The conversion narrative, from St. Augustine to the most recent evangelical memoir—with its story of a soul suddenly aware of its own shortcomings and seized with a desire to repent—has always possessed enormous appeal for readers. But what happens when an emotionally potent faith fades, when belief withers? How do people tell the story, not of coming to faith, but of losing it?

Evangelical Disenchantment is an enormously interesting look at just this question. Rather than asking, why do people believe? or how do they come to evangelical religion? David Hempton asks, why do people fall away? and what can we learn from that disenchantment? To probe these dynamics, Hempton samples nine individuals—George Eliot, Francis Newman, Theodore Dwight Weld, Sarah Grimke, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Willard, Vincent van Gogh, Edmund Gosse, and James Baldwin—and provides both a thumbnail religious biography and an account of each one's entrance into and exit from the evangelical fold. If his historical parameters are somewhat restricted—with the exception of Baldwin, all died between the 1870s and the 1920s—Hempton is similarly restrained in the claims he makes for his studies, noting that he “makes no grand representative claims beyond the intrinsic interest of the stories themselves and what they reveal about the strengths and weaknesses of the evangelical tradition” (3). The writing is crisp, and each character is treated with sympathetic charity. The book's very premise—that we can learn as much from the falling-away as from the coming-to faith—is provocative and should foster future studies.

Although entry into the evangelical world generally resulted from an individual spiritual crisis, disenchantment, Hempton points out, occurred for a whole host of reasons and played out in many different ways. It could take place suddenly, or gradually over an extended period of time. It could signal an exit from organized religion altogether, or movement into a more complex spiritual life. In any case, disenchantment, as these studies make abundantly clear, is not merely a matter of shedding a set of beliefs, but also a process of exiting evangelical communities (often tightly bound ones), and finding one's way in new surroundings. It is both a social and a religious phenomenon, and it could be powered by revulsion at the way evangelicals behaved as well as by the specifics of what they believed.

Yet this reader came away from Evangelical Disenchantment with some disenchantment of his own. The title term “evangelical” is never clearly defined, and the contours of American versus British evangelicalism are given only a cursory treatment in the book's opening chapter. Admitting the virtues of definitions offered by David Bebbington, W. R. Ward, and George Marsden, Hempton nonetheless points out that evangelicalism is “not easily contained within a tidy geometrical structure, or a convenient statement of propositions” (6). Still, without a clearer working definition of evangelicalism, it is unclear just what it is that “enchants” these individuals, let alone what it means to be disenchanted. Sarah Grimke, Hempton admits, was “never a conventional evangelical” (99), and eventually she found peace of mind among Quakers and Spiritualists. Theodore Weld's “abandonment of evangelicalism was not written down and formally sealed for all to see” (88); and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had “a failed conversion to evangelical Christianity” during her teenage years (104). (Was she disenchanted at all, if she was never enchanted in the first place?) Hempton refers to James Baldwin's fiction as “the words of an evangelical preacher … albeit without an appeal to a personal and empowering God” (182), a description that begs for a more clear definition of what remains of evangelicalism after the removal of a personal and empowering God.

At times, Evangelical Disenchantment seems to be recounting a spiritual experience—disenchantment—in a relatively straightforward manner, while at others it becomes clear that the narratives offered by the disenchanted are a literary genre all their own, which might call for a more subtle analytical toolkit. For the most part, Hempton takes his subjects' accounts of their disenchantment at face value. But there is a certain formulaic quality to many of the disenchantment narratives, and Hempton admits that they are often at odds with the historical record. For example, he clearly thinks that Vincent van Gogh's reasons for abandoning preparations for theological study, presented in letters to his brother Theo, are less than convincing (125). Over the course of his life, Edmund Gosse offered no fewer than three different and incompatible accounts of his first encounter with Charles Swinburne; more generally, Hempton allows, Gosse was “prone to inflate events with which he was personally associated to make a better story” (144). Elizabeth Cady Stanton's story of her encounter with Charles Finney during her childhood, for example, is clearly not accurate—it can't be, since Finney wasn't even present where Stanton claims to have met him—but Hempton concludes that “on one level it does not matter” (103). Perhaps, but it might matter a great deal. The possibility that there is conscious authorial moralizing going on here (authors' attempts to place themselves in the noblest possible light, and their evangelical rivals in the worst) poses a more severe (and, I would argue, interesting) analytic and interpretive challenge than Hempton seems willing to admit.

The conclusions that Hempton offers, as mentioned above, seem appropriately restrained. To make grandiose claims about the course of evangelicalism based on nine portraits would be untenable. And yet it is difficult to avoid some disappointment upon encountering the tepid conclusion that “sexual identity, personal aspiration, social status, gender and racial consciousness, and temperamental characteristics often collectively help to determine the spiritual journeys of its subjects” (189); or that all nine individuals under consideration, at some point in their lives, originally found something appealing in the evangelical tradition (190). (This latter insight seems built into the book's design, after all; in order to be disenchanted, one has to have been enchanted.)

All this is to say that Hempton has inaugurated a new line of inquiry that promises enormous payoffs in the study of evangelicalism and, indeed, the changing nature of belief (and unbelief) itself. Future conceptual and methodological clarification, by Hempton as well as others, and a wider focus on a more historically varied range of subjects, will no doubt yield new and productive insights.