Grace Abounding and “Evangelically Speaking”
Everybody loves a good story.
Evangelicals love a good conversion story.
The more dramatic, the better. The starker the difference between “before” and “after,” the more often the story will be retold. (Have you ever noticed how often the gritty details of the “before” part can be dragged out in these stories while the “after” is all but an afterthought?)
The power of all good stories—not just the ones centered on conversion—is in how they reflect the order of human existence: first comes the recognition that something is missing or out of order, then the desire to fill that need, and, finally, fulfillment and restoration. In the best stories, resolution comes in some surprising way or from some unexpected source. This is the universal story. As literary critic Northrop Frye puts it, the poet or storyteller’s role “is not to tell you what happened, but what happens: not what did take place, but the kind of thing that always does take place.”1 In this way, every story is a metaphor. Every story invites us to compare—compare that story to this story, this story to our story—and to compare what is with what should be.
Metaphors help us make meaning of the world, and human beings are meaning-making creatures. The world revolves around facts, but our understanding of the world depends on the facts we consider and on the meaning we make of these facts. We cannot make meaning without imagination. And our imaginations are shaped as much (although not always in the same way) by things that are not factual as by things that are factual. The imagination begins with the concrete materials of the real world—what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell—and makes meaning from there. Some of that meaning takes the form of thoughts. Some expresses itself in music, poetry, story, or love letters. As the famous saying (commonly attributed to Pablo Picasso) goes, “Art is a lie that tells the truth.”
C. S. Lewis describes something similar in a letter to a friend when he reveals a key moment in the long process of his conversion. In the midst of a late-night conversation about “metaphor and myth,” Lewis came to the realization that while he was “mysteriously moved” by pagan myths, he rejected the power of the gospel story and its truth claims. He suddenly saw that “the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference: that it really happened.”2 Mythical stories prepared the field of Lewis’s imagination to receive the truth of the gospel.
While the categories of fiction versus nonfiction, imaginary versus real, and truth versus lie are essential distinctions, a story as a form shapes our imaginations regardless of whether its basis is fact or fiction. Our visions are expanded not only by what is or was but by what could be.
Although the content of every story differs from others, the basic form of most stories remains the same. A story has a beginning, middle, and end. The middle is a point of conflict, the center on which the rising action and resolution revolve. I thought I wasn’t a dog person. Then one day Sam showed up at my door. My life hasn’t been the same since. In this three-sentence story, we have a before and after—and in between, a point of conflict that leads to a turning point or conversion. The before and after are defined by that turning point. “Before” isn’t “before” until both the something it precedes and the consequences that follow take place. (By the way, is Sam a dog or a person? The answer to that question is the story.) The structure of every story, even this miniature one, reflects the grand narrative told in Scripture of creation, fall, redemption. In a more complicated way, this remains true even in stories told out of chronological order. Some kind of conversion or transformation is the hinge that confers meaning on what precedes and follows. This holds true whether the story is truth or fiction.
Now, nothing ruins a good conversion story like a lie. Some years ago, someone I considered a friend was exposed for falsifying details about his life in order to make his Christian testimony more dramatic—extremely dramatic. Not only this, but this highly embellished story conveniently played into a number of fears, stereotypes, and myths that were in vogue among American evangelicals at the time. Not surprisingly, this conversion testimony catapulted its teller into modest Christian fame, the sort of fame that leads to book deals, media appearances, and plum appointments in evangelical institutions. In the midst of increasing public accusations, I asked my friend directly whether the charges were true. He replied, unflappably, “Of course not.” I chose to believe him.
Some would say such naivete is baked into evangelicalism. That’s probably true. It’s definitely true of me.
The gullible are grist to the evangelical industrial mill.
For years, I wondered how those poor, illiterate medieval serfs could fall so easily for the tricks and schemes of those corrupt clergymen selling pardons and indulgences. The past few years have been, for me, a long and humbling realization that I am no better or smarter than those medieval peasants. Perhaps, even worse, it’s not so much gullibility as it is that we’ve become so accustomed to these “evangelically speaking” stories that we have simply developed too great a tolerance for them.
A Horse Is a Horse of Course of Course
There’s fact. There’s fiction. Then there’s truth, which transcends both. To arrive at truth requires the work of the imagination. This is not to say that truth is imaginary. Rather, it is to recognize that imagination is what discerns meaning—and ultimately, hopefully, truth—from the facts.
The isolation of facts from the meaning or value of those facts is humorously illustrated in a famous scene from Charles Dickens’s Hard Times. The scene takes place in a schoolroom presided over by a teacher named Mr. Gradgrind, whose name is quite fitting. His utilitarian philosophy of teaching is described in the opening lines of the story:
Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!3
During one class, Gradgrind asks a pupil, Sissy Jupe, to define a horse. Sissy knows horses very well because her father trains and rides horses in the circus. However, intimidated by her teacher’s badgering style, she stumbles to answer. The next student provides Gradgrind with the exact answer the schoolmaster seeks: “Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.”4
How little the mere facts of a horse convey the truth of its marvelous beauty, power, majesty, and mystery!
Conversion stories—whether those of real life or those found in imaginative literature—are powerful and good because stories are the way in which human beings make meaning and share that meaning, something Dickens’s Gradgrind clearly fails to understand. But like all expressions of human understanding, these stories—along with the language we use to create and tell them—are limited and fallen. They cannot capture “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
Before and After
My own imagination was formed within a culture in which having a conversion story to tell was almost as important as the conversion itself. If you’re like me, you grew up hearing, “I know the year, the day, and the hour I was saved,” and its countless variations, in many churches, from many people, and many, many preachers. I heard it so often that it was years before I could admit publicly that I don’t remember my own day of salvation, the time when I asked Jesus into my heart and was born again. No, I don’t remember my moment of conversion.
Although I can’t remember the middle of the story, I do know the “before” and “after.” I have one very early memory of sitting on a stoop after being chided for some now-forgotten act of childish disobedience, just wallowing in my sin. Another memory from a year or two later is in another town in another state in a new home. My family had just moved, and my mother was kneeling with me as I prayed and asked Jesus—whom I knew then to be my Savior—to help me. Somewhere in between those two memories—according to my mother’s testimony—I prayed to receive Christ.
It is to my baptism, which took place while I was a young child—in a cold northern lake because our church was too small for a baptistry—that I look for the mark, seal, and assurance of my faith, my step of obedience and my public profession that Jesus is Lord and I belong to him.
Yet, not having a memory of that prayer of salvation—not having a conversion story—is something that held so much weight in my faith community that I dared not speak of it for a long time.
I’m in good company, though.
Despite the dramatic standard set by Saul when he became Paul after that sudden experience on the road to Damascus (see fig. 5), other famous Christians throughout church history had a slower go of it, including Martin Luther, Blaise Pascal, John Bunyan, and William Jay, just to name a few.
Richard Baxter, the renowned seventeenth-century Puritan divine, had a similar testimony. When he was about fifteen years old he read a devotional work by Rev. Edmund Bunny. Baxter felt a sense of awakening during this reading. Recalling this moment later, Baxter wrote,
It pleased God to awaken my Soul, and shew me the folly of Sinning, and the misery of the Wicked, and the unexpressible weight of things Eternal, and the necessity of resolving on a Holy Life, more than I was ever acquainted with before. The same things which I knew before came now in another manner, with Light, and Sense and Seriousness to my Heart.5
But Baxter was careful to point out that he could not say whether this was the moment of his conversion, for he did not know when that took place. “Yet whether sincere Conversion began now, or before, or after,” he explains, “I was never able to this day to know.”6
Jonathan Edwards stood firm on the needlessness of identifying a precise moment of conversion:
Conversion is a great and glorious work of God’s power, at once changing the heart, and infusing life into the dead soul; though the grace then implanted more gradually displays itself in some than in others. But as to fixing on the precise time when they put forth the very first act of grace, there is a great deal of difference in different persons; in some it seems to be very discernible when the very time was; but others are more at a loss. In this respect, there are very many who do not know, even when they have it, that it is the grace of conversion, and sometimes do not think it to be so till a long time after. . . . The manner of God’s work on the soul, sometimes especially, is very mysterious.7
It’s a paradox. Evangelicals heavily promote child evangelism. On the other hand, evangelicals also encourage the sort of salvation testimony that requires not only a good memory of that decision but an understanding of it sophisticated enough to tell the story of that conversion well. Of course, somewhere in the fine print, if one digs deeply enough, is a disclaimer stating that these circumstances aren’t necessary to one’s testimony. Nevertheless, the emphasis on such stories carries an implicit veneration of them.
Not having a before-and-after kind of conversion experience is a worrisome thing for an evangelical. It sets your mind to racing backward in search of a lost memory and, failing to find one, leads you to say the sinner’s prayer over and over, or to raise your hand at the end of the sermon one more time, or to go forward to the altar again (and again), just to be sure the deal is sealed.
Yet, as one of my colleagues wryly observed over a recent faculty lunch, “No parent prays for their child to have a dramatic testimony.”
Testimony as Both Witness and Assurance
This “question of timing” of one’s conversion has been a point of discussion since the Reformation.8 Evangelicals tended not to be hard and fast about pinpointing the exact moment of conversion, but Revivalists and the Methodists “usually looked for a datable crisis” or “the change of a particular moment.”9 While some schools within the evangelical movement believe “once saved, always saved” and others do not believe in eternal security, both, in emphasizing conversion, stress deepening the conversion experience by remembering it. Not only the conversion testimony itself but the retelling of it, too, helps deepen assurance of salvation. Memories and the retelling of them are what give and increase the meaning of them in our lives. The same is true of our salvation stories.
For telling stories is a universal human activity, and retelling the stories of our identity and our origin (including new spiritual birth) is a way of reinscribing that identity and origin more deeply into our sense of self.10 Through memory, the conversion experience moves from an objective, onetime event to a more subjective, layered experience. Conversely, the testimony transforms a conversion experience into a reified form by externalizing an internal experience, for both the writer/speaker and the reader/listener. Conversion narratives build identity, strengthen beliefs, create a sense of community with others who share that identity, and extend invitations to the unconverted to join.11
The use of the word “testimony” to mean “conversion story” is so prevalent within evangelicalism today that some of us who resist this conflation commonly resort to the running joke of responding “Which one?” when asked to share our “testimony.” On the one hand, it’s just semantics: we know that when evangelicals talk about one’s “testimony” it’s a shorthand phrase that is referring to our salvation story. On the other hand, though, words matter. The life of the faithful Christian ought to be chock-full of testimonies of the mysterious and ordinary workings of the Lord in our lives. Genuine conversion transforms how we see everything.
Yet, there is a history behind this semantic quirk. The prominent place of the conversion narrative within the evangelical social imaginary has a story of its own. It is nearly impossible within evangelicalism to separate the importance of conversion itself from the importance of telling the story of it. Throughout the evangelical movement—and even in the years leading up to it—sharing one’s testimony of conversion has been so connected to the conversion experience that conversion essentially has come to have “two parts, a heart-change and a narrative.”12 These narratives take different forms. Augustine’s Confessions, for example, is an obvious early example. The genre of spiritual autobiography became extremely prominent among Puritans in the seventeenth century. Today, evangelicals love spiritual memoirs, which make up a good chunk of the ever-expanding publishing category known as “Christian living.” As one academic study sums it up, “Conversion stories are the trademark of born-again Evangelical believers.”13
The World’s Most Influential Conversion Narrator
But the most influential conversion narrative ever published isn’t a true account like those marvelous accounts by Augustine or the Puritans or Lauren Winner. The most influential conversion narrative in all of human literature, hands down, is John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Technically, using today’s categories, The Pilgrim’s Progress is a fictional conversion narrative. But Bunyan would not have seen it as such. For him, as he explains in the poem that precedes the story and serves as a kind of foreword, allegory is simply truth adorned by outer dress—in Lewis’s terms, a true myth. The symbols that comprise the story (obscured or “dark” words) do not lie or feign (as his critics charged) but rather make truth clearer. He explains,
Some men, by feigned words, as dark as mine,
Make truth to spangle and its rays to shine.
Solidity, indeed, becomes the pen
Of him that writeth things divine to men;
But must I needs want solidness, because
By metaphors I speak? Were not God’s laws,
His gospel laws, in olden times held forth
By types, shadows, and metaphors?14
Some lines later, Bunyan proclaims,
My dark and cloudy words, they do but hold
The truth, as cabinets enclose the gold.15
It is significant that before writing this work that would for centuries be the most published book in the world after the Bible, Bunyan wrote his real-life conversion narrative. His spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, was first printed in 1666, twelve years before the publication of The Pilgrim’s Progress. (Both works were written while Bunyan, a Baptist Dissenter, was imprisoned for preaching without a license.) Undoubtedly, Bunyan’s own conversion experience, followed by his careful retelling of it, was the fuel that lit the fire of The Pilgrim’s Progress, a blaze that has been burning through Christendom for hundreds of years and is still bright.
Bunyan’s pilgrimage to genuine Christian conversion began with reading two books that were among the sole possessions his wife brought into their marriage. Notably, the subject of one of these books, Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven, was also conversion. Upon reading this testimony, along with the other book, Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety, Bunyan felt his first stirrings of religious desires. He began to attend church regularly but did not yet experience internal change. Amid ongoing temptations toward sin, he longed to find an example in Christian history worthy of emulation, observing that many ministers and theologians of his day wrote of the experiences of other people rather than their own experiences, in his words, of “only that which others felt . . . without going down themselves into the deep.”16
But then Bunyan came upon Martin Luther’s testimony in Luther’s commentary on Galatians. There Luther wrestles in ways similar to Bunyan’s own struggling, and Bunyan soon preferred, of all books, second only to the Bible, this one of Luther’s, one Bunyan describes as “most fit for a wounded conscience.” After reading Luther’s testimony, “I found, as I thought,” Bunyan writes, “that I loved Christ dearly: Oh! Methought my soul cleaved unto Him, my affections cleaved unto Him; I felt love to Him as hot as fire.”17
Unbeknownst to him, Bunyan’s imagination was being refashioned until that time when it was ready to conform to the gospel. With prose that is sheer poetry (and worthwhile to slow down so as to read attentively), Bunyan describes that moment like this:
As I was passing in the field, and that too with some dashes on my conscience, fearing lest yet all was not right, suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul, Thy righteousness is in heaven; and methought withal, I saw with the eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ at God’s right hand: there, I say, was my righteousness; so that wherever I was, or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me, He wants My righteousness; for that was just before Him. I also saw moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse; for my righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself, The same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Heb. Xiii. 8.
Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed; I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations also fled away; so that from that time those dreadful scriptures of God left off to trouble me: now went I also home rejoicing, for the grace and love of God; so when I came home, I looked to see if I could find that sentence; Thy righteousness is in heaven, but could not find such a saying; wherefore my heart began to sink again, only that was brought to my remembrance, 1 Cor. i. 30, Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption; by this word I saw the other sentence true.
For by this scripture I saw that the Man Christ Jesus, as He is distinct from us, as touching His bodily presence, so He is our righteousness and sanctification before God.18
Here is conversion as it would be imagined for the next several centuries: in Christ alone and in an instant.
Yet, truth be told, that “instant” was a long time coming. Grace Abounding is filled with many near misses. Bunyan’s conversion takes such a “diffuse, repetitive, and cumulative” character that it even has been described as a “double-conversion.”19
Bunyan’s slow, meandering journey to his spiritual rebirth contributes to the way in which Grace Abounding is not just spiritual autobiography and conversion narrative but also a work of apologetics in a vein similar to Augustine’s Confessions. In narrating his many doubts, questions, and challenges to the Christian faith, Bunyan also offers resolutions. The reader has the chance to wrestle vicariously along with Bunyan, to ask the same questions and to arrive with him at his conclusions. In so doing, the reader goes through the same process far more quickly and efficiently than the years it took Bunyan to do so. Grace Abounding offers the reader a “morphology of conversion,”20 a map for the spiritual journey. Bunyan’s travail can thus be both universalized and truncated. He offers a path that, once cleared, becomes easier for others to follow.
Indeed, Bunyan’s account has had a long and lasting influence, making appearances in later conversion narratives for years to come.21 Together with The Pilgrim’s Progress—which is in many ways an allegorical retelling of the real-life journey narrated in Grace Abounding—Bunyan’s cumulative influence in shaping the evangelical imaginary is likely unmatched, particularly in the context of the testimony.
Notably, Bunyan was a man of active and vivid imagination, not only in his written texts but also in his dreams, memories, and understanding of himself and the world, a quality of his inner life vividly captured in Grace Abounding. He even expresses an essential understanding of the social imaginary when he writes of “unthought of imaginations” that drive a soul to distress.22 Yet, looking back on his life, he attributes even the “fearful dreams” and “fearful visions” of devils and hellfire of his childhood to God’s pursuit of him.23 Later in his life, after encountering joyful Christians in Bedford and feeling the conviction of his conscience for his lack of saving faith, he recalls,
Bedford was thus, in a kind of a vision, presented to me, I saw as if they were on the sunny side of some high mountain, there refreshing themselves with the pleasant beams of the sun, while I was shivering and shrinking in the cold, afflicted with frost, snow and dark clouds: methought also, betwixt me and them, I saw a wall that did compass about this mountain, now through this wall my soul did greatly desire to pass; concluding, that if I could, I would even go into the very midst of them, and there also comfort myself with the heat of their sun.24
In both Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan’s approach to making a testimony of faith, done as a mode of apologetics, is described by Bunyan scholar David Parry as “a kind of imaginative preparationism.” In other words, Bunyan appeals “to the imagination in order to entice the unregenerate mind to entertain and to become habituated to the thought world of faith.” Such a reformation of the imagination helps create for readers social imaginaries more hospitable to religious belief.25 Such an approach suggests that though “the message of salvation cannot be attained by unaided human reason or imagination, appeal to the imagination can persuade the reason to be open to the divine revelation that offers salvation.”26 What a contrasting tale is offered between Bunyan’s embrace of the gifts and power of his imagination and Edmund Gosse’s parents’ denial of those same gifts to their son two centuries later. Bunyan’s welcome of the imagination helped usher in the evangelical movement; Gosse’s parents’ rejection of it marked its decline.
The Conversion Narrative of Ebenezer Scrooge
Another conversion story that continues to be beloved, in its original form or in countless adaptations, isn’t a religious conversion narrative at all, at least not on the surface. Nevertheless, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol ends the way all good testimonies do—with Ebenezer Scrooge having become, truly, a new creature.
Part of the brilliance of Dickens’s tale is his depiction of the growing awareness that Scrooge undergoes during each journey with the spirits, each foray a separate pilgrimage bringing its own progress. When the miserly and miserable Ebenezer Scrooge awakens in his room on Christmas morning after his final sojourn during the night with various ghosts—those of his deceased business partner Jacob Marley, Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come—he converts, in every sense of the word:
Yes! And the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!
“I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!” Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. “The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley! Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob; on my knees!”
He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions, that his broken voice would scarcely answer to his call. He had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the Spirit, and his face was wet with tears.27
This famous conversion scene reflects a great deal about the concept of conversion, from both an evangelical perspective and a broader one.
It’s no coincidence that A Christmas Carol appeared in 1843, early in the Victorian period, which was shaped, perhaps more than anything else, by evangelicalism.28 Dickens was not an evangelical, although he did seem to believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior, despite a lack of both orthodoxy and orthopraxy. He was writing within a culture and for an audience largely shaped by evangelical values and ideals. While he often criticized the hypocrisy and excesses of evangelicalism, he also reflected some of its core beliefs—not only conversionism but activism too. Like the evangelicals, Dickens believed in the possibility and necessity of social reform. He also understood, as A Christmas Carol shows, the power of the conversion story.
Most good stories (the longer ones, anyway) are pilgrimages. Some of these pilgrimages involve literal journeys—The Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and even Jane Eyre—that are also personal and spiritual journeys too. Nearly every pilgrimage ends—or begins—with a conversion (of some kind). Most importantly, these stories invite readers to participate in these pilgrimages. The modern distinction between fiction and nonfiction, between dream vision and waking reality, does not register on the soul embarked on such a journey.
Print Culture, Modernity, and Evangelicalism
The modern sense of the individual has been accompanied by the increased importance of identity. It makes sense, then, that the conversion narrative would be a way of not only articulating but also cementing the new identity of a convert. In his seminal study, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, Bruce Hindmarsh documents the rise of this genre and its influence on the movement. Through “narrative identity,” Hindmarsh explains, the reader, by reading the conversion narrative and then seeing in it “these stages in her life, correlating outward and inward experience,” can “possess a well-ordered and integrated sense of herself—who she was, where she had come from, and where she was going.”29 This is a particularly modern and evangelical move in that such identity and the assurance it can bring cultivate a democratization of authority. Not just the cleric but even the layperson could be an “author” of their own story.
This democratization of authority arose alongside technological and political changes: publication of conversion narratives was possible because of greater religious liberty and more freedom of the press.30
It is not coincidental that a narrative understanding of one’s life, identity, belief, and self would emerge at the same time as print culture. The spread of literacy and reading made possible by the printing press also cultivated introspection and heightened the experience of interiority, which are so bound up in creating one’s sense of identity. Print media, as Neil Postman demonstrates in his classic work Amusing Ourselves to Death, tends toward, and thereby cultivates, a linear, sequential frame of mind.31 Thus, alongside the rise of printed texts and literacy, Hindmarsh says, came an increasing theological emphasis on “the sequencing of salvation” in one’s personal conversion experience.32
Because of these developments, evangelicalism was in many ways the product of a reading culture. Testimonies beget testimonies. And, of course, this includes oral testimonies—whether those of ancient times or those shared on a park bench with a friend—but printed accounts not only circulate more but become objects in their own right. Thus, conversion narratives beget conversion narratives. As one scholar of the genre explains, “Conversion not only responds to but creates its own context. Converts sum themselves up in language. They follow models of conversion that have come before, they write themselves into existence, and they rely on their own words to do evangelistic work.”33 The Pilgrim’s Progress was so influential because it appeared at a time when print technology and literacy were on the rise.
This symbiotic relationship between the evangelical movement and the culture of print has existed from the movement’s beginning. Many prominent evangelicals from these centuries cite the influence of books in their journey toward conversion. They include John Newton, who read Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ; Hannah More, who read John Newton’s Cardiphonia; William Wilberforce, who read Philip Doddridge’s The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul; and Legh Richmond, who read Wilberforce’s Practical View of Christianity. It is a pattern that is hundreds of years old, and it laid the foundation for today’s evangelical publishing industry, which has transformed not only evangelicalism but America itself.
Little Pilgrims
Indeed, one of the most beloved and enduring works of American literature is Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, which is the direct literary offspring of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Images and motifs from the allegory recur throughout Little Women, and several chapter titles make direct reference to The Pilgrim’s Progress. The very opening of the novel pays direct homage to Bunyan. The story begins (like A Christmas Carol does) at Christmastime, with the four young March sisters (notice the journey motif in the family’s surname) grousing and grumbling to each other until their mother, Marmee, tempers the moment by recalling,
Do you remember how you used to play Pilgrim’s Progress when you were little things? Nothing delighted you more than to have me tie my piece bags on your backs for burdens, give you hats and sticks and rolls of paper, and let you travel through the house from the cellar, which was the City of Destruction, up, up, to the housetop, where you had all the lovely things you could collect to make a Celestial City.34
The girls respond with fond recollections—except for Amy, who says, “I don’t remember much about it, except that I was afraid of the cellar and the dark entry, and always liked the cake and milk we had up at the top. If I wasn’t too old for such things, I’d rather like to play it over again.” Marmee corrects her, saying,
We never are too old for this, my dear, because it is a play we are playing all the time in one way or another. Our burdens are here, our road is before us, and the longing for goodness and happiness is the guide that leads us through many troubles and mistakes to the peace which is a true Celestial City. Now, my little pilgrims, suppose you begin again, not in play, but in earnest, and see how far on you can get before Father comes home.35
Amy, lacking hermeneutical sophistication, doesn’t make the move from symbol to interpretation: “‘Really, Mother? Where are our bundles?’ asked Amy, who was a very literal young lady.”36
Marmee explains that each of the complaints the girls had been rehearsing is the burden they need to shed. They are not to merely play The Pilgrim’s Progress but apply the story and live out its pattern in their own lives. Meg understands exactly what the purpose of such a testimony is: “‘Let us do it,’ said Meg thoughtfully. ‘It is only another name for trying to be good, and the story may help us, for though we do want to be good, it’s hard work and we forget, and don’t do our best.’”37
No one more than Bunyan would have been pleased with such a result, for as he wrote in his prologue to the allegory,
This book will make a traveller of thee,
If by its counsel thou wilt ruled be;
It will direct thee to the Holy Land,
If thou wilt its directions understand38
Bunyan’s purpose in penning The Pilgrim’s Progress, he makes clear, was to point others to the kingdom of God—which is, of course, the point of the entire testimony genre.
Good Genre Gone Wild
Religious conversion is, of course, a genuine human experience. So, too, is the desire to tell others about it.
But like all powerful things, such experiences can be manipulated. “Testimony envy” is a thing,39 and the conversion narrative can easily become performative. The signs—coming to the “anxious bench,” going forward to the altar, raising a hand, saying a rote prayer, or sharing a powerful story—can become mistaken for the substance. Documenting the role the conversion narrative had in many churches around the beginning of the evangelical revivals, Bruce Hindmarsh summarizes it this way: “No narrative, no admittance.”40 The pattern for conversion narratives has existed for so long and is so ingrained in our imaginations that it has become formulaic, not only regarding spiritual conversion itself but often the journey that follows. Christians, along with Christian institutions, are not immune from the dynamics of peer pressure.
In Pray Away, for example, a documentary about the gay conversion movement (note that it is called a “conversion”), Julie Rodgers, a lesbian who once advocated celibacy for same-sex-attracted Christians but is now married to a woman, shares a story from her former involvement in an ex-gay ministry (often described as “conversion therapy”). Early on in that role, Julie says she was pushed into telling her story a certain way. After she shared with one of the ministry’s leaders that she had been sexually assaulted in college, the leader told Julie he “wanted me to incorporate that into my testimony.” Julie wasn’t comfortable doing so. But, praising her for her speaking skills, the leader insisted that including this experience would make Julie’s testimony more powerful. Finally, Julie says,
I ended up telling the story. But I remember feeling, like, so angry that all of these really intimate experiences of my life were being orchestrated and put together in a way that pushed a narrative: “Men are bad, and I hate men. And because of abuse, I have turned to women.”41
The pressure to spin a narrative along the path in which it is already spinning and has been spinning for decades or centuries is tremendous, as Rodgers’s account confirms. But such pressure is counterproductive at best.
Another problem is that the dominant culture of evangelicalism has consisted primarily of stories that make too little room for the people oppressed by that dominant culture. The conversion of African slaves, Native Americans, and many others often occurred not because of, but despite, the testimonies of those who dominated them. As Robert Kellemen puts it in Beyond the Suffering, regarding such experiences among America’s descendants of enslaved people,
If spiritually famished African Americans were going to convert to Christianity, then they had to convert on the basis of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection as revealed in the Bible, not on the basis of Christianity revealed in the lifestyles of the Christians they knew. Ironically, to find redemption in Christ, African Americans had to redeem Christianity as they saw it practiced.42
The connection between the conversion experience itself and its retelling is not rooted in doctrine or theology as much as it reflects defining characteristics of the age and the culture in which it is told. Different people and different times have different ways of telling stories.
Even in the modern, secular age that has been developing for hundreds of years, the expectations for the Christian testimony have also evolved. But the image embedded in our social imaginaries about what conversion should look or feel like can undermine the reality of the experience for some. I learned this truth by hard experience years ago. I was a full-time graduate student and working on a horse farm on the side. I had befriended the farm owner’s wife, who had been asking me questions about my Christian faith. One day, she surprised me by saying she wanted to be saved. We talked more, and I led her in a prayer for salvation. When we were done praying, she lifted her head, opened her eyes, looked at me quietly for a few moments, and said, “I don’t feel any different.” I panicked. I didn’t know what to say (nor do I remember what I did say). But I do remember that as soon as I got home, I called my pastor to ask what I should have said. And for the first time in my life, I heard—or at least heard in a way that made me really hear it—that conversion to Christ is not strictly or necessarily an emotional experience (although that might sometimes be part of it). This woman had learned enough about conversion to imagine it would have some sort of immediate emotional component—and I had not imagined enough about conversion to know it didn’t have to include that.
He’s the Real Thing
In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor argues that an “inescapable feature of human life” is that in order to make sense of our lives and to have an identity, “we need an orientation to the good.” Further, “this sense of the good has to be woven into my understanding of my life as a story.” One “basic condition of making sense of ourselves,” Taylor says, is “that we grasp our lives in a narrative.”43 We “determine what we are by what we have become, by the story of how we got there.”44 It makes sense that our identity as Christians would be rooted in the story of how we came to that identity—whether that story centers on one dramatic before-and-after moment or plays out more like a stop-motion film in which the movement is detectable only when all the frames are shown in sequence.
One study of evangelical conversion narratives done over the course of the last several decades documented a shift in the form these testimonies have taken, shifts that reflect the same changes in the modern sense of self that Taylor describes in his work. The study noted that over the years, conversion stories moved through three stages. The earliest type reflected “biblical scripts of dramatic conversion modeled after the conversion of St Paul and the prodigal son.” But in the 1990s these types of testimonies gave way to what the researchers call “revitalization stories.” These are narratives that chart a more gradual process of spiritual awakening, often within the context of a lifetime spent in Christian communities or churches. More recently, a third kind of testimony has emerged. These narratives make more room for “failed transformation, even hinting at the possibility of deconversion.” Such testimonies differ significantly enough from the form of conversion narratives that were prominent through the 1990s that the study refers to them not as conversion stories but as “life stories” in which the narrators “present themselves as pilgrims and life as a journey.”45
We have come, if this research is right, back around to the testimony exemplified by Bunyan in both Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress. And yet this conversion-as-life-journey redux affirms Taylor’s insights into the modern self, the ethics of authenticity, and the power of social imaginaries. This study of evangelical testimonies shows that today’s conversion narratives have shifted the emphasis from the authenticity or credibility of the experience itself to the authenticity or credibility of the person who had the experience. In other words, it’s a shift from asking “Do I believe this really happened?” to “Do I trust this person?” The shift parallels the modern turn to subjectivity over objectivity, and to expressive individualism.46
Thus the question in the current evangelical social imaginary isn’t so much about whether Jesus is real as it is about whether the person telling the story is real. It’s not a bad question. I don’t know about you, but I have no doubts about how real Jesus is. Yet, I have increasing questions about the stories of some of those who claim to follow him.