Dead Christians Society

John Newton’s biographer, Bruce Hindmarsh, tells us that Newton wrote his own autobiography (The Life & Spirituality of John Newton: An Authentic Narrative) very much under the inspiration of a contemporary genre: the sensational adventure tale.

But that wasn’t the only genre Newton had in mind as he wrote his tale. Newton was writing at just the time when a group of philosophically minded writers were creating that blockbuster of all written forms: the novel. And he didn’t miss this development at all–in fact, he used many of the techniques and terms of the new novel form, whose philosophical underpinning was a major and much-ignored Enlightenment “creed”: sentimentalism.

The other day, as I sketched some of the historical context for Newton’s account for our “patron saints” class, I mused on this conjunction of the sentimental novel and the evangelical conversion narrative–for Newton’s “authentic narrative” was hugely popular and much emulated among evangelicals of the late 18th and 19th centuries, and his use of sentimentalist conventions influenced, it seems to me, all conversion narratives to come.

Sentimentalism was not the hankie-wringing, insincere thing that word implies now. And it contained a conviction about how we know truth that was and is strikingly “non-modern.”

(Some of what follows is reworked from a conversation on another part of this blog–that’s just the kind of creative synergy I’d hoped would happen when I started it! For more, click here.):

The question of whether two people sharing an account of their experience with each other can communicate helpful truth is closely related to a crucial question posed by postmodern philosophers: can we learn anything helpful across cultures, or is our very language so conditioned by our own “in-group’s” assumptions about where authority and power are to be found, that positive dialogue is impossible?

I’m not going to force an answer to this question, but I will describe an important genre of literature that Newton’s Authentic Narrative owes a great deal to. That is the genre of the “sentimental” narrative, invented in the 18^th century.

For a later example, think of the novels of Charles Dickens.

When we read Charles Dickens (remember high school English class?), we get two very strong impressions:

(1) we become emotionally engaged in the characters, and

(2) we sense that Dickens is pursuing a moral, spiritual agenda through painting those characters for us.

Both of these are true, and both of them rest on this single assumption about human nature and the importance of human emotion that in fact led a group of eighteenth-century philosophers and writers to invent the novel as a genre. But again, sentimental narratives could be novels, but they could also be history books or biographies.

“Sentimentalism” did not carry the meaning then that it does now (denoting over-wrought, insincere emotional expression). No, the term was invented to describe a coherent set of philosophical ideas about emotions and morality. The sentimentalists assumed, first, that all people share certain basic experiences and emotions, and second, that we can become better people by hearing the stories of other people and having our own emotions (hearts) shaped by those stories.

And that’s the basic contention that postmodern theorists would disagree with. To the postmodern theorist, even our emotions—which we are so used to thinking of as pure, unconditioned experiences—are constructed according to scripts learned from a particular social, cultural group. In other words—and I have seen this seriously argued in a piece of scholarship in the field of anthropology—an East Indian, or French Canadian, or Mexican man who has lost a child would not know how to experience grief unless a sort of social script for grief had been taught to him by what he observed other people in his social group doing as he grew up—and maybe sometimes by explicit teaching too. This is what is known as the strong constructionist assumption in the social sciences.

However, within the past decade or so, social scientists in the new field of emotions research have begun to conclude that there are, in fact, universal human emotions, surrounding certain basic human experiences like the loss of a child, marriage or its equivalent, and so forth. Even though these emotions may be scripted in different ways in different societies, there are discernible similarities across all cultures in what people experience in those basic life moments and situations.

Whether novel, history book, or biography, the sentimental narrative describes people’s emotional experiences in a way that is intended to form the emotions—and the minds, and the moral and spiritual beings—of readers. The sentimentalists were not hack writers, they were sophisticated philosophers who believed that when we encounter other people’s life experiences in print, we are changed by that encounter.

And if this is true, then it seems reasonable to assume that we can learn something from other people’s life experiences—including their experiences of the Triune God.

So, let’s review:

Modernists have tended to dismiss emotion and experience as illegitimate or at least second-class categories of knowledge: they have sought, instead, ordered systems of rational truth—coherent explanations marked by logical sequences and given universal force to explain all things at all times. This is knowledge on the modern, scientific model.

Postmodernists have tended to dismiss emotion and experience as being just as illegitimate sources of knowledge as the supposedly universal dictates of rational proof and rational system—and for the same reason: each social and cultural group has such different assumptions and agendas that it is impossible to communicate across groups—and this affects us right down to the level of our emotions.

But certain Enlightenment thinkers–the early evangelicals and the sentimentalists, both groups drinking from the well of the empiricist John Locke–believed that one’s experiences (and by extension, one’s emotions, and by another extension, other people’s experiences and emotions) are a strong, helpful source of knowledge. And this assumption ruled not only 18^th-century but also 19^th-century reading habits of both secular and Christian readers: The three top genres in those centuries were novels, biographies, and histories—because it was assumed that what you learned in reading those books was valuable, experiential knowledge that, when you learned it, could transform you in ways mere rational argumentation could not achieve.

So what happened? How did this sort of knowledge—what other Christians have called “heart knowledge”—get marginalized in Western culture, including evangelicalism?

First, the hard sciences, with their modernist project of rational control, completed their rise to supreme authority in Western culture. Science had helped us achieve so much material progress that it seemed natural to rely on it in every other sphere of human life as well: from the historical criticism of the Bible to the Darwinian explanations of social life to the Freudian explanations of our inner lives. By 1900 (exaggeration of precision here, but work with me), ministers, biographers, and novelists had lost their authority; scientists in lab coats were the new supreme authorities of Western life. If you wanted people to take you seriously in the public sphere of the marketplace and the political arena, you had to deal in rational proofs and scientific methods.

Second, by (around) 1900, the positive late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century movement of sentimentalism had gone into a permanent, decadent tailspin. With experience and emotion increasingly rejected as authoritative roads to certain kinds of truth and marginalized to the realm of leisure and entertainment, the late Victorians had been left indulging in ‘sentiment for the sake of sentiment’—all the swooning, hankie-wringing and self-indulgent, but insincere and manipulative sorts of emotional expression that we tend to think of when the word ‘Victorian’ comes up in conversation.

So from the late 1800s on, if you wanted to prove that you were a real man—or even, in the public forum, a real woman—you had to make obligatory statements distancing yourself from this decadent sentimentalism.

Meanwhile, social and economic forces conspired to intensify this emotional distancing: As Western society (certainly at least American society) became more and more complex—commerce, politics, and social services all having to operate on a more and more massive scale—it seemed increasingly unlikely that social solutions would be found in the old, charmed and overlapping circles of church-town-family with their face-to-face relationships.

By the opening years of the new century, no longer could you write a sentimental novel like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1850s nation-changing blockbuster Uncle Tom’s Cabin and expect people to change their hearts—and thereby their actions (an apocryphal anecdote has President Lincoln meeting Stowe and saying, “So you’re the little lady who started the big war.”) Charles M. Sheldon’s 1890s novel In His Steps, with its interwoven storylines of Spirit-led personal change and its personal thumb-rule of “What would Jesus do,” was one of the last of these sort of narratives to command mass sales and the serious ethical as well as spiritual attention of the American people: In the public sphere of the new modern world, personal character and human relationships were forced to take an increasingly distant back seat to efficiency and system.

From the Progressive Era on (early 1900s), the watchwords for social improvement became Science and Progress. The newly businesslike, unemotional personal style that had already emerged partly in reaction to late-Victorian decadent sentimentalism gained cultural dominance. So we get Teddy Roosevelt—the man’s man. And the muscular Christianity of the YMCA—all healthful exercise, discipline, grit, and courage. Everything soft and sentimental and . . . well, it was assumed, ‘feminine’ . . . might still be OK for the home—the woman’s sphere, but it wouldn’t cut it in the marketplace—the man’s sphere.

Then came two world wars and the British example of the stiff upper lip—the need to keep ourselves together in the face of daily reports of tragedy. Well, you can see how the emotional culture of a whole nation can change through factors such as these.

So what we are doing here in this class is in a sense very subversive. Just by reading biographies—which are by their nature accounts of other people’s experiences and emotional states, as well as of their ideas—we are going back to an earlier kind of knowledge that sits uncomfortably both with modern and with postmodern thought.

And this brings us back to Newton’s narrative. This story was written in the form of personal letters, with warm greetings and relational rhetoric at the front of almost every chapter. Would it surprise you if I told you that this “epistolary” form was exactly the same form used by the first writers of sentimental novels—like Samuel Richardson, author of the blockbuster novel Pamela? And look back at the lavish descriptions Newton gives at various points along the way of his inner states.

Remember “Rhapsody”—the chapter of Shaftesbury’s book Characteristics that Newton fell in love with and nearly memorized? That was a piece of sentimental philosophy, although in that case anti-Christian.

What about the way Newton wove his courtship and marriage into his account? All of this description of emotional experiences was intended to change the hearts of those who read it. And the immense popularity and power of this account—the many reprints, the way it got passed around from friend to friend for decades and even into the next century—this tells us that there was space in that culture for people to read and be influenced by this kind of narrative.

So the question is, in this postmodern time, when we have become disillusioned with the modernist quest for rational mastery, is there again a “social space” for this kind of account? I throw that open to you all.