Language, Dr. Pepper, and Ebenezer Scrooge
St. Paul. Constantine. Augustine. Martin Luther. John Newton. Olaudah Equiano. C. S. Lewis. Alice Cooper. Justin Bieber.
These are some of history’s most famous Christian converts. Each of their conversions is unique and dramatic in its own way. For those who believe, all of these converts are reminders to hold onto hope for those who don’t believe.
Although conversion is one of the defining ideas of the evangelical movement, conversion is not just an evangelical idea. It’s not even a solely Christian idea or even necessarily religious.
Conversion as a kind of transformation can be found everywhere, in art and nature, in countless literary characters, and in the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly. As schoolchildren, we learn to convert fractions into whole numbers in math problems. When traveling abroad, we convert our own country’s currency into another. Sometimes we convert an extra bedroom into a home office. All of these conversions suggest a real alteration or change, not only in being but in identity too.
When I was growing up, for example, a catchy Dr. Pepper television commercial centered on the concept of conversion. The commercial featured a spirited band of attractive young people singing and dancing to a catchy song about drinking Dr. Pepper. The benefits of doing so were so plentiful that its imbibers found their loneliness replaced by a sense of belonging and community inhabited by fellow “Peppers.” “Wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper, too?” the song asks in closing.
Now, there’s nothing particularly religious about not wanting to be “alone in a crowd,” as one phrase in the song puts it, or not wanting to be alone at all. But there is something very “evangelical” about this little ditty. Of course, the song is marketing a product. But in employing the language of evangelism and conversion to do the work of marketing, the song proves the lure of such language. On the other hand, evangelicalism has itself become a highly marketed product. What started out as a necessary call to replace nominal Christianity with a genuine conversion experience has devolved over time to marketing—not sharing the good news but selling it.
As the words to this tune show, genuine conversion—whether conversion to Pepperism or Christianity—entails a change of both belief and identity. The evangelical movement emerged during a time in church history when many identified as Christians but did not truly believe. Now, three centuries later, many who identify as evangelicals not only don’t embrace evangelical beliefs, but they often don’t even know what defines evangelicalism.1 “Evangelical” as an idea has devolved into polling, political, and marketing categories. But there is a rich history of this evangelical emphasis on conversion—a history based on sound doctrine—that might be recovered. But first we need to uncover this history.
A Reorientation of the Soul
It is in the religious context that conversion carries the most weight and meaning.
In his seminal study, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo, A. D. Nock defines “conversion” as “the reorientation of the soul of an individual, his deliberate turning from indifference or from an earlier form of piety to another, a turning which implies a consciousness that a great change is involved, that the old was wrong and the new right.”2 This description of conversion applies to religion in general. But while most religions include some form of conversion in their understandings, evangelical Christianity emphasizes conversion in a way that is distinct even within Christianity more broadly.
“Conversion” is an interesting word. It comes from a Latin word that means “a turning round, revolving; alteration, change,” one that suggests the turn of one’s entire being. The word has carried the current sense of a religious transformation since the Middle Ages.3
In Scripture, the idea of conversion is paramount, often expressed through various metaphors. Only a few places in the Greek New Testament use a word that is translated as the English word “convert.”4 These instances usually refer to someone from outside the Jewish tradition (a gentile) who turns to the faith. Most references in the New Testament to the kind of change that brings salvation come from different Greek words that are rendered into English with some form of the word “repent.” “Repent” literally means a change of mind. An unbeliever can repent and receive Christ. But even the converted have much to repent of over the course of their daily lives. Both repentance and conversion refer to a decisive act of turning from sin to Christ. As Lakoff and Johnson demonstrate in Metaphors We Live By, much of the language we use has a physical basis that is lost once overtaken by its metaphorical meanings. “Turn” is such a word. Its original meaning refers to physical rotation or revolving. Now it has come to refer to movements beyond those made by physical bodies. Thus the metaphor of turning within the context of conversion brings multiple layers of meaning to the event: it is a change of direction, from death to life; it is a movement, a turn of the mind; and in the fullest sense it is also a turn of the body (bowing, praying, serving, obeying) and therefore an aesthetic experience. Another metaphor Scripture uses is seen in 2 Corinthians 5:17, which says that anyone who is in Christ has become a “new creation.” Ephesians 4:24 describes the believer as having a “new self.” But the biblical metaphor most often associated with evangelicals today is the one found in John 3:7: “born again.”
While the phrase “born again” is only one of the terms used in the Bible to describe conversion, this particular phrase became prominent in the popular imagination in the later twentieth century after Jimmy Carter became “the nation’s first born-again president” and Richard Nixon’s adviser Chuck Colson had his own conversion experience, which he wrote about in a 1976 book titled Born Again.5 That year, 1976, a Gallup poll showed that 34 percent of Americans considered themselves to be evangelical or born again. Newsweek declared on its cover that this was “the year of the evangelical.” The term “born again” peaked in popularity around 2010,6 and it has declined ever since. (I think 2010 was about the time I started to notice Christians describing themselves as “Christ followers,” a phrase that seems to have had a short shelf life. “Believer” seems to have maintained a steadier presence.) “Born again” continues to be the phrase most commonly used in surveys and polls in recent years to identify evangelicals, usually combining both terms in one question, such as, “Are you evangelical or born again?”7
The Language of Conversion
The way these descriptions of conversion go in and out of style demonstrates how, in some ways, conversion (like much of the Christian life) can be seen as “a process of acquiring a specific religious language.”8 In fact, the way in which religious language, including the language of conversion, is used in secular contexts to express significant life experiences has become its own object of study within the field of linguistics.9 There can be no doubt for anyone who believes in the truth of Scripture that something happens—something supernatural and eternal—when one is converted (or born again, or made new in Christ). Yet, in our humanness, language can be an obstacle to the truth as well as an expression of that truth. “Born again” as a descriptor of being converted came into style and went out, just as other metaphors have and will. It is important to recognize that language not only reveals truth but can also at times limit or even distort our imaginations. In moving from one region of the country to another, for example, I encountered a use of the phrase “born again” that didn’t align with how it is used in the Bible. I sometimes would hear people use it to describe a onetime experience (such as going forward at an altar call or praying the sinner’s prayer) that was disconnected from whether the person still thought of themselves as a Christian. Within evangelicalism, we need only look at all the trite phrases and clichés that cycle in and out of our vernacular (and receive a justifiable amount of mockery from time to time—remember “smokin’ hot wife”?10). No wonder Jonathan Swift, the eighteenth-century Anglican priest better known as a brilliant satirist, advised—earnestly, not satirically—in his 1719 Letter to a Young Clergyman against “the folly of using old threadbare phrases” in preaching.11
Biblical language (which, of course, for most of us is translated from its original language into our own) is never clichéd. But our use of it can be. We should take instruction from the fact that the Bible expresses its recurring ideas and concepts with a delicious menu of varied words and phrases. This truth is a subtle acknowledgment that human words are but an echo of the Word who not only is the source of all our words but is the “incarnational ordering” of those words.12 Indeed, the root of the Greek word “logos” included in its meanings “to collect, gather,” a meaning that was used in the context of ordering one’s words in speaking.13 No less than a “miracle,” Charles Marsh writes in his memoir, Evangelical Anxiety, “is the way language can reconcile disparate parts of the self.”14 The Word incarnated is what reconciles us to God too. The Logos is a proper ordering, or reordering, as the case may be. This is the essence of conversion, a reordering of the fallen soul into proper relationship with God. Conversion is a literal event of individual, personal, eternal salvation. And yet its meaning manifests metaphorically too.
Evangelicalism and Conversionism
Conversion has not been emphasized everywhere in the church or throughout church history in the way evangelicalism stresses it. Evangelicals today, especially those who grew up within the contemporary evangelical subculture, might find it difficult to imagine how conversion could not be central to the Christian faith.
I’m reminded of someone who had been reading Jane Austen’s work and asked me whether there was a shortage of clergymen during Austen’s time. This reader couldn’t make sense of why clergymen like Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Collins—who doesn’t seem religious at all, let alone Christian—are so common in Austen’s works and wondered whether the churches at that time were so desperate to fill the position that they’d hire just anyone. Actually, it was the opposite. Because the Church of England is a state church, its ministers are government employees. Clerical posts were in Austen’s day political appointments more than divine callings.
The reclamation of the centrality of conversion emerged, then, from the nominally Christian culture that existed at the time of the evangelical movement’s origins. Evangelicals tend today to emphasize making converts from among those of other religions or no religion, so it’s a little ironic that evangelicalism arose within a context in which the vast majority of the culture claimed to be Christian regardless of whether they had actually been converted.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
The English Reformation began formally in 1534 when King Henry VIII broke from the Roman Catholic Church and established the Church of England as a national church. Christianity was the default religion, and the Church of England became the default church. As in other post-Reformation European countries with a state church, “the baptism of infants made children into citizens as well as church members.”15 It was easy in such a context to identify as a Christian (and be identified as one by others) without believing as a Christian.
It also meant that the church was filled with unbelievers by default. Every English citizen “was by mere fact of residence in a parish, a member of the parish church; and however ungodly his beliefs or behavior, the parish church was powerless to expel him.”16 With few exceptions, everyone who lived in a parish was a member of that church by virtue of being born there. Thus, one of the several “purifications” sought by the Puritans was to “purify” church membership by limiting membership to those who had actually been converted. Back then, it was kind of a novel idea!
Anti-Puritan sentiments were high, however, particularly around the years of the English Civil War (1642–1651), which centered on religious-political divides. Reformation fervor peaked in England with the execution of King Charles I by the Puritan-led Parliament in 1649. By 1657, English Puritans Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye felt the need to remind the church, “It hast been one of the Glories of the Protestant Religion, that it revived the Doctrine of Saving Conversion.”17 Following the restoration of the monarchy through the return of Charles II to the throne in 1660, an even more anti-Puritan spirit overtook the nation. Until the implementation of the Toleration Act in 1689, dissent from the established church was essentially illegal, which is why nonconformist ministers like John Bunyan had been imprisoned for preaching outside the Church of England. Under the Toleration Act, however, freedom of worship (with certain restrictions) was granted to nonconformist Protestant Christians. (Some of these restrictions continued into the nineteenth century.)
One inevitable consequence of the establishment of a state church is that the pastoral office becomes a government post, thereby secularizing what is supposed to be a sacred calling (hence my friend’s question about the clergymen in Austen’s novels). David Bebbington describes the situation for ministers during the years surrounding and leading up to the Evangelical Revival in England in the early eighteenth century:
Clergymen were expected to display the manners of the gentry, among whom they were educated at Oxford and Cambridge. Their pulpit ministry was partly designed to teach the lower orders their place in the order of things. Conscientious men there were in the Church of England, notably at episcopal level, but there was little effective check on clerical negligence. The church played a salient role in everyday life, but at the expense of imbibing a strong dose of secularity.18
This kind of nominal Christianity inevitably bred complacency.
Some of the best illustrations of the extent to which Christianity had become nominal can be seen in the stories of those ministers who underwent conversion experiences while already serving in the ministry. Such stories were increasingly recorded around the start of the evangelical movement. An early example during this period is Richard Kilby, who graduated from Oxford and Cambridge and was ordained as a minister long before being convicted that he had not been truly converted.19 Another famous story is that of William Haslam, who was converted while preaching his own sermon on the Pharisees and suddenly recognized himself. Upon feeling “light and joy coming into his soul,” he repented, and one witness exclaimed, “The parson is converted!”20 A later example is Thomas Chalmers, a nineteenth-century evangelical leader in the Church of Scotland who, by his own testimony, had been a minister for nearly ten years before he was converted to Christ.21
Within such a context, apart from genuine conversion, one’s claim to Christianity was merely perfunctory. A person might assume they were a Christian simply because they were born to Christian parents in a Christian nation, baptized in the church, and educated as a Christian. A context in which belief is assumed ends up working, paradoxically, like a vaccination against belief. Not surprisingly, then, in addition to the secularization of the office of the pastorate, a significant decline among the people in the practices associated with Christian devotion—from reading the Bible to attending church—took place in the eighteenth century, to the point that some churches were closing as a result of decreased participation.22
This parched religious landscape was ready for the sweet rain of revival. The evangelical movement’s renewed emphasis on authentic, genuine conversion drew the replenishing waters down.
The same spirit was moving across the ocean in America too. Jonathan Edwards, one of the leaders of the American Evangelical Revival (the First Great Awakening, discussed in the previous chapter), underwent his conversion in 1721, while still a young man. Edwards had wrestled with many intellectual objections to the notion of God electing some to salvation and not others. But while reading 1 Timothy 1:17, he experienced in his heart “an inward, sweet delight in God and divine things that I have lived in since,” he wrote some years later in his “Personal Narrative.”23 Edwards and other American revivalists would join with their British counterparts in a movement that would sweep across the transatlantic region and then the globe.
Those counterparts in England were led by brothers John and Charles Wesley and their friend (though their foe in matters of doctrine and slaveholding) George Whitefield.24 When Whitefield and then his Oxford classmates John and Charles Wesley experienced and proclaimed their own conversions, the Evangelical Revival began. While students at Oxford, the Wesleys founded the Holy Club, which came to include Whitefield among its members. The club aimed to spur members on to more pious lives. Critics of the club referred to members as “Methodists,” mocking their efforts as an attempt to achieve holiness through methodical living. Eventually, the name stuck and was adopted by the denomination started by Wesley when he was ousted from the Church of England for his renegade approaches to evangelism.
Ironically, it was the failure of the works-based system of the Holy Club to offer the assurance of salvation that readied first Whitefield in 1735, then the Wesley brothers in 1738, to find assurance in the work of Christ alone. John Wesley’s famous journal entry describing what happened to him on May 24, 1738, not only reflects a dramatic, singular experience of conversion; it also set an example of public testimony that would come to characterize evangelical experience:
In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.
I began to pray with all my might for those who had in a more especial manner despitefully used me and persecuted me. I then testified openly to all there what I now first felt in my heart.25
The next year, Wesley began—as Whitefield had already done—to hold open-air services. The preaching of both men focused on conversion, what Wesley famously called the “new birth.” In opposition to the established church leaders of the day, both Whitefield and Wesley emphasized conversion as “an individual, deeply felt experience.”26 In fact, experience is one of the four elements of the so-called Wesleyan Quadrilateral, a framework later developed to describe the principles undergirding Wesley’s theological conclusions. Whitefield maintained his position as a clergyman with the Church of England (in contrast to Wesley, who was eventually banned from the Anglican communion) and revolutionized preaching and evangelism from within the institutional framework. The evangelical movement thus gained momentum both inside and outside the established church. (Significantly, the movement also included from its beginnings both anti-slavery and pro-slavery camps: Wesley was a staunch abolitionist while Whitefield owned slaves in America. The racial divisions we still see within evangelicalism have, sadly, existed from the start.)
The movement didn’t just recover key doctrinal points such as conversionism, however. The movement also radically changed the style of faith and practice in the church. Many accounts attest, in particular, to Whitefield’s presence, his rhetorical skills, and the emotional delivery of his sermons. To witness it was an experience. Whitefield’s open-air preaching across England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and America revolutionized the church in ways beyond measure. By preaching outside the walls of the church building, limits on the size of the crowd were removed, also making it possible for these events to take place anywhere and at any time. People who normally attended church elsewhere could also go to hear Whitefield preach at another time or place without missing their own service. It also meant that he could draw believers from across denominations, especially in America, where a diversity of Protestant denominations flourished. The mingling of believers of various Christian denominations was a radical departure from the persecution (even to the point of brutal deaths) across the centuries until this era. Along with unbelievers, Christians of various stripes were drawn to evangelistic preachers like Whitefield and Wesley, and those preachers in turn crossed denominational boundaries in different ways for the sake of one unified purpose: evangelizing the unconverted.
This focus did not simply win more converts, however. It also shifted beliefs about conversion. As David Bebbington describes it, by the nineteenth century, “some of the more enthusiastic Evangelicals, eager to maximise conversions, began to teach that the crucial factor is a person’s will to be saved.” An emphasis on the individual will to be saved resulted in “carefully planned methods” that “could encourage the desire to believe.”27 In the Second Great Awakening of the nineteenth century, Charles Grandison Finney popularized what he called the “New Measures,” strategies designed to encourage people to convert by their free-will decisions (a rejection of the Calvinist teaching of election).28 Finney would cajole, berate, and scold his listeners to rise up from their seats and publicly come to faith in Christ at the “anxious seat,” raising in his listeners their own emotional responses. Critics of these techniques, both then and now, surmise that many “conversions” that took place in these circumstances were not genuine.
This focus on conversions and ways to increase them brought other developments to church and Christian life, things that are familiar within evangelicalism today. These changes include more colloquial styles of preaching, the increased use of mass communication, less emphasis on instruction in doctrine, the wedding of populism to religious experience, and the birth of new sects and denominations.29 These mass revivals also changed the conversion experience from something private to something public, a phenomenon relying on and building social trust, which had the further effect of strengthening families and a sense of community.30 Yet, in Luke 12:52, Jesus warned his followers that such ties may be broken in order to truly follow him.
Conversion as Personal Experience
The emphasis on methods that result in (or seemingly result in) conversions is characteristic not only of evangelicalism but of the modern age that birthed the movement. Modernity is most simply understood as a turn from the authority of something external and objective (such as God or his infallible human regents) toward internal, subjective authority—in other words, the self. The “religion of the heart,” as evangelicalism was often described in its early years,31 was also referred to as an “experimental religion.” In eighteenth-century usage, “experimental” meant something closer to what we would call today “experiential.” But the association of “experimental” with scientific methods and experiences is not coincidental. Evangelicalism was birthed by the Enlightenment. It was the Enlightenment that brought a focus on not only the scientific method but also the individual—individual experience and individual subjectivity, emphases that were possible in large part because of the growth in literacy and print culture that allowed the masses to read the Bible for themselves. Evangelicalism “did not present itself to its adherents as a logical set of beliefs but rather as a series of vivid and compelling personal experiences.”32 The revivals across the transatlantic “introduced a new idea of conversion as a sudden, overwhelming experience of God’s grace.”33
The evangelical movement was right to reject the assumption that genuine Christianity could exist without the authentic conversion experience. However, the accompanying rejection of ecclesiastical authority also brought with it a new assumption of individual authority. Overreliance on the subjective authority of the individual can lead, not surprisingly, away from deep experiences of conversion to easy, shallow ones. From the stunning conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus—dramatic in both spiritual and physical ways, “a collusion between figurative and empirical ways of seeing and knowing; his three-day spell of blindness and his call to conversion are literal and allegorical at once”34—we devolve to filling out decision cards that we put in the offering plate, raising hands while everyone’s eyes are supposed to be closed, or repeating the words of the sinner’s prayer. It’s not that God can’t use these methods—he certainly does—it’s rather that we choose to use them.
Paradoxically, in the midst of an age centered on reason, rationalism, and science—all of which are supposed to demonstrate the unity and universality of truth—a religious movement expressive of individual experience would become dominant. But it is perhaps not paradoxical after all: the bridge between these two seemingly contradictory impulses is “experiment.”
But what experience gives, experience can take away.
Conversion as Cultural Phenomenon
Many cultural factors during the early years of evangelicalism made the field ripe for a harvest of conversions. The transatlantic region that was the center of the movement had experienced the tumult of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the industrial revolution. While the first two revolutions took place away from the homeland, the industrial revolution began in England, making it “the world’s first modern technological society” and bringing the additional layers of anxiety and stress that attend any shift so dramatic and swift as that. Amid so very many changes, the appeal of the evangelical lifestyle of “self-discipline and seriousness” makes sense. These revolutions, too, brought smaller-scale revolutions and social reform movements, creating new class conflicts, popular movements, and social unrest that were new to a society that had been stable and relatively unchanging for so long.35
The conversion experience not only centered individual lives, but it was a unifying experience that bridged all social classes. From its beginnings, Christianity “demanded not merely acceptance of a rite, but the adhesion of the will to a theology, in a word faith, a new life in a new people.”36 The evangelical movement recovered an emphasis on the human will, which Christ demonstrated in his life when he invited people to follow him, marking a radical shift in the world’s religions—and in the world. While social class and monetary means still divided people in the early modern era, the growing emphasis on individual agency revealed a common human condition: everyone has a will.
John Wesley took his open-air preaching primarily to the working poor, whom no one had before thought of much beyond being a source of necessary labor. They had been neglected for so long—even by the church—that “few of them can have been obsessed by a sense of sin or filled with a desire for supernatural grace,” A. D. Nock observes in his study of conversion. Yet, he notes, “those ideas were somewhere under the level of consciousness as a heritage from generation after generation of Bible-reading and sermon-hearing forefathers.”37 In other words, the social imaginary of even these neglected souls had been formed by the tenets of the English Reformation for two centuries.
While Wesley’s Methodist movement had focused its efforts on the lower classes, the later Evangelical Revival sought to win over the upper and middle classes.38 Hannah More is one example of a prolific and popular evangelical writer from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century who wrote texts oriented to every class of reader, including the upper classes and royalty—and More successfully won over these readers. The notion that societal change is best achieved through the example set by those in higher society to those in lower society was particularly potent during the Victorian age. In a highly stratified society, such a flow of influence was much more likely than in a more democratized one. Nevertheless, this idea has persevered all these years, and it accounts, in part, for the infatuation among evangelicals today with seats at the table among celebrities and the powerful. The natural inclination to curry favor with such people is compounded by reasoning that, if those with great power and sway can be won over, their influence will then change the world accordingly.
Conversion as a Literary Theme
One of the earliest English novels, Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded, published in 1740 by Samuel Richardson, is an example of a conversion story that reflects the evangelical desire to win the powerful to Christ, not only for their own salvation but also for the good of all those under their influence. The conversion of the wealthy squire at the center of the novel comes through the virtuous example of the title character, Pamela, an impoverished servant girl who resists her master’s many attempts on her “virtue” (even his attempt to rape her) and eventually sees him converted. The clear but unintended lessons of the novel are, first, virtue is not its own reward, but rather virtue might reward you with marriage to a wealthy man; and second, a virtuous woman has the power (and responsibility) to transform a wicked man. (The novel is also a very powerful early expression of the modern self, one who sees her soul as equal in human worth and dignity to anyone, regardless of social class or power—and this, too, is part of evangelicalism.)
Pamela was incredibly successful. One town rang the church bells when the part of the story depicting Pamela’s marriage was published (see fig. 4).39 One clergyman recommended the novel to his congregants from the pulpit.40 An entire industry of Pamela-themed merchandise arose, including teacups, fans, unauthorized sequels and spinoffs, and stage adaptations.41 Pamela was the nation’s first bestseller.42 And it was the product of an evangelical imagination, in turn shaping that imagination for years to come. Notably, critics of Pamela found in it too heavy an influence of antinomianism and “Methodism,” the latter being a derogatory term at the time, applied first to the Wesleys and other members of their Holy Club at Oxford, then to evangelicalism as a whole (before it became the name of a denomination unto itself). The most troubling basis for these criticisms is the easy conversion Pamela’s master undergoes in the narrative—a conversion that transforms him from Pamela’s kidnapper and near-rapist to her beloved and respected husband. Critics at the time argued that such stories modeled the cheap grace (or license to sin) that some today accuse evangelicals of espousing. To read one of the first send-ups of the novel (Henry Fielding’s parody, Shamela) is to encounter all of these critiques and more. In fact, some of what Fielding mocks about Methodism in Shamela reads like a scathing critique of today’s evangelicalism.
In the chapter titled “Conversion” in William James’s foundational work The Varieties of Religious Experience, first published in 1902, he writes,
To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain an assurance, are so many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong, inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right, superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities.43
James’s description of the “divided” self echoes the struggle Paul describes in Romans 7. Even after the change that comes through conversion, vestiges of our sin nature remain. While James (who is defining conversion in such a way that it can apply to all religious experience) says that conversion can be “gradual or sudden,” evangelicals have traditionally emphasized it as the latter.
By the waning years of the nineteenth century, however, a growing cynicism about all things evangelical—including conversion—was settling in. Many adult children of evangelical Victorians rejected the faith of their parents, clearly foreshadowing today’s phenomena of deconstruction and deconversion.
Thomas Hardy, the famous novelist and poet, was one of these who rejected the evangelicalism of his youth. Hardy shifted from boyhood plans of becoming a minister to atheism in his early adulthood, then finally to agnosticism. His shaken belief is evidenced everywhere in his literary works. In his 1891 novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hardy is critical of—if sympathetic to—an evangelical family he portrays. He is less sympathetic to the novel’s villain, Alec d’Urberville, who has an entire section of the novel—“The Convert”—named for him based on his adoption of evangelical Christianity. After being converted by an evangelical minister (the father in the family just mentioned), Alec—once a promiscuous libertine—becomes a revivalist preacher. His conversion turns out to be one of convenience, however, and it doesn’t outlast the first lure of temptation, a plot point that contributes significantly to the novel’s tragic end—and to expressing Hardy’s real-life skepticism of evangelicalism.
A key part of how that tragedy plays out culminates in that section of the book named after Alec, titled “The Convert.” After having run away following yet another devastation in her life, the heroine of the novel, Tess, encounters Alec—the original source of her ruin—once again. He is almost unrecognizable at first, in “half-clerical” dress, his “sable moustache” replaced by “neatly trimmed, old-fashioned whiskers.”44
It was less a reform than a transfiguration. The former curves of sensuousness were now modulated to lines of devotional passion. The lip-shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to express supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated as riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour of pious rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism, Paulinism; the bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in the old time with such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a theolatry that was almost ferocious.45
Alec’s “transfiguration” is forced. It is not genuine but rather “made to express supplication.”
Part of Hardy’s purpose in writing this tale is to criticize evangelicalism. Thus, he allows his authorial knife another twist in the narrative’s description of “the convert’s” preaching:
The sermon, as might be expected, was of the extremest antinomian type; on justification by faith, as expounded in the theology of St Paul. This fixed idea of the rhapsodist was delivered with animated enthusiasm, in a manner entirely declamatory, for he had plainly no skill as a dialectician.46
Translating Hardy’s erudite verbiage into more common language: Alec couldn’t make a logical argument, but he could make a claim and deliver it with emotion. Not only does Alec quickly abandon his newfound faith upon being reunited with the object of his passionate desire, but he also blames the woman for his fall—and takes her down with him.
In this novel, as in nearly all of Hardy’s work and in the work of many other late Victorians, his cynicism toward evangelicalism is on display, specifically the conversionism that Hardy thought came too easily and too superficially. For Hardy and other critics of the evangelical movement, too often the desire for purity encouraged hypocrisy, earnest ideals became mere performance, and the valuation of hard work turned into pursuit of material prosperity. The character of Alec d’Urberville is as cynical a depiction of an evangelical (at least in name) as I have seen in literature. Of course, Hardy’s portrayal is that of an outsider. It is not how we evangelicals would wish to see ourselves. And yet, these corrupt kinds of conversions form part of our imaginary too.47
One of Hardy’s close friends was Victorian poet and critic Edmund Gosse, the son of strict Calvinist parents who were part of the Plymouth Brethren. Gosse’s parents raised him with the fervent belief from his childhood that he was among the elect. His mother hoped, he wrote in his 1907 memoir Father and Son, that “I should be the Charles Wesley of my age, ‘or perhaps,’ she had the candour to admit, ‘merely the George Whitefield.’”48
The emphasis Gosse’s parents placed on conversion is detailed throughout the memoir, from making new converts to emphasizing the drama of the conversion experience. Describing his father’s evangelistic efforts among their neighbors, Gosse details what conversion meant for his father:
There must be a new birth and being, a fresh creation in God. This crisis he was accustomed to regard as manifesting itself in a sudden and definite upheaval. There might have been prolonged practical piety, deep and true contrition for sin, but these, although the natural and suitable prologue to conversion, were not conversion itself.
. . . On some day, at some hour and minute, if life was spared to them, the way of salvation would be revealed to these persons in such an aspect that they would be enabled instantaneously to accept it. They would take it consciously, as one takes a gift from the hand that offers it. This act of taking was the process of conversion, and the person who so accepted was a child of God now, although a single minute ago he had been a child of wrath. The very root of human nature had to be changed, and, in the majority of cases, this change was sudden, patent, and palpable.49
The fact that as a boy of nine, Edmund had not given evidence of a specific moment of conversion presented a quandary to his father, who believed Edmund was saved, desired his participation in communion, and yet, vexingly, could not point to an exact moment of his conversion. The problem was resolved by calling on two elders to examine the boy, which they did, happily reporting the next Sunday that young Gosse’s “testimony to all the leading principles of salvation” had been “so distinct and exhaustive” that the elders recommended him for public baptism and admission to the communion.50
Early in adulthood, however, Gosse rejected his parents’ faith, recoiling not only against what he viewed as severity in his father but even more against an evangelical experience that made no room for the literary and artistic imagination that his parents had worked hard to suppress in him during his youth.
It is ultimately impossible, of course, to determine with certainty whether those who seem to have walked away from the faith—whether in real life or in fictional accounts—were ever truly converted or simply never grew into maturity.
Yet, it’s important to realize that converts can be converted to anything. Even the Bible warns against this in Matthew 23:15: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t recall ever hearing this verse mentioned before an altar call or a commissioning service.
Conversion as Revolution
The Bible’s exhortation in Matthew 28:19 to “go and make disciples” does not command us to “go and make converts” (although conversion is implied, since disciples must first be converted). It tells us to make disciples—followers of Jesus who are baptized, instructed, and taught how to live lives in obedience to God’s commands.
Three hundred years ago, the evangelical movement reminded the church that genuine conversion is necessary to being a Christian. One isn’t simply born a Christian; one must be born again.
Now, centuries later, being born again has been so emphasized that nurturing that new life after birth—the process in the Christian life known as “sanctification”—is too often neglected. (Is it just coincidence that pro-life evangelicals are sometimes accused in the abortion debate of being pro-birth more than pro-life? While the charge is not entirely just, there is a tendency among evangelicals, who were reacting to a history that neglected conversion, to emphasize the new birth at the expense of what follows.) The good news of Jesus Christ doesn’t end when one is born again. Overcorrection is a universal human tendency, but the course of virtue steers between the ditches on either side. Such virtue is as rare as it is radical.
Indeed in The Wounded Healer, Henri Nouwen characterizes true Christian conversion as “the individual equivalent of revolution.” Nouwen earlier describes two opposing pulls in the universal search for transcendence: the inward pull toward mysticism and the outward one toward social revolution. In Christ, the two come together. “Mysticism and revolution are two aspects of the same attempt to bring about radical change,” Nouwen explains.51 Conversion brings radical change inside the believer that will by its very nature effect change in the world outside. We need look no further than to the first disciples, who turned the world upside down.
Evangelicalism’s long emphasis on conversion—its stadium-filled services, its emotional altar calls, its formulaic prayers of salvation—leaves too little emphasis on formation, on sanctification. Personal salvation alone will not solve all problems, personal and social.52 “Get people saved,” one hears constantly in response to laments about social injustice and moral problems. If this were all that were necessary to eradicate injustice, there would be no (or at least far fewer) Christians who have bought and sold slaves, abused their wives, aborted their unborn children, watched porn, or gotten drunk on power.
Woe to us if we fail to see what exactly we are asking people to convert to.