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Hempton's chapter on Van Gogh is an exploration of Evangelicalism and Secularisation. Like many other cultural and church historians Hempton is sceptical of the received tradition that defined secularisation along lines like these: "the decline of the social significance of religion lay in inexorable processes of urbanisation, industrialization,  and societalization, all conveniently subsumed within the catchall concept of modernization…". Explaining the origins and onset of the secular age using such an overarching theory is no longer tenable for many cultural historians and analysts.

Using three of van Gogh's paintings Hempton suggests persuasively because illuminatingly, that van Gogh depicted in image and colour the decline in influence and decay of dominant presence of the Church in Europe. The above picture, Old Church Tower at Nuenen (“The Peasants’ Churchyard”), contains the telling clues of intentional art. The windows are boarded or bricked up, the steeple (that upward pointing finger) has gone, the birds have claimed the tower as well as the air, no human figure is present. The low horizon, broken by wooden crosses that mark the graves of generations of peasants, with a dominant ruin in the foreground, speak of past glories now in ruin, and human history still present in the symbols of a faith slowly but surely in eclipse.

Van Gogh's own interpretation has obvious precedence:
"I wanted to express how those ruins show that for ages the
peasants have been laid to rest in the very fields which they dug up
when alive – I wanted to express what a simple thing death and burial
is, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf, just a bit of
earth dug up – a wooden cross. […] And now those ruins tell me how a
faith and a religion mouldered away – strongly founded though they were
– but how the life and the death of the [people] remain forever the
same, budding and withering regularly, like the grass and the flowers
growing there in that churchyard. “Les religions passent, Dieu demeure”
[Religions pass away, God remains]." (Letters, 411.1)

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This is Van Gogh's father's Reformed Church in Nuenen. Hempton sees here a further portrayal of secularization and the demise of Christendom. "There is no doubt that van Gogh's portrayal of his father's small Protestant church with its mainly female worshippers in a predominantly catholic village serves as an excellent symbol of late nineteenth century European religion. Religious pluralism, confessional pride, respectability…and feminization, which historians interpret as both the signs and the engines of European secularization, are all on display." (page 133)

The Bible belonged to Van Gogh's father; it is open at Isaiah 53. It lies beside a well worn copy of Emile Zola's La Joie de Vivre. The suffering servant juxtaposed with a novel in which a central figure is described as "the incarnation of renunciation, of love for others and kindly charity for erring humanity". Ancient faith embodied in a book, the Bible alongside an unlit candle, and the fiction of modernity with its own capacity to convey the realism and urgency of the present.

Three paintings, in which van Gogh uses images depicting the powerful and personal undertow pulling people of faith away from ancient religious certainties. They reflect the religious consequences in van Gogh's personal life of inexorable changes in contemporary culture, as his own faith was transmuted from evangelical Christianity to a more poignant, compassionate view of nature and the world of human affairs. In place of rejection of a fallen world, in these and the later paintings human suffering and joy, natural beauty and ordinariness, the cycle of life, growth and death, became vehicles for a view of life with reversed polarities; no longer confident that God is love, van Gogh is rather seeking ways of saying, in painting after painting, love is god. And this credo, far from being sentimental humanist piety, conferred honest mercy and deep understanding of the human condition, upon a man afflicted by personality extremes of mania and melancholia. A recurring Pauline phrase in his letters to his brother was 'sorrowful yet always rejoicing.' The courage and cost of such defiance, the compassion and creativity triggered by such oscillating anguish, are part of the mystery of the triumphant tragedy of van Gogh's life and art and religion.

Did you know that Vincent Van Gogh went through an intensely evangelical phase in the 1870's? That he taught Sunday School, and attended prayer meetings and preached in Richmond Wesleyan Methodist Church? It didn't last of course. But his spiritual journey is one of the fascinating stories told in David Hempton's latest book, Disenchanted Evangelicals. There are seven studies of people who moved away from an earlier enthusiastic, dogmatic and activist Evangelicalism.  Each study allows Hempton to explore important evangelical social attitudes related to the move from Evangelicalism to a more open, liberal, pluralist or secular faith position. It would be a mistake to invest those words with negative head-shaking disapproval – an attitude far too readily available to evangelicals as first response to those inner shifts in others that signal the movement of personal conviction and faith commitment in new directions.

Reading the stories of these all too human people, and Hempton's sympathetically critical study of what was going on in their inner lives and outer circumstances, it becomes clear that these were people of strong principle, thoughtful criticism, ethical passion, and open-eyed honesty about the theological limitations, social consequences, psychological costs and moral censoriousness, of Evangelicalism as they encountered it, and for varying lengths of time were enamoured with and lived it. Their disenchantment with a form of Christianity that had initially been the driving force of their lives, points to a number of perceived shortcomings in Evangelicalism as a movement and form of Christianity, which for them called in question the capacity of Evangelicalism to sustain faith in the rapidly changing world of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

The story of George Eliot's evolution away from evangelical principles to a highly moralised form of agnostic humanism provides a superb case study in moral analysis. The laser-like precision with which George Eliot homed in on hypocrisy, intellectual dishonesty, dogmatic bullying, culture-denying piety, masculine chauvinism and much else, made it impossible that a mind so ruthlessly honest would for long tolerate, what she increasingly pereived as a full contrary mindset. Eliot's celebrated demolition of Dr Cumming's fundamentalism in her essay in the Westminster Review is here placed in the context of her later backward looking critique. It still reads as an extended moral exposure of malign tendencies Eliot believed were endemic to Evangelical piety; this piece of irresistible polemic should be set reading for evangelicals who suffer from yet another of the afflictions Eliot lampooned – smugness.

Then there's the chapter on Van Gogh. Hempton makes no attempt to add to the varied explanations of Van Gogh's psychological and mental ill-health. He is too good a historian to be caught out in the reductionism that often underlies such analysis, diagnosis and too confident conclusions. Instead he explores Vincent's letters, the available biographical material, and some of the paintings, to trace the spiritual development that occurs within the heart and mind of one whose inner anguish and whose art, whose faith and way of coping with life's demands, embodies one of the key moments in the fortunes of Christianity in late modernity. The chapter is sub-titled Evangelicalism and Secularization. The 'hard pilgrimage' of Van Gogh, from doctrinally strident Dutch Reformed orthodoxy, through Wesleyan Methodism and evangelistic mission work, to a faith position removed to another intellectual universe, is traced by Hempton in a chapter worth the price of the whole book. he provides an analysis of three paintings which offer a different master narrative of the secularizatuion process. This section of the book is much too important to skip over. I'll include a fuller post on it as the next stage of this review.

On a different note altogether, Ian represented our College at a recent colloquium on Baptist Hermeneutics held at South Wales Baptist College in Cardiff. He's doing several posts on it over at the College Blog.