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 ...

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