Dedication
For Ember, James, Jean-Luc, Jessica, Joe, Leesa, Michele, Morgan, Rachel, and Will
ListofTables
Acknowledgments
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1 Introduction: Evangelical Undergraduates and Activism in a Secular Imaginary
2 Studying Evangelical Writing and Identities in a Secular Imaginary: Theory and Methods
3 “Keeping It Under Wraps”: Obscuring Faith and Respeaking Evangelical Discourses in First-Year Writing
4 “Staying Cautious”: Compartmentalizing Faith in Academic Writing and the Differentiating Power of the Secular Imaginary
5 “Living My Values”: Integrating Faith and Other Social Identities in Academic Writing
6 Evangelical Students and Rhetorical Education in a Secular Imaginary Index
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2.1 Hierarchical Coding Categories
2.2 Selected Document Analysis Coding Methods
2.3 Focused Coding Categories
2.4 Emergent Participant Groups
3.1 Summary of Jessica's Academic Writing Samples
3.2 Summary of Michele's Academic Writing Samples
4.1 Summary of Joe's Academic Writing Samples
4.2 Summary of Joe's Additional Academic Writing Experiences
4.3 Summary of Leesa's Academic Writing Samples
4.4 Summary of Leesa's Additional Academic Writing Experience
4.5 Summary of Will's Academic Writing Samples
4.6 Summary of Will's Additional Academic Writing Experience
5.1 Summary of Morgan's Academic Writing Samples
5.2 Summary of James’ Academic Writing Samples
5.3 Summary of Rachel's Academic Writing Samples
5.4 Summary of Selected Sample of Jean-Luc's Academic Writing Samples Related to Gender and Sexuality
5.5 Summary of Selected Sample of Ember's Academic Writing Samples
Acknowledgments
This book has been “in the works” for over a decade, so the list of people who have supported me as I worked on this project is long. I apologize to anyone I inadvertently fail to name here.
I have been fortunate to receive financial support and time (several semesters of reduced teaching and a sabbatical) from York College of Pennsylvania. Time to focus on this project has been invaluable. I thank my colleagues in the Department of Communication and Writing for redistributing my administrative workload while I finished this book. I have also benefited from the wonderful York College colleagues who have written alongside me in various faculty and staff writing groups. I especially thank Gabe Cutrufello, Kia Kuresman, Travis Kurowski, and Kim Fahle Peck for showing up for each other and me with coffee and encouragement. Beyond York College, I am thankful for the camaraderie of the transatlantic group of women scholars I wrote with every morning over Zoom.
I am so grateful for many generous colleagues who have read and provided feedback on drafts of this project: Jeff Ringer, Mary Juzwik, Anne Snellen, Gabe Cutrufello, Carolyn Wisniewski, Kirsten Benson, Dawn Coleman, Bethany Mannon, Curry Kennedy, James Vining, Elizabeth Kimball, Michael Zerbe, and many more anonymous peerreviewers. I also offer my thanks to many colleagues whose conversations about religious rhetorics have enriched my thinking: Martin Camper, Mike DePalma, Robert Ellison, Keith Francis, T.J. Geiger, Roxanne Mountford, Holland Prior, Melody Pugh, Christa Shusko, David Stock, Megan Von Bergen, and the Rhetoric and Religious Traditions Standing Group at CCCC. I also thank the many incredible students in the Professional Writing program at York College who have read and discussed portions of this project with me.
Working with the team at Routledge, especially Suzanne Richardson and Stuti Goel, has been a dream. Thank you for your professionalism, responsiveness, and constructive feedback.
I cannot adequately thank the people who have surrounded me over the past few years as I’ve worked on this book while mothering a neurodivergent family, living through a global pandemic, teaching, administrating, etc. Mom, Dad, Megan, and Martha: thank you for loving me and my guys so practically and fiercely. I am thankful to be one of “the Murphy girls.” Shannon, thanks for being the nerdy, extroverted best friend I need; you’re a “Murphy girl” too now. Finally, I thank my husband, Aaron, and our sons, Miles and Max. (I do apologize, Max, that the book I’ve written is unlikely to become a blockbuster movie. You can write that book.) Thank you for putting up with me, making me laugh, being interested in my work, and growing with me.
Most of all, I thank the ten participants who trusted me with their stories and their writing.
Permissions
Portions of Chapter 4 originally appeared in Emily Murphy Cope’s “Compartmentalizing Faith: How Three First-Semester Undergraduates Manage Evangelical Identities in Academic Writing.” ResearchintheTeachingofEnglish54.4 (2020): 367–391. Copyright 2020 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted with permission.
All excerpts from interviews with and writing by Ember, James, Jean-Luc, Jessica, Joe, Leesa, Michele, Morgan, Rachel, and Will are used with their permission and using pseudonyms. This study was approved and annually reviewed by the University of Tennessee Institutional Review Board (UTK IRB-14-08512 B-XP).
1 Introduction
Evangelical Undergraduates and Activism in a Secular Imaginary
DOI: 10.4324/9781003393948-1
By the time Morgan brought up Tim Tebow, the former football star whose public displays of evangelical Christian piety gave rise to the verb “Tebowing” (one definition on UrbanDictionaryis “to get down on a knee and start praying, even if everyone else around you is doing something completely different”), the interview had already taken a few unexpected turns. We had talked not only about the papers Morgan had written for college and how his religious attitudes and practices had changed since beginning college but also about sex, pledging a fraternity, and beer (three topics that did not appear in my interview protocol). Toward the end of the interview, I asked Morgan if he thought his evangelical Christian faith affected his writing for college. Morgan replied with a variation of Yes, but nothowyoumightthink. He stated: “I think that my moral compass comes from my faith, but a lot of times . . . it’s not that I can’t bring it up [in academic writing] it’s just like . . .” Morgan paused and then offered this explanation:
I heard Tim Tebow give an explanation as to why he prays or why brings up Jesus . . . in every sort of interview, and he said, “If I were in love with someone, if I loved my wife, I would want to take every chance I could to tell her how much I love her.” That being said, if I were writing a paper that has to do with a historical event or something like that, I’m not going to write in there, “Well, this is true because my wife says it’s true,” or “This is true because that’s how my wife likes it” but I would definitely take those things and support them with my own personal beliefs. I think my personal beliefs are definitely guided by my faith.
For Morgan, invoking faith explicitly in academic writing was as absurdly out of place as citing a spouse’s authority or preferences in academic writing.
From Morgan’s perspective, his evangelical faith influenced his academic writing, but he did not seek to enact his faith in an explicit, “Tebowing” kind of way. Rather, he believed his faith showed up in academic writing intermediated by his “personal beliefs” and “moral compass.” As a rhetoric and writing studies scholar with deep interests in contemporary American evangelicalism, I found Morgan’s hazy description of the tenuous force of his faith on his academic writing intriguing: What makes Morgan’s “faith” different from “personal beliefs” or a “moral compass”? Why does he perceive “personal beliefs” as more relevant or appropriate in academic writing than faith? What does this mediated faith look like in his actualwritingforcollege?
I argue that Morgan’s—and many American evangelical undergraduates’— perceptions of academic writing, faith, and rhetorical effectiveness have been shaped by a secular imaginary (Taylor, 2004, 2007). American evangelicals participate in a social world that operates primarily in “this-worldly” terms. Modern Western cultures are increasingly pluralistic, and no single religion structures a shared social world. Lacking a common religious framework, people now act together “as if” God may not exist or God’s existence is irrelevant to many areas of social life. In a secular imaginary, Morgan’s comparison of biblical authority to citing a romantic partner’s perspective makes sense: both are possible (i.e., an individual may consider their partner’s perspective just as they may accept the authority of God or a religious institution), but neither are considered universally authoritative (e.g., an individual is not expected to be bound by what someone else’s partner or “higher power” has to say). In a secular imaginary, religiosity can flourish, but any religion is considered one option among many, not the “taken-for-granted shape of things” (Taylor, 2004, p. 29).
Morgan’s instincts about the relevance and appropriateness of faith in academic writing as well as the ways faith might still be shaping his writing for college resonate with the nine other evangelical Christian undergraduates at a US public university who participated in this study. The evangelicals in this study rarely used the term secular, but their beliefs about the appropriateness of explicitly religious discourse in various contexts demonstrate that they have assimilated and work from the values and norms of a secular imaginary. In interviews, all ten articulated in their own words a perception like Morgan’s—that faith is out of place in academic writing, but that their faith nevertheless sometimes “ripples just below the surface” of their writing for college (Ringer, 2016, p. 137). But Morgan and the other participants are different from many evangelicals discussed in the existing writing studies literature because their writing for college (I collected just over 200 writing samples from these 10 young evangelicals) rarely invokes their evangelical faith explicitly or constructs obviously evangelical identities.
When I began designing this qualitative study in 2011, I aimed to learn how evangelical undergraduates at a public university experienced academic writing situations and describe the characteristics of their academic writing. Through my own experiences with evangelicalism as a child and young adult, I suspected that the existing rhetoric and writing studies literature did not reflect the true diversity of American evangelicals. Since I began this study, several qualitative studies have enriched our understanding of evangelical students and their academic writing (DePalma, 2011, 2017; Juzwik & McKenzie, 2015; Pugh, 2015; Ringer, 2016; Thomson-Bunn, 2017). These studies have challenged the narrow portrayal of evangelical undergraduates as offensive, problematic writers that arose from an overreliance on anecdotal reports of evangelical writers (Lynch & Miller, 2017; Pavia, 2015) and have forwarded an argument for better understanding and
incorporating students’ religious discourses, funds of knowledge, and cultural practices into their academic work. This book extends the existing scholarship on Christian identity and academic writing by bringing a larger sample of self-identified evangelical undergraduates into the frame and considering how a secular imaginary shapes their experiences with academic writing and rhetorical choices.
As the existing scholarship has shown, defining evangelical and deciding who counts as an evangelical are tricky tasks (Cope & Ringer, 2014; Hackett & Lindsay, 2008; Woodberry et al., 2012). In order to take as comprehensive a view of the phenomenon as possible, this study relied on self-identification (i.e., participants identified themselves as evangelicals) using three well-established scholarly approaches to defining evangelical: historical, attitudinal, and subcultural (Noll, 2004). Historians provide genealogical definitions of evangelical, using the term to describe a subset of protestant Christianity, specifically the movements, denominations, and institutions that arose from the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury revivals in the United Kingdom and the United States (Noll, 2004, p. 421). In this view, evangelical functions as an umbrella term for related labels, including fundamentalist, charismatic, and various denominational identities, which refer to movements, denominations, and institutions whose values can be traced back to the transatlantic revivals. I also relied on Bebbington’s (1989) “quadrilateral” definition, which outlines four attitudinal “hallmarks” of evangelicalism:
1. conversionism, the understanding of conversion as a personal experience that significantly transforms each Christian’s life;
2. biblicism, the premise that the Bible is the ultimate authority for Christian living;
3. activism, the impulse to spread and enact faith through relief or social work; and
4. crucicentrism, a focus on the substitutionary death of Christ. (Bebbington, 1989, p. 3)
Supplementing historical and attitudinal approaches, sociologists define evangelicalism as a subculture or group of related subcultures that not only provide an alternative to the larger culture but also adapt to cultural shifts (Balmer, 1989; Gallagher, 2003; Smith, 1998). In this vein, sociologist Christian Smith (1998) describes evangelical identity as a “distinct, publicly recognizable collective identity” and an identity “ ‘space’ between fundamentalism and liberalism” (pp. 15, 14).
I chose to layer all three of these definitions of evangelical and evangelicalism in order to avoid narrowly defining the phenomenon and to allow as much range as possible for participants to selfidentify as evangelicals. While this choice resulted in a group of participants who represent a wider range of American evangelicals— especially in terms of religious experiences—than prior studies, nine of the ten participants I recruited were white (one participant described herself as a “Middle Eastern kid” and reflected on her experiences in overwhelmingly white contexts). Although I hoped to recruit a more racially diverse group of evangelicals for this study, I suspect my failure to do so results both from my own identity as a white woman and from the increasing perception of American evangelicals as white conservatives (see Cope & Ringer, 2014), a perception that has been reinforced by white evangelicals’ support for Trump in 2016 and the fracturing of American evangelicalism since then (Cope et al., 2021). Despite these limitations, relying on self-identification as evangelicals and taking a capacious approach to defining who counts as an evangelical was productive and yielded a group of evangelicals that challenge the field’s view of this student population.
Definitional flexibility is important when considering undergraduates’ identities: because college is a transitional time, many Christian students make campus ministries, rather than churches, their primary faith communities and are in the process of negotiating their own religious identities. And compared to previous generations, Americans born after 1981 are more likely to practice a religion without identifying with religious institutions. The Pew Research Center (2015) describes the 22.8% of the population that is religiously unaffiliated as “the nones” (many of “the nones” consider themselves spiritual or even religious but do not have strong institutional affiliations). Some younger evangelicals are part of this group, “the nones” (Cope & Ringer, 2014). While all of the participants in this study self-identified as evangelicals, what that meant to them varied. For some, being an evangelical primarily meant affirming basic evangelical theological propositions and endorsing commonplace evangelical behavioral norms (see Chapter 3); for others, being an evangelical primarily meant experiencing a “personal” relationship with God (see Chapters 4 and 5). And, sometimes, participants’ sense of what being an evangelical Christian meant changed during their undergraduate years (see Chapter 5). While all of the participants are clearly visible as evangelicals using the historical definition of evangelicalism, their attitudes and propositional beliefs and experiences with evangelical subcultures varied.
When describing their experiences of being Christians at a public university, all ten participants indicated that they felt motivated to “live out” their faith in a variety of ways. I refer to this feeling of being motivated to bring their faith to bear beyond their interior lives and outside their religious enclaves as evangelical activism, one of Bebbington’s (1989) four attitudinal “hallmarks” of evangelicalism. Evangelical activism has been defined capaciously as “the expression of the gospel in effort” and understood as a dual impulse to “enact one’s faith by working to meet physical needs and evangelize others”
(Bebbington, 1989, p. 2; Noll, 2004, p. 422). All participants described behaviors driven by evangelical activism; they described participating in a range of activist activities, including relief work aimed at alleviating suffering (e.g., building houses and serving meals to homeless people), mentoring high school students, and talking to others about their faith.
My interviews with these evangelical undergraduates revealed that most (nine out of ten) were also interested in enacting their faith in their writing for college. Unlike many of the evangelical undergraduate writers captured in the rhetoric and writing studies literature, the participants in this study did not engage in any “Tebowing”—they rarely wrote about their faith or constructed obviously evangelical identities in their academic writing. They were interested in figuring out how to authentically and appropriately enact their faith in their writing for college. My analysis of these participants’ writing samples and interviews revealed three patterns in their approaches to working within the constraints (as they perceived them) of academic writing—obscuring, compartmentalizing, and integrating faith— all of which are significantly shaped by the secular imaginary.
Listening to and learning from these young evangelicals’ accounts of their academic writing and how some changed as writers over time allows us to understand better what helps some younger evangelicals develop rhetorically effective strategies for academic writing and begin to design rhetorical education that supports them in learning to be effective and ethical rhetorical agents. The questions of how religious, especially evangelical, undergraduates engage in academic writing and how best to teach them to participate in academic inquiry and prepare them for civic engagement have been widely discussed in the fields of rhetoric and writing studies (see Lynch & Miller, 2017), as teachers struggle to know how to respond to evangelical student writing that sometimes violates the norms and expectations of academic writing and, more
important, rhetorical educators worry about preparing the youngest generation of citizens—including our evangelical students—for ethical and effective rhetorical participation in “civil discourse” (Crowley, 2006).
More recent scholarship by Shannon Carter (2007), Michael-John DePalma (2011, 2017), and Jeff Ringer (2016) argues that religious discourses and literacies can be resources for students, not merely constraints. In Vernacular Christian Rhetoric and Civil Discourse, Ringer (2016) presents case studies of three evangelical undergraduates that show them enacting values that are wellaligned with “the civic goals of rhetorical education” in their writing for college (p. 1). His case studies show these evangelicals to be “interpreters, innovators, and negotiators of belief systems” rather than “passive recipients of ideologies such as religious traditions” (Ringer, 2016, p. 146). Ringer’s work helps us see that evangelicals’ activist impulse is an important resource for their rhetorical development, motivating engagement with people outside evangelical enclaves and supporting the development of rhetorical awareness and skills. This growing body of scholarship also has demonstrated that evangelicals’ motivations and values are shaped by many forces, not just the religious values of previous generations of evangelicals.
Evangelical Writing in a Secular Imaginary extends this line of inquiry by examining the powerful influence of a secular imaginary on undergraduates’ academic writing, which has not yet been adequately addressed in the existing scholarship. Composition scholars have worried about secularism’s powerful constraints, urging educators to be more tolerant of, curious about, and even inviting of religious discourses in rhetoric and writing classrooms (DePalma, 2011, 2017; Geiger, 2013; Hansen, 2005; Trapp, 1999; Swearingen, 1997). Other scholars have critiqued certain forms of secularism that exclude religious identities and perspectives in academic discourses (Bizzell, 2008; Dively, 1993; Miller & Santos,
2005; Moss, 2001). In studies of academic writing, the term secular is often used to signify one-half of a secular/religious binary in which secular is understood as the opposite of religious. However, this binary understanding of the secular does not usefully characterize the lived experiences of the participants in my study and many other people of faith. Many younger evangelicals are not merely tolerant of but embedded within and skillful participants in a culture that largely understands collective social life in non-transcendent or secular terms.
To understand the rhetorical work involved in obscuring, compartmentalizing, or integrating faith in academic writing, we need a richer vocabulary than secular versus religious. The related but more complex concept of a secular imaginary, which I define more fully in Chapter 2, provides a more useful framework for understanding the subjective realities and discursive practices of evangelical undergraduates writing in public universities. In their review of the last 25 years of scholarship on faith and writing, Paul Lynch and Matthew Miller (2017) celebrate the fact that scholars of rhetoric and writing “are busy studying a wider and more diverse understanding of faith, an understanding that may in fact move us toward a civil discourse” (p. 5). Scholars of the secular are interested in many of the same concerns, especially how to ensure the “common good” in diverse contexts. I hope this book will contribute to this more complex understanding of religious rhetors and writing by demonstrating the resources for civil discourse that the secular imaginary provides.
How evangelicals engage with rhetorical education and how they experience and are shaped by the secular imaginary matter because evangelicals are powerful participants in public life, not just in the United States but increasingly around the world (McAlister, 2018; Pew Research Center, 2011, 2015). Discussion of American evangelicals and the secular imaginary is timely, too, because the secular nature of the US public institutions is continuously being
questioned and remade. American evangelicals’ support for Donald Trump demonstrated that white evangelicals’ power in civic life is not waning (Du Mez, 2021; FitzGerald, 2017). Evangelicals’ influence in American public life results not merely from their critical mass as a voting group but, just as importantly, from the circulation of evangelical discourses in public contexts. In short, the rhetorical education of American evangelicals matters.
Evangelical Writing in a Secular Imaginary
Evangelical Writing in a Secular Imaginary argues that the secular imaginary both constrains and supports academic writing by shaping writers’ social identities and their perceptions of academic contexts and genres. Specifically, this book explores how social identity complexity and the secular imaginary converge in evangelical undergraduates’ experiences with academic writing and their rhetorical choices.
This book reports findings from a research study that combined qualitative interviews with ten self-identified evangelical undergraduates at a public university in the southeastern United States and qualitative document analysis of 203 samples of their writing for college to that point. Before presenting the primary findings of this study, Chapter 2 more fully explores Charles Taylor’s (2004, 2007) conceptualization of the secular imaginary, which serves as the primary theoretical framework for my analysis of the study’s data. Chapter 2 also details the research methods I used to study evangelical undergraduates’ experiences with academic writing at a public university in the southeastern United States. I also consider how my own positionality—as a former evangelical about a
decade older than my participants—influenced this study in various ways.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 describe and compare three approaches participants took to manage evangelical identities in academic writing—obscuring, compartmentalizing, and integrating faith—in order to show not just how they appear in academic writing but to build an understanding of how those discursive practices are influenced by the secular imaginary. In each chapter, I prioritize the participants’ voices, allowing them to describe their perceptions of academic writing and their goals and strategies. Each chapter analyzes the everyday experiences of evangelical undergraduate writers in order to show the complex forces shaping students’ academic and rhetorical development. These findings are explored in conversation with scholarship from social theory, writing studies, sociology of religion, rhetorical theory, and social psychology to describe the multiple ways these evangelicals participate in the secular imaginary that is the public university through their academic writing.
Finally, Chapter 6 discusses the implications of the secular imaginary for teachers and scholars of rhetoric and writing as well as those interested in religion and education more broadly. Better understanding the range of ways evangelical undergraduates work within the secular imaginary in their writing for college not only allows faculty to be better readers of their academic writing but also provides a conceptual framework and a vocabulary for developing pedagogical interventions that tap into the evangelical impulse to activism and leverage it toward cosmopolitan ends. I argue that we can learn from these evangelicals, especially those who work to integrate their faith in academic writing, about the challenging but essential work of developing complex social identities, the discursive practices that allow for civil engagement in a pluralistic world, and the opportunities for higher education to support these processes.
While this book focuses on younger evangelicals in the United States, many of the concepts and implications discussed here are relevant more broadly. Where the secular imaginary is pervasive, it affects all of us, not just evangelicals or other religious groups. By differentiating and privatizing religion, the secular imaginary reinforces the public/private binary that constrains social identities beyond religious identities. I believe that the concept of the secular imaginary and this study’s findings about ways undergraduate writers obscure, compartmentalize, and integrate multiple social identities discursively can be useful for scholars grappling with the public/private binary and for educators seeking to develop and enact pedagogies that support civil discourse and the common good.
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