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Reviews John D. Barbour, Versions of Deconversion: Autobiography and the Loss of Faith. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1994.238 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8139-1546-5. Autobiographies recounting the experience of religious conversion have a long history, going back to the fourth-century account of St. Augustine. Barbour contributes to the study of autobiographies of conversion through an analysis of the loss of religious faith, which he terms "deconversion." In defining this term, Barbour distinguishes between "secularization" and deconversion. The former refers to a gradual fading of religious beliefs, and the latter to a conscious rejection of former religious beliefs, a dramatic reversal in which former beliefs are seen as not merely irrelevant, but incorrect. Barbour focuses on deconversion to examine why autobiographers reject religious beliefs, and to analyze hermeneutical and rhetorical strategies used to narrate the loss of faith. Autobiographers of interest to Barbour include those whose deconversion leads to another religious faith; those who embrace agnosticism; and those who use deconversion as a metaphor to interpret other experiences of personal transformation. A recurring theme is the centrality of issues of ethics and conscience in the deconversion decision. The examination is divided into ten chapters, beginning with Augustine, John Bunyan, and John Henry Newman, who converted to what they perceived to be an "authentic" Christianity. Barbour returns to the theme of authentic Christianity in his discussion of Frederick Douglass, Charles Eastman, Malcolm X, and Lame Deer, who called for whites to deconvert from an understanding of Christianity which sanctioned injustice. The loss of religious faith as a metaphor for understanding and interpreting non-religious deconversion or other personal transformations is discussed in chapters about Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The aesthetic critique of Protestantism is examined in a chapter on John Ruskin and Edmund Gosse; another chapter discusses Mary McCarthy's and Anthony Kenny's rejections of Roman Catholicism. Four autobiographers—C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Day, Langdon Gilley, and Edwin Muir—are given a chapter on the apologetic use of the deconversion experience. Final chapters are devoted to deconversion from religious cults, and to the relation of issues of gender identity to deconversion narrative. Barbour concludes his study with an essay on the literary and religious significance of deconversion narratives. Biography 20:1 (Winter 1997), © Biographical Research Center 104 Biography 20.1 (Winter 1997) The book has two methodological difficulties. Barbour acknowledges the first in his introduction: in a sense, every conversion is a deconversion; every deconversion a conversion. Because of this intertwining of deconversion and conversion, Barbour gives much space to the discussion of conversion. This is a difficulty only because the book's title may mislead some readers. Readers will want to be alerted that Barbour's interest is in conversion: he simply focuses on the rejection of former belief which is part of the conversion process. His approach differs from other studies of conversion more in emphasis than in underlying concern. A second difficulty is an occasional lack of focus, evidenced in a few ways. Not all the autobiographies fit Barbour's definition of deconversion as the conscious rejection of a former faith. Patricia Hampl, for example, whose conversion narrative is described in the chapter on gender and deconversion, describes her loss of faith as a mere "falling away" brought about by the need to reject parental authority. In another instance, the chapter on apostasy and apology begins with a definition of apostasy as an act of rebellion against God. Dorothy Day is one autobiographer discussed in this chapter: however, it is not clear that Day's conversion narrative, at least as recounted by Barbour, indicates such a rebellion. Barbour describes Day's conversion from an understanding of Christianity as a "life-denying" faith to a new understanding of Christianity which allowed her to discern "grace at work in the natural world." But from Barbour's description, Day saw her earlier rejection of the life-denying version of Christianity not as a rebellion against God, but rather as a rejection of some of the "psychological repressions" which can be involved in Christian belief and practice. This book has several strengths. Barbour's analysis of religious metaphor in non...

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