Vernacular Christian Rhetoric and Civil Discourse

The Religious Creativity of Evangelical Student Writers

Jeffrey M. Ringer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317357100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Vernacular Christian Rhetoric and Civil Discourse seeks to address the current gap in American public discourse between secular liberals and religiously committed citizens by focusing on the academic and public writing of millennial evangelical Christian students. Analysis of such writing reveals that the evangelical Christian faith of contemporary college students—and the rhetorical practice motivated by it—is marked by an openness to social context and pluralism that offers possibilities for civil discourse. Based on case studies of evangelical Christian student writers, contextualized within nationally-representative trends as reported by the National Study of Youth and Religion, and grounded in scholarship from rhetorical theory, composition studies, folklore studies, and sociology of religion, this book offers rhetorical educators a new terministic screen that reveals the complex processes at work within our students' vernacular constructions of religious faith.

1 From Problem to Possibility

Evangelical Christian Students, Composition Studies, and Civil Discourse

I end with the hope that my readers will find, or open, many more paths of invention than I have been able to name here.

—Sharon Crowley, Toward a Civil Discourse

I remember the sense of surprise I experienced when I first read the final line of Sharon Crowley’s award-winning book, Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism. It was such an impressive analysis in so many respects that the tone of defeat and frustration in Crowley’s last line took me by surprise. Sure, as an American Christian with deep evangelical roots, I had often found myself at odds with Crowley’s narrow construction of fundamentalism, evangelicalism, and Christianity. I agree with Beth Daniell, for instance, when she argues that Toward a Civil Discourse excludes the vast Christian middle to which many of us—myself included—belong (see Daniell, “More,” “Whetstones”). With Mike DePalma and Jim Webber, I thus began to work out a response to Crowley’s book, an argument that we presented at the 2008 Annual Convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in New Orleans and later published in Rhetoric Society Quarterly (DePalma, Ringer, and Webber).

Crowley graciously attended our presentation and approached us afterwards in the spirit of dialogue. I distinctly remember the first words she said to the three of us: “Okay. So what do we do?” It was an honest question, one borne, I’m convinced, out of a sincere desire to do what she set out to achieve in her book: find paths of invention for addressing the political impasses that plague American public discourse in the early twenty-first century. I didn’t get to talk much with her myself—others approached me to discuss the panel. But her words and the sincerity with which she spoke them remain emblazoned in my mind and attest to the sincerity of her desire for civil discourse.

In a way, this book comprises my response to Crowley’s question. It does so from a vantage many readers might not anticipate: by focusing on the writing of evangelical Christian students. As I hope to show in this book, at least some evangelical Christian students—those who align with what sociologist D. Michael Lindsay calls “cosmopolitan” evangelicalism (221; see also Juzwik and McKenzie)—already appeal to and even enact a set of values that align with the civic goals of rhetorical education, values that include respect for and a sincere desire to engage with diverse views in order to open up new avenues of communication across difference. Such students do so—not all the time, not always eloquently—in ways that highlight two realities of evangelicalism: it can’t be reduced to fundamentalism or right-wing conservatism, and it is undergoing significant changes in the early twenty-first century (Balmer; Bielo; Cope and Ringer; Webber). Contrary to entrenched conceptions of evangelical Christians that persist in the academy in general and rhetoric and composition in particular, the evangelical students I discuss in this book go to great lengths to (1) accommodate perspectives and beliefs that differ from their own; (2) participate as equals within deliberative discourse and even seek to constitute conditions that make such discourse possible; and (3) demonstrate a commitment to visions of the common good that address both spiritual and material concerns.

The attitudes, beliefs, and perspectives evidenced by my participants align with larger trends among what researchers have variously referred to as millennials (“Religion Among”; “Barna Millennials”), “younger evangelicals” (Webber), or “emerging adults” (Smith and Snell). Findings from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), a nationally representative survey of emerging adults, point to the fact that millennial evangelicals—the term I’ll use throughout this book—honor diverse perspectives and identities to a far greater extent than previous generations of evangelicals. Drawing on the NSYR data, sociologists Christian Smith and Patricia Snell explain that millennials have been taught their entire lives “to celebrate diversity, to be inclusive of difference, to overcome racial divides, to embrace multiculturalism, to avoid being narrowly judgmental toward others who are out of the ordinary” (80). To be sure, such attitudes can lead to a dangerous erasure of diversity that can itself short circuit meaningful dialogue across differences of religion, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, and gender. But the proclivity to accept others in spite of differences constitutes an important first step when it comes to achieving civil discourse. As Crowley puts it, “rhetoric requires willingness to be addressed by an other” (29).

Back to Crowley’s question: what do we do to bridge the significant gap that exists between liberal politics and certain forms of Christianity that militate against deliberative democracy? As a writing instructor who envisions the composition classroom as a public-in-training, I believe we can work toward alleviating the problem by attending to the vernacular faith of millennial evangelicals. Doing so means more than paying sincere, thoughtful attention to such students’ particular constructions of faith, though this is central to my argument. It also means more than considering the inventive possibilities they might offer for civic engagement, though again I certainly make that argument and believe firmly doing so can yield beneficial results (see Shannon Carter; DePalma; Geiger; Kirsch; Ringer, “Consequences,” “Dogma”; Vander Lei, “Ain’t”). Attending to the vernacular faith of millennial evangelicals means teaching such students how to draw on their faith-based values, beliefs, assumptions, and identities in meaningful, creative ways toward deliberative ends. While this statement might seem evident—of course it’s our job as rhetorical educators and composition instructors to teach students how to be productive citizens—it challenges the persistent assumption that faith-based topics or perspectives are best avoided in writing classrooms because they’re too subjective or too difficult to manage, more hindrance than help to the work we do as socially conscious teachers of writing and rhetoric (Dively, “Censoring”; Geiger; Gilyard; Goodburn; Kirsch; Neulieb; Smitherman-Trapp; Vander Lei, “‘Where’”).

Numerous compositionists have argued for the inclusion of faith-based perspectives in the writing classroom. Michael-John DePalma, for instance, argues that religious discourses can serve as resources for academic writing, while Ronda Leathers Dively (“Censoring”) and Kristine Hansen each make compelling cases for why valuing religious faith in the writing classroom corresponds to the democratic aims of rhetorical education. Such compositionists echo C. Jan Swearingen’s frank conclusion that ignoring the “self-understandings, convictions, and … intellect” of religiously committed students comes “at very great peril to us all” (“Hermeneutics” 150). And many compositionists would agree with Elizabeth Vander Lei’s hope for our religiously committed students—not that they “alter what they believe,” but rather that they “use tension between faith … and academic inquiry as a way of learning more and learning better” (“Coming” 8). I agree with these scholars but also forward an argument that extends their thinking. If we pay attention to how our millennial evangelical Christian students live and negotiate their faith in pluralistic contexts—if we look at the subtle ways whereby they already alter their faiths or ways of talking about their faith in order to coexist and communicate effectively with others across difference—then we’re likely to perceive a kind of creativity that offers possibilities for civic engagement.

I call such creativity vernacular religious creativity, a term I borrow from folklorist Leonard Primiano and define more fully in Chapter 2. Briefly stated, vernacular religious creativity is the conscious or unconscious process of negotiating religious beliefs in order to make sense of and potentially adjust one’s faith commitments in relation to social, political, cultural, discursive, and institutional contexts. Vernacular religious creativity is an ongoing process that foregrounds interpretation: religious believers are always in the process of interpreting their beliefs in relation to their sociocultural contexts. And as their contexts change, individuals attempt to reconcile their religious beliefs accordingly—rarely in radical or wholesale ways, but often by enacting subtle adjustments in order to achieve some degree of identification with people who think and believe differently from them. My purpose in this book is to show that millennial evangelical Christian students enact vernacular religious creativity in ways that could foster deliberative discourse or the social conditions necessary for such discourse. In particular, I show how my case study participants:

• casuistically stretch beliefs to establish common ground with individuals who share a radically different set of beliefs (Burke, Attitudes 229–32; Ringer, “Consequences”);

• articulate or connect beliefs in flexible values hierarchies in order to argue on behalf of the common good (Crowley 59–61; Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 80–83); and

• translate ways of talking about faith in order to achieve the legitimacy necessary for deliberating effectively with others (Habermas 25; Hauser, Vernacular 67–70; Roberts-Miller 197).

As I’ll argue throughout this book, these rhetorical strategies, which are grounded in the vernacular religious creativity of millennial evangelical Christian students, can help achieve a more civil civic discourse in two ways. First, each of these strategies can constitute social conditions that allow for deliberative exchange (Charland; Hauser, Vernacular; Roberts-Miller). Following Gerard A. Hauser, I define such conditions in terms of intersubjectivity, a state of affairs wherein interlocutors share a common reference world and perceive each other as legitimate, equal parties to discourse, even if they hold different values, beliefs, and assumptions and don’t agree on issues of public concern (Hauser, Vernacular 66–72). Stretching beliefs to accommodate the perspectives of others, rearticulating beliefs in flexible hierarchies depending on the rhetorical situation, and translating one’s faith-based discourse into terms that resonate with non-Christian audiences can constitute the very social reality that is necessary for deliberative discourse. Second, these strategies can help rhetors initiate deliberative discourse with people who already share their religious beliefs, a possibility I take up in Chapter 5. Arguing explicitly as religious citizens who embrace visions of the common good and who value diverse perspectives, millennial evangelical students might work toward rearticulating the beliefs of other evangelical Christian citizens. And given that they can argue from within their ethos as evangelical Christians, they might meet with more success than Crowley was able to achieve (see Bizzell, “Faith-Based”; Lessl; Steiner; Swearingen, “Rhetoric”).

My emphasis in this book is thus on values, beliefs, and assumptions, the basic building blocks that rest at the heart of rhetorical action and education.¹ Such a focus is particularly germane to evangelical Christian students because religious commitment of any stripe brings to the fore questions of belief. By attending carefully to the beliefs (statements concerning what reality is), values (statements that name what ought to be), and assumptions (warrants that allow rhetors to connect data to claims) that millennial evangelical students enact and even reshape in their writing, I hope to prompt discussion about how the vernacular religious creativity of twenty-first century evangelical Christian students might help invigorate a more robust and inclusive civil discourse. I say “might,” because as I hope to make clear, this book deals both with what millennial evangelical students are already doing and with what they could do with the right rhetorical training (“see Fleming, City, “The Very”; “Mt. Oread”). As writing instructors, we can help establish a more civil discourse by valuing the religious creativity of our evangelical Christian student writers and by using our status as rhetorical educators to teach them how to stretch, articulate, or translate those beliefs meaningfully for deliberative ends.

Vernacular Evangelical Faith

I make this argument by focusing on the vernacular evangelical faith of the millennials who populate our writing classes. Two key terms, vernacular and evangelical, demand further definition. By vernacular, I refer to the ways of speaking, writing, and thinking of ordinary evangelicals. Compositionists (Banks; Elbow), communication scholars (Hauser, Vernacular; Ono and Sloop), folklorists (Howard, Digital; Primiano), and sociologists of religion (Ammerman, Everyday, Sacred; Bartkowski; Wolfe, Transformation) have all shown that paying attention to vernacular rhetorical action or religion—or both—can be highly productive. In the case of the millennial evangelicals in our writing classes, it means assuming that their faith cannot be reduced to that of elites who speak for it and make headlines—people like Pat Robertson, the late Jerry Falwell, Tim and Beverly LaHaye, Billy Graham, and James Dobson—many of whom Crowley cites as representatives of the Christian Right and proponents of apocalyptism (102; see also M. Williams 339–41). Or to borrow a term Mark Alan Williams recently has used, it means paying attention to the “friction” that often marks our students’ conflicted relationships with “dominant religious representations” (341). As I argue more fully in Chapters 2 and 3, attending to the vernacular constructions of our evangelical students’ faith can open up significant possibilities for deliberative exchange.

The second term, evangelical, is harder to define, a difficulty that Emily Murphy Cope and I explore in “Coming to (Troubled) Terms: Methodology, Positionality, and the Problem of Defining ‘Evangelical Christian.” In particular, we discuss how various scholars have “wrangled over defining evangelicalism” to the point where some don’t find the term fruitful anymore (106). We advocate using the term, though, largely because no better term exists. In our definition, which I use in this book, we rely heavily on historian David Bebbington’s construction of evangelicalism that identifies four priorities featured within evangelicalism: conversionism, the emphasis on the importance of individual conversion to Christianity; biblicism, the view that the Bible is central to Christian faith;² activism, the desire to share faith and work towards social change; and crucicentrism, the belief in Christ’s substitutionary atonement (Bebbington 3; Cope and Ringer 107). Contemporary evangelicalism tends to emphasize the first three because crucicentrism doesn’t reflect the theology of all evangelicals (Lindsay 3–4). Evangelicals also tend to identify in various ways with the evangelical subculture, which sociologist Christian Smith defines as “a distinct, publicly recognizable collective identity” (American 15). That collective identity, though, is far more varied today than it was in the 1990s when Smith initiated his research on American evangelicalism (see Balmer; Bielo; Lindsay; Webber). For instance, millennial evangelicals tend to distance themselves from traditional notions of evangelicalism and from the narrow set of political affiliations still associated with the term (Cope and Ringer 110–11; Pally; Pavia 352; Webber). In short, I use the term evangelical to describe students who evidence attitudes of conversionism, biblicism, and activism and who identify with the evangelical subculture. In the case of my participants, this subculture consisted largely of their university’s chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) and a local evangelical church they all attended (see Appendix A).

To explore the vernacular faith of millennial evangelicals, I engage with the growing scholarly discussion about religiously committed students in rhetoric and composition (DePalma and Ringer, Mapping; Vander Lei, et al.; Vander Lei and kyburz). I also draw on three related fields that have much to offer compositionists who seek to understand and value the vernacular religious beliefs that motivate many of our students: communication studies, folklore studies, and the sociology of religion. The first of these, communication studies—our institutional next-door neighbor—has a rich tradition of scholarship exploring the intersections of rhetoric and religion. Rhetoricians such as Thomas Lessl and Mark Allan Steiner contributed to a special issue of the Journal of Communication and Religion called “Civic Engagement from Religious Grounds” that is salient to my concerns. In particular, Steiner’s faithful witness model of evangelical Christian civic engagement, which I define more fully in Chapter 3, is particularly germane and is thus a concept I return to throughout this book. Additionally, rhetorical scholars in communication studies who theorize concepts that haven’t received much attention in composition studies can help us understand the interconnections among religion, rhetoric, and civic engagement. Hauser, whom I have already mentioned, defines vernacular rhetoric itself, while the work of Maurice Charland highlights how students might constitute social conditions that make deliberative rhetoric possible.

The other two fields, folklore studies and the sociology of religion, might not be as familiar to compositionists as communication studies but still have much to offer when it comes to understanding vernacular evangelical faith. Indeed, scholarship from these two fields helps to flesh out concepts of lived religion (Ammerman, Everyday, Sacred; Bartkowski; Hall; Wolfe, Transformation) and vernacular faith itself (Howard, Digital; Primiano). As I discuss in Chapter 2, turning our attention toward the lived or vernacular religious faith of our millennial evangelical students can help compositionists perceive and appreciate the highly creative, innovative ways whereby such students reshape or adapt their faith to accommodate audiences who hold beliefs different from their own. Highlighting such vernacular religious creativity can help rhetoricians and compositionists complicate their assumptions about religiously committed students in general and millennial evangelical Christian students in particular. Emphasizing vernacular religious creativity can also reveal the ways whereby such students bring their faith to bear on writing that deals with public problems. In Chapter 3, I extend that argument to name how millennial evangelicals might enact religious creativity strategically for rhetorical ends. By highlighting the rhetorical possibilities of vernacular religious creativity, I hope to prompt compositionists to conceive of pedagogical approaches whereby they could help students channel the energy from such creativity toward civil discourse.

The Problem of Evangelicals in Composition Studies

Before making that argument, though, it’s worth acknowledging the fact that more often than not in rhetoric and composition, we tend to associate evangelical Christian students with problem rather than possibility. Indeed, while evangelical Christian students are not new to scholarship in composition studies, some readers might register surprise at the argument that attending directly to their faith might promote civil discourse. After all, many of the scholarly depictions of evangelical Christianity construct such faith and the students who espouse it as antithetical to the democratic values of tolerance, openness, and inquiry that many scholars and teachers of rhetoric and writing locate at the heart of civil discourse. We have, for instance, examples of evangelical Christian students who are dualistic (Anson; Dively, “Religious”), unaware of the situatedness of their testimonial language (Anderson), self-righteous and overly certain about their beliefs (Hunt; Perkins, “‘Attentive’”), resistant to multicultural or critical pedagogies (Goodburn; Perkins, “Radical”), and dismissive of perspectives that conflict with their own (Montesano and Roen; Smart). While numerous examples exist that complicate this narrow portrayal of evangelical Christians in the writing classroom, the prevalence of these stereotypical cases reifies the status of evangelicals as “problem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• 1 From Problem to Possibility
• 2 Vernacular Religious Creativity
• 3 Creating Deliberative Conversation
• 4 Effective Witness, Faithful Witness
• 5 The Problem and Possibility of Ethos
• 6 Changing the Way She Speaks
• 7 The Implications of Vernacular Religious Creativity for Rhetoric and Composition
• Bibliography
• Index