Evangelical writing in a secular imaginary; the academic writing of christian undergraduates at a pu
Evangelical Writing in a Secular Imaginary; The Academic Writing of Christian Undergraduates at a Public University 1st Edition Emily Murphy Cope
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Evangelical Writing in a Secular Imaginary; The Academic Writing of Christian Undergraduates at a Public University 1st Edition Emily Murphy Cope
Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks, Second Edition: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)
Evangelical Writing in a Secular Imaginary addresses the question of how Christian undergraduates engage in academic writing and how best to teach them to participate in academic inquiry and prepare them for civic engagement.
Exploring how the secular both constrains and supports undergraduates’ academic writing, the book pays special attention to how it shapes younger evangelicals’ social identities, perceptions of academic genres, and rhetorical practices. The author draws on qualitative interviews with evangelical undergraduates at a public university and qualitative document analysis of their writing for college, grounded in 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. The conception of a “secular imaginary” provides an explanatory framework for examining the lived experiences and academic writing of religious students in American institutions of higher education. By examining the power of the secular imaginary on academic writers, this book offers rhetorical educators a more complex vocabulary that makes visible the complex social forces shaping our students’ experiences with writing.
This book will be of interest not just to scholars and educators in the area of rhetoric, writing studies and communication but also those working on religious studies, Christian discourse and sociology of religion.
Emily Murphy Cope is Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at York College of Pennsylvania. She is the author of several articles and book chapters and currently a co-editor of Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Rhetoric and Writing.
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Evangelical Writing in a Secular Imaginary
The Academic Writing of Christian Undergraduates at a Public University
Emily Murphy Cope
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbooksin-Religion/book-series
Evangelical Writing in a Secular Imaginary
The Academic Writing of Christian Undergraduates at a Public University
Emily Murphy Cope
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For Ember, James, Jean-Luc, Jessica, Joe, Leesa, Michele, Morgan, Rachel, and Will
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4.1
4.3
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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 peer-reviewers. 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
x Acknowledgments
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.” Research in the Teaching of English 54.4 (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, JeanLuc, 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
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 Urban Dictionary is “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 not how you might think. 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 actual writing for college?
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 “thisworldly” 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; ThomsonBunn, 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 wellestablished 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 nineteenth-century 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 self-identify 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 well-aligned 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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2 Studying Evangelical Writing and Identities in a Secular Imaginary Theory and Methods
I definitely see the benefits of not going to a public university. . . . I don’t think it’d be a bad idea to go and kind of put yourself into a bubble like that [at a Christian college] where you aren’t . . . you’re just not thrust into all these different secular things. . . . This is like not a Christian environment. This is just a very secular, anti-God environment.
—Will interview
I think that the experience of a university in and of itself is not un-Christian or un-godly, but it does present alternative ideas that you probably did not grow up with in church. Those alternative ideas don’t necessarily mean that they contradict our ideas. They’re just new ways of looking at the world.
—Jean-Luc interview
In the course of my interviews for this study, only one participant, Will, used the word secular. During our interview, he used the term twice when talking about how challenging it sometimes was for him to live as a Christian at the university. Will explained that he was influenced to attend a public university rather than a Christian institution by the evangelical impulse to activism (see Chapter 1); he said, “at some point as Christians, you have to get out into the world and spread the gospel and serve people who need it.” Will argued that “being in a little bubble where you’re secluded from society, you probably would not have any opportunities” for evangelism and service to nonbelievers. But he acknowledged that some evangelicals choose to attend Christian colleges where, he said, “you’re just not thrust into all these different secular things.” For Will, “secular things” included aspects of peer culture (e.g., he found it challenging to be a Christian in the midst of “foul language,” peer pressure, and what he perceived as “selfcentered” and competitive behavior) as well as some course content (e.g., he experienced his belief “that God created all creatures in seven days” as
incompatible with the disciplinary knowledge he needed to demonstrate through his biology lab on phylogenetics). For Will, “secular” signified not only not Christian (“not a Christian environment”) but also “anti-God.”
Despite how rarely participants used the word secular, the interview transcripts are full of evidence that a secular imaginary significantly shapes their experiences as evangelicals at the university and how they approach academic writing. These interviews also demonstrate that the secular imaginary is not uniform—it looks and feels different even for different evangelicals. This chapter’s second epigraph captures another participant’s perspective; Jean-Luc describes public universities and churches as providing multiple but not necessarily incompatible “ideas.” Without using the word secular, Jean-Luc invokes notions of the secular when he differentiates churches’ and academics’ “ways of looking at the world.”
As I’ve worked on this book, the word secular has often come up in conversation in my home. Recently over dinner, I attempted to explain what secular means to one of my teenage children. Like many people, Miles intuited that the word means “not religious” and even includes connotations of “morally bad.” As the son of a Presbyterian minister (my husband) and a scholar of American religious rhetorics (me), Miles basically rolled his eyes at my gloss of this book’s thesis—that you can be simultaneously religious and secular, and more specifically, evangelical and secular. “That’s always been true, Mom,” was his basic reaction. When I asked what he meant, Miles explained that many “so-called Christians” have been immoral (e.g., broken one of the ten commandments). Here, Miles is drawing on one of the popular meanings of secular that I internalized as a child in evangelicalism: in some contexts, secular is an adjective that means both “not-Christian” (“un-saved”) and “un-Christian” (worldly or sinful). In my childhood religious enclaves, it was a word that, like communism, named something dangerous. On a practical level, for example, evangelical teenagers were warned that listening to “secular music” would cause them to fall into all sorts of temptations. At a more elite level, evangelical thought leaders posited “secular humanism” as an ideology that threatens Christianity (Warner, 2008). But for people who did not grow up in or around particularly conservative religious communities, “secular” might not hold such a negative meaning. More commonly, people use secular to signify “not religious.”
In short, secular is a fuzzy idea, meaning different things depending on the time and social context (see Casanova, 2011). The term secular and its derivatives secularism and secularization are used in sometimes contradictory ways in popular culture and scholarly conversations, and their definitions and critiques of those definitions are the focus of ongoing debates in multiple disciplines, including religious studies, social theory, political
theory, and sociology of religion. Despite the challenges of using the term secular, I believe the concept of a secular imaginary (Taylor, 2004, 2007) is valuable for those of us who are interested in people’s lived experiences and, more particularly, for those of us who are invested in rhetorical education that aims to develop neighbors and citizens who seek the common good and avoid violence.
In this chapter, I do not attempt to provide a comprehensive picture of the scholarly conversations about ideas of the secular—its history, theory, and applications. Many excellent books and articles provide thoughtful syntheses of various perspectives on the secular (Asad, 2003; Calhoun, 2011; Kahn & Lloyd, 2016; Mahmood, 2016; Taylor, 2007). Rather, my goals for this chapter are to unpack the theoretical lenses (the most important of these is the secular imaginary) through which I read these evangelicals’ academic writing and interviews throughout, focusing on the concepts that emerged as most relevant and explanatory for this study, and then to outline the qualitative research methods I used to investigate evangelical undergraduates’ experiences with academic writing in one particular secular imaginary.
Secular Imaginaries
My use of the term secular imaginary draws on philosopher Charles Taylor’s work in Modern Social Imaginaries (2004) and A Secular Age (2007). Taylor uses the term “social imaginary” to describe “the way we collectively imagine, even pretheoretically, our social life in the contemporary Western world” (2004, p. 50). In Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor (2004) explores three social imaginaries he considers central to Western modernities: the economy, the public sphere, and democratic self-rule. Taylor’s concept of a social imaginary is focused on the lived experiences of ordinary people. “By social imaginary,” Taylor writes, “I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode” (2004, p. 23). Taylor leans into the term “imaginary” because it focuses our attention “on the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ their social surroundings,” which “is carried in images, stories, and legends” rather than in “theoretical terms” (2004, p. 23). The notion of a social imaginary, Taylor insists, addresses “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (Taylor, 2004, p. 23). Although Taylor acknowledges a social imaginary can be “full of ideological and false consciousness” and “self-serving fiction and suppression,” he argues that a social imaginary is
“never just ideology” but also “an essential constituent of the real” (2004, p. 183). Thus, recognizing social imaginaries is valuable because “they have a constitutive function, that of making possible the practices that they make sense of and thus enable” (Taylor, 2004, p. 183).
Taylor (2004) argues that all three of the modern social imaginaries he excavates—the economy, the public sphere, and democratic self-rule—are secular. For Taylor, the secular marks not the decline or absence of religion but the non-given status of religion in large parts of our social world. In modern social imaginaries, Taylor clarifies, “God or religion is not precisely absent from public space” but is understood to be a matter of choice for individuals, rather than for societies as a whole, and occupies a different kind of social space than in premodern societies (2004, p. 193).
Religiosity can be and is “central to the personal identities of individuals or groups” (Taylor, 2004, p. 193) but is debatable and optional rather than universal and foundational in a secular social imaginary.
In A Secular Age, Taylor (2007) returns to his argument about the secular nature of modern social imaginaries, presenting a historical and theoretical argument about the development and nature of the secular. Taylor narrates Western (primarily North Atlantic) history as a “shift to secularity,” or “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace” (2007, p. 3). He argues that “as we function within various spheres of activity—economic, political, cultural, educational, professional, recreational—the norms and principles we follow, the deliberations we engage in, generally don’t refer us to God or to any religious beliefs” (Taylor, 2007, p. 2). Rather, in secular imaginaries, “the considerations we act on are internal to the ‘rationality’ of each sphere—maximum gain within the economy, the greatest benefit to the greatest number in the political arena, and so on” (Taylor, 2007, p. 2). Taylor uses the term the immanent frame to draw attention to this critical feature of a secular imaginary; in the immanent frame, people make sense of the world without reference to forces or influences beyond the world. In other words, in the immanent frame, people act together as if supernatural phenomena do not exist or are irrelevant, even if religiosity is an important aspect of some people’s lives and identities. Because the immanent frame is a defining feature of a secular imaginary and an important concept for understanding this study’s findings, I revisit this concept in more depth later in this chapter.
The Secular
Taylor uses the term secular to describe the nature of Western modernity’s relationship to the supernatural or the transcendent compared to
premodern cultures. A secular age is “marked by an unheard of pluralism of outlooks, religious and non- and anti-religious” (2007, p. 437) and the sense that all of these positions are contestable. Scholars emphasize that there is not just one experience of the secular. Casanova (2011) outlines three basic “ways of being secular”:
(a) that of mere secularity, that is the phenomenological experience of living in a secular world and in a secular age, where being religious may be a normal viable option; (b) that of self-sufficient and exclusive secularity, that is the phenomenological experience of living without religion as a normal, quasi-natural, taken-for-granted condition; and (c) that of secularist secularity, that is the phenomenological experience not only of being passively free but also actually of having been liberated from “religion” as a condition for human autonomy and flourishing.
(p. 60, emphasis in original)
When evangelicals use the term “secular humanism,” they frequently refer to this third way of being secular, what Casanova calls “secularist secularity,” which perceives religiosity as oppressive or regressive. But Casanova’s notion of “mere secularity” aptly captures the experiences and perspectives of the young evangelicals who participated in this study. As I will show in the next three chapters, these evangelicals are used to “living in a secular world and in a secular age, where being religious may be a normal viable option” (Casanova, 2011, p. 60) but where their faith is not understood to be universally or automatically accepted as real or authoritative.
Although Taylor’s concept of a secular imaginary is a productive lens for reading the data I collected in his study, I acknowledge that using the term secular is complicated. Thus, my use of this concept is also informed by critiques of the term secular, especially postcolonial critiques, which show that the secular is, in fact, constituted by Western Christianities (e.g., Asad, 2003) and postsecular critiques, which emphasize the enduring power of religiosity and suggest that religiosity can never (and perhaps should not) be excluded from public spheres (e.g., Butler et al., 2011; Habermas, 2008a, 2008b). This postsecular critique of the public sphere resonates with Crowley’s (2006) critique of the liberal rhetorical theory for its inability to contend with “passionate commitment.”
Although the secular imaginary is being used to explore a range of global contexts (e.g., Cady & Hurd, 2010), scholars of the secular have shown that it is not a universal concept and may be relevant primarily in societies shaped by Christian traditions (Asad, 2003). As a correlate to the religious, the concept of the secular arose as a conceptual category within Christian thought (Taylor, 2004, 2007; Casanova, 2011). Casanova explains that the term secular originally “only meant an indefinite period of time,”
but later emerged as “one of the terms of a dyad, religious/secular, that served to structure the entire spatial and temporal reality of medieval Christendom into a binary system of classification separating two worlds, the religious-spiritual-sacred world of salvation and the secular-temporalprofane world” (2011, p. 56). The category of the secular supports Christian engagement in the world. During the medieval period, “‘secular’ priests” were called to “live ‘in the world’ ” and intervene in it, while “‘religious’ priests” were primarily called to “specific liturgical practices” that sometimes kept them separated from the everyday world (Calhoun et al., 2011, p. 13). In Taylor’s (2007) telling, over time Western Christianity has placed more and more importance on the secular world (the here and now), and no longer consider it secondary to the sacred world. Taylor (2007) argues that the Protestant Reformation, in particular, accelerated secularization by emphasizing the ministries of ordinary people living ordinary lives (through their work/professions, their families, etc.).
A historical understanding of the secular as a development of Western Christianity itself is useful for a study of evangelicals because it reveals that evangelical activism (Bebbington, 1989) actually depends on a concept of the secular (even if it is not named or labeled as such). The role of the secular priests is evocative of many contemporary evangelicals’ selfperceptions: the secular—or, in their words, “the world”—is a necessary concept for the evangelical impulse of activism. Calhoun et al. (2011) point out that contemporary evangelicalism has shaped itself as a provider of “secular services,” inasmuch as they seek to “mister to the affairs of this world” and not just “the connections between the human and the transcendent” (p. 13). They explain:
Evangelical mega-churches today are organized as service providers of a sort. That is, they may espouse biblically literalist or fundamentalist or enthusiastically celebrationist theologies and religious practices, but they are also organized, in very large part, to deliver secular services in the world: marriage counseling, psychotherapy, job placement, education, help in relocating immigrants. They are, in that sense, secular-while-religious.
(Calhoun et al., 2011, p. 13)
Omri Elisha’s (2011) Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches, an ethnography of two megachurches located in the same city as the university described in this present study, captures the “secular-while-religious” activities of contemporary evangelicals. Elisha shows how ordinary evangelicals, despite their conservatism, are motivated by their faith to address issues related to social welfare in
their city and surrounding areas, forcing them to grapple with social issues including poverty and racial injustice.
Forwarding concepts like “secular-while-religious,” scholars continue to critique simplistic binary formulations of the secular as the opposite and exclusive of the religious. “Modernity is secular,” Taylor argues, “not in the frequent, rather loose sense of the word, where it designates the absence of religion, but rather in the fact that religion occupies a different place, compatible with the sense that all social action takes place in profane [ordinary rather than sacred] time” (2004, p. 194). In the secular imaginary, the “different place” that religion occupies is usually “the personal”; indeed, since the Protestant Reformation, religious faith has increasingly been understood as an interior or personal matter (Engelke, 2012, p. 148). Educational philosopher David Lewin (2017) argues that “the kinds of binaries that structure our thinking about religion—religious/secular, faith/ reason, conviction/critique—are misleading, since the nature of religion is far more porous than the secularist account would acknowledge” (p. 24). Indeed, Taylor points out that the rise of the secular does not automatically result in “the falling off of religious belief and practice” (2007, p. 2). While religious identification has declined as the secular imaginary has taken hold in Western Europe, many other parts of the world (including the United States) see religious participation flourishing alongside the secular imaginary.
As an antidote to the secular/religious binary, some scholars, including Habermas (2008b), are forwarding the term postsecular to emphasize the persistence and the intermingling of the secular and the religious in people’s lived experiences (see Beckford, 2012). Over time, Habermas’ thoughts on the place of religiosity in the public sphere have changed considerably. In his earlier work on the public sphere, Habermas (1999) considered religiosity ill-suited for the public sphere because it did not meet the standard of rationality demanded by an ideal deliberative public sphere. However, more recently, following the rise of terrorism linked to religious fundamentalism globally and the influence of religion in US politics, Habermas (2006, 2008a) has argued that suppressing or excluding religiosity in the public sphere may not only have dangerous consequences (the increased marginalization of extreme religious perspectives) but may also be “impoverishing” to the public sphere overall (Calhoun, 2011, p. 79). Instead of excluding religious perspectives from the public sphere, Habermas (2006, 2008a) has more recently advocated for religious institutions to “translate” their perspectives into secular terms in order to participate in public deliberations.
In this book, I use the term secular with these considerations in mind. While I retain the term secular, my understanding of the secular imaginary
