Evangelical Disenchantment Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt David Hempton

In this engaging and at times heartbreaking book, David Hempton looks at evangelicalism through the lens of well-known individuals who once embraced the evangelical tradition, but later repudiated it. The author recounts the faith journeys of nine creative artists, social reformers, and public intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including such diverse figures as George Eliot, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Vincent van Gogh, and James Baldwin. Within their highly individual stories, Hempton finds not only clues to the development of these particular creative men and women but also myriad insights into the strengths and weaknesses of one of the fastest growing religious traditions in the modern world. Allowing his subjects to express themselves in their own voices - through letters, essays, speeches, novels, apologias, paintings - Hempton seeks to understand the factors at work in the shaping of their religious beliefs, and how their negotiations of faith informed their public and private lives. The nine were great public communicators, but in private often felt deep uncertainties. Hempton's moving portraits highlight common themes among the experiences of these disillusioned evangelicals while also revealing fresh insights into the evangelical movement and its relations to the wider culture. It features portraits of: George Eliot; Frances W. Newman; Theodore Dwight Weld; Sarah Grimke; Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Frances Willard; Vincent van Gogh; Edmund Gosse; and, James Baldwin.

David Hempton is Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies, Harvard University. His book Methodism: Empire of the Spirit, published by Yale University Press, was awarded the Jesse Lee Prize.

"David Hempton's "Evangelical Disenchantment "is a lucidly written and riveting narrative of nine evangelical men and women who left the faith in which they once believed and were nurtured. The strengths of the books are its sensitive and sympathetic treatment of its subject matter and its attention to and appreciation of the complexity of the issues it addresses. Hempton never loses sight of the humanity of his subjects. . . . This is intellectual history at its best. . . . A well-written and deeply researched book. Hempton crafts a compelling story whose details he has mastered, and he presents them in extraordinary clear prose. . . . His sensitive and sympathetic analysis of subjects is exemplary. . . . Hempton's book is not a simple story of disenchantment as linear progress toward enlightenment. It is a story of tragedy and disappointments, gain and loss, with broken relations and new friendships. It is an eminently readable book that deserves wide reading because it bears on so many important aspects of religious history, biography, and the challenges to faith in the modern world."--Curtis J./i>--Curtis J. Evans "Journal of Religion "