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Giebelhausen explains the need for her book thus: "Despite the centrality of religion to Victorian culture, this is the first study to engage with the theory and practice of religious painting in nineteenth-century Britain." Lest anyone should make the embarrassing mistake of thinking that she personally believed any of the spiritual messages proclaimed in these works of art, Giebelhausen ends her acknowledgments with a disclaimer of sorts: "And finally, my biggest thanks go to my family and friends for taking my mind off Jesus." This personal stance noticeably influences her work. She takes it for granted that God, like Prince Albert, did not outlive Queen Victoria. She writes as if the modern discipline of biblical criticism generated the compelling insight that people don't rise from the dead. Nor is this personal distance redressed by a reasonably adequate factual grasp of the Christian tradition. Presumably projecting her own experience, Giebelhausen imagines that people learned to think of Christ fulfilling the offices of Prophet, Priest, and King by reading Thomas Carlyle.
The fundamental structural flaw in Giebelhausen's presentation, however, is her inability or unwillingness to observe the influence of evangelicalism. One suspects that she could not envision herself defending evangelical works of art as innovative and compelling. In Painting the Bible, Hunt's evangelical identity is literally confined to an endnote—and this was forced upon Giebelhausen by an unavoidably apt quotation from Hunt himself. Instead, the religious map is redrawn so that there are only two germane camps: "liberal Protestantism" (a full and final statement of Hunt's religious identity, in this telling) and "the extreme High Church" (identified as the source of Hunt's opponents).
As to the latter, the word "extreme" is apparently an attempt to deal with all the support that Hunt actually received from the high church. His main patron, Thomas Combe, after all, was a high churchman. Combe's widow donated the original The Light of the World to, of all places, Keble College, Oxford, an institution whose high churchmanship can hardly be described as moderate. Hunt even made a wonderfully sympathetic portrait of an Anglican priest that emphasized his Tractarian zeal (New College Cloisters, 1852).
Core themes of evangelical Protestantism—personal conversion and atonement through Christ's work on the cross—were the inspiration for almost all of Hunt's great religious works of art. The Light of the World is as evangelistic a painting as one can imagine: a straight appeal for the viewer to open the door of his or her heart and let Jesus come in. Likewise, The Awakening Conscience was a direct call to be converted from a life of sin. The Shadow of Death drove home the point that Christ's whole life should be viewed through the lens of his crucifixion. The Scapegoat is a piercing affirmation of penal substitution, a doctrine that liberal Protestants—then and now—endeavor to evade.
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