The Semiotics of Salvation

On Palm Sunday 2007, the motorcycle stunt performer Evel Knievel, in frail health and with only months to live, appeared on stage at the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California, to profess his newfound faith in Jesus Christ. Prior to being baptised by the Reverend Robert Schuller, Knievel was interviewed by Schuller concerning his life as a stuntman and his recent conversion. It is at the Daytona Bike Week in Daytona Beach, Florida that Knievel’s narrative reaches its climax:

So I don’t know what in the world happened. I don’t know if it was the power of the prayer, or God Himself, which was reaching me while I was driving or walking down the sidewalk or sleeping … the power of God in Jesus just grabbed me! It just took hold of me. It was so strong. I can’t tell you how strong it was and I became a person who was filled … just filled with Christianity. All of a sudden I just believed in Jesus Christ. I did! I believed in Him! I don’t know what happened to me.

[ … ]

The second night in Dayton, I rose up in bed. I was by myself and I said, ‘Devil, devil you bastard you, get away from me. I cast you out of my life!’ I went to the balcony of my hotel room, I said, ‘I will take you and throw you, throw you on the beach. You will be dead, you will be gone. I don’t want you around me anymore!’ Then I just got on my knees and prayed that God would put His arms around me and never, ever, ever let me go.¹

Knievel’s almost physical wrestling to repudiate the devil and embrace God’s grace might raise the eyebrows not only of sceptical scholarly analysts but also of many devout Christians to whom faith has come more quietly. However, it will strike a chord of recognition with anyone who has read John Bunyan’s classic spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners or other instances of the seventeenth-century conversion narrative.

A resurgence of interest in religious conversion and its representation in writing has inspired some innovative work of late in early modern studies. In a study of poetry by writers who moved between Catholicism and Protestantism, Molly Murray has explored how the generic forms adopted by these writers enact the fraught negotiations of a fluid self not readily reducible to the neat binaries of confessional polemics.² Craig Harline bravely and movingly departs from scholarly convention in a novelesque study which juxtaposes the story of a seventeenth-century Dutch Reformed preacher’s son who runs away from home and becomes a Jesuit with the story of a friend of the author’s who converted to Mormonism in the 1970s from an evangelical family, only to leave the LDS church on discovering his gay identity.³ In a somewhat quirky book moving from colonial Connecticut to postcolonial Oceania and taking in Bob Dylan en route, Rob Wilson argues that the Puritan paradigm of conversion has bequeathed to the American psyche a tendency to reinvent oneself which persists in ostensibly secular as well as overtly religious forms.⁴ Essay collections wholly or partly focused on early modern conversion have appeared,⁵ and a major AHRC-funded research project on ‘Conversion Narratives in Early Modern Europe’ is under way at the University of York.⁶ Kathleen Lynch’s Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World is an admirable addition to this growing shelf of studies.

Conversion is a slippery subject for various reasons. One is an ambiguity of definition. The word ‘conversion’ is routinely used to refer both to an externally visible change of religious affiliation and to an internal change whereby one turns from sin to receive the grace of God – in Molly Murray’s pithy formulation, ‘a change of church’ and ‘a change of soul’.⁷ These two changes may...