind. Brought up in a narrow Plymouth Brethren home, Gosse and his later autobiography provide a fascinating, at times embarrassing account of Evangelicalism and childhood. I remember the first time I read Father and Son. And coming to the end of it where the last line says so much about the impact of powerful religious convictions, conveyed through parental approval or disapproval, and reinforced within a small religiously intense community where conversion and baptism as a believer by immersion were paradigmatic and required experience. The book ends by insisting on "a human being's privilege to fashion his inner life for himself." And in that culminating observation lies an entire critique of what Gosse himself saw as a well meaning but personally damaging process of indoctrination.
Hempton is even-handed in these studies. Disenchanted critics are listened to, their grievances heard, and the validity of much of their complaints acknowledged. Their own oddities of temperament, gift for shooting themselves in the foot, attempts to have their evangelical cake and eat it, these are also noted and fitted to what is an overall balanced exploration of a movement and its dissidents. The concluding chapter helpfully gathers the main causes of intellectual and spiritual disenchantment and personal disaffiliation. Some reflection on these will be the final post on this fascinating education of a book.
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