The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (review)

This study provides a deeply researched survey of eighteenth-century narratives of evangelical conversions and a provocative argument for what those narratives signified. The author, a professor of spiritual theology at Regent College (Vancouver), earlier published a fine study of John Newton, the ex-slave captain and hymnwriter who also appears briefly in this volume. The book’s provenance is England, with a substantial side trip to Scotland and occasional glances across the Atlantic. One of the few criticisms that might be directed against it is that Hindmarsh does not make enough of American parallels, especially the conversions of three females that are related in Jonathan Edwards’s A Faithful Narrative of Surprising Conversions, which was first published in 1737. Hindmarsh mentions these stories in passing (225) but probably underestimates their importance for establishing a narrative template that would be widely imitated in Britain and the new world. The book’s historical contribution is Hindmarsh’s thorough depiction of the many varieties of conversion narratives that appeared during the era’s evangelical awakenings. Its interpretive contribution is his success at positioning these stories against the eighteenth-century’s changing cultural circumstances and the forces moving toward a modern sense of the individual self.

The centrality of conversion in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American revivals has long been a commonplace, but until Hindmarsh no one had systematically pursued the origins, extrapolation, variations, social locations, and meanings of the voluminous number of conversion stories with which the age was filled. He begins by carefully defining the terms “autobiography,” “narrative,” “identity,” “conversion,” and “gospel” (as an adjective meaning “evangelical”). These definitions allow him to announce the book’s argument, which is that the era’s evangelical conversion narratives can only be understood in dual perspective. They were markers on the way to the modern self defined by personal choice and personal self-fashioning. But they were also indications of intense community commitment and reflections of “the self-transcending word of the gospel” (349). By positioning these narratives “on the trailing edge of Christendom and the leading edge of modernity” (32, 340), Hindmarsh offers a non-reductive, yet fully contextual analysis of their shape, evolution, and relationship to lived experience.

The first section of the book outlines continuities and discontinuities with the past. Eighteenth-century evangelicals shared much theology with the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, but they were much more deeply committed to conversion as a specific event (Hindmarsh provides the helpful reminder that for Luther and Calvin conversion as such plays almost no role). More directly connected to eighteenth-century religious experience was the morphology of Puritan conversion developed by the “precise” English Protestants at the turn of the seventeenth century and then by the conversionist practices of continental Pietists after the mid-seventeenth century. From these sources descended a pattern of introspection-guilt/ anxiety-crisis-joyful relief that set the basic outline for what would follow in the evangelical revivals. The novelty in the eighteenth century was the new set of cultural, rhetorical, publishing, and gendered contexts in which the Puritan-Pietist conversion was revitalized and transformed.

The bulk of the book offers detailed accounts of the conversion stories that from the 1730s sparked the evangelical revivals, defined the evangelical revival, became routinized in evangelical revival, and diversified as evangelical revivals also diversified. Throughout these discussions Hindmarsh makes effortless use of a wide variety of printed sources and secondary accounts, but his most telling contributions come from mining manuscript collections for lay Methodists (from Manchester University), lay Presbyterians (New College, Edinburgh), lay Moravians (several English sites), and several more.

The published journals of George Whitefield and John Wesley paved the way for much that would follow. When these journals first appeared (Whitefield 1738; Wesley 1740), they were partly imitating the outward-looking travelogs that had risen to great popularity in this period. Yet the journals also innovated by including extensive attention to the authors’ internal...