The Self and the Sacred: Conversion and Autobiography in Early American Protestantism (review)

Abstract

Reviews 621 orthodoxy that governs so much academic research and writing. Nonetheless, the book as a whole bears out beautifully one of the axioms with which it begins: "whatever else she may represent, she always represents lack" (xxix). That Royal Representations reconstitutes that "lack" as plenty is chief among its virtues. Mary Jean Corbett Rodger M. Payne. The Self and the Sacred: Conversion and Autobiography in Early American Protestantism. Rnoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1998.123 pp. ISBN 1-57233-015-5, $27.00. Payne attempts to tackle a very difficult problem—an explanation of the relationships among the Enlightenment conception of the autonomous self, the evangelical Christian conception of self, the experience of the individual's conversion to such a self, the language of the convert's autobiography, and the converted self's subsequently changed perception of its relation to its community. The primary evidence for Payne's investigation comes from American nineteenth-century evangelical spiritual autobiographies, and his main claim is that the discourse in which these authors wrote descriptions of their conversion experiences did not merely "demonstrate a degree of correspondence between their experiences and a preordained morphology of conversion" (91) or "replicate the pietistic formula of despair, conviction, and conversion (86), but rather, these "texts of conversion (as opposed to texts about conversion ) served to constitute self, experience, and community for early American evangelicals" (2). In other words, such descriptions of conversion could not and did not represent an experience of something existing prior to and independently of the discourse that claims to report it, but, as with any other experience of "fictional realities" (my words, not Payne's), the experience of conversion is an experience of an entanglement in signs whose only referents are other signs. Payne draws theoretical support for his thesis that conversion rhetoric does not merely represent but constitutes evangelical religious experience from a number of twentieth-century poststructuralists and social constructionists, such as Clifford Geertz, Hay den White, Stephen Greenblatt, and Michel Foucault, for whom all the objects of human experience, and indeed the very human self, are unfounded cultural products, the result of the mediating force of systems of conventions and discursive formations. According to these theories, no element within a system can make sense except in relation to the whole system, and thus change must always be explained as a series of ruptures. Such historical 622 Biography 22.4 (Fall 1999) discontinuity Ferdinand de Saussure first institutionalized with his distinction between diachronic and synchronic linguistics, but the notion that history is thus discontinuous permeates all structural and poststructural thought. As Payne notes of Foucault's explanation of the rise of new "discursive formations," "The individual elements of any discourse may have been present for years, even centuries, within a culture but may not have functioned as discourse until the formation of a specific historical context that sanctions the combination of these elements into a meaningful form with paradigmatic value." Accordingly, "new discursive formations may arise quite suddenly and almost immediately attain the status of 'truth' as they become the basis for analyzing and explaining the human condition" (5). Payne argues that conversion discourse emerged in precisely this way, starting in the seventeenth century, as "changes in the theoretical and political life transformed Western culture, creating a correlative sense of confusion and disorder" (7). Most disruptive, in Payne's view, was the conception of the autonomous self, a self that could use the new science and technology to create choices and change its way of life, so that by the mid-eighteenth century "even grace itself had become a matter of choice to be accepted or rejected by human beings" (7). In order to salvage the Protestant tradition, which had relied heavily upon the doctrines of providence and predestination, a whole new discourse of conversion was required that could both "affirm the traditional Protestant values of personal humility and human inability" and also "embrace and secularize the concept of the autonomous self" (8). This salvaging effort's result was that conversion came to be described (unconsciously) as the consequence of what might be termed a cultural/linguistic immersion. Through such immersion (again, this is my analogy, not Payne's), one...