On Faith and Writing as an Academic

Cleaning out my Journals (and sharing the best bits with you):

The Consequences of Integrating Faith into Academic Writing: Casuistic Stretching and Biblical Citation, Jeffrey M. Ringer, College English, Volume 75, Number 3, January 2013

That evangelicals ... populate FYW courses at public universities is nothing new in composition studies. Scholars such as Chris Anderson, Lizabeth Rand, Elizabeth Vander Lei, Shannon Carter, and Michael-John DePalma, among others, have sought ways to understand evangelicals and help them engage productively with academic discourse. Though such scholarship certainly has helped compositionists understand evangelical identity, surprisingly absent in the conversation is significant attention to how writing academically influences students’ faith-based identities. In other words, although compositionists have considered evangelical identity from the vantage of what such students bring to their academic writing, few have considered what happens when evangelical students integrate their faith into academic writing. If it is true, as Donna LeCourt contends, that “academic discourse does influence the construction of self” (143), then what are the identity consequences for evangelicals who integrate their faith in their academic writing? More specifically, what happens to the faith-based identities of evangelicals ... when they attempt to convey deeply held beliefs to an audience that does not share them? ... What happens, though, when a FYW student makes a discourse choice she thinks aligns with a core belief or value but that in reality conflicts with it?

Kenneth Burke’s notion of casuistic stretching provides a framework for understanding the consequences of such a move. In Attitudes toward History, Burke defines casuistic stretching as a process wherein “one introduces new principles while theoretically remaining faithful to old principles” (229). Burke speaks favorably of casuistic stretching in Attitudes, noting that “language owes its very existence to casuistry” and that a “truly liquid attitude towards” language would lead to “a firmer kind of certainty” without “the deceptive comforts of ideological rigidity” (230–31). One could certainly envision how such a post-structuralist view could lead to agency. But while Burke sees casuistic stretching as present in all language, he recognizes that some acts of casuistic stretching are more impure than others. Casuistry is pure when the different purposes its enactment seeks to fulfill are more alike than not, while stretching one principle to accommodate a radically different one represents a “perversion of casuistry” (Rhetoric 154–55). Thus, Burke argues that “casuistic stretching must itself be subjected continually to conscious attention,” lest such stretching lead to “mystification” or “the concealing of a strategy” (Attitudes 232). Burke’s concern is that a rhetor might consciously deceive an audience, but it is also possible to envision the rhetor himself as mystified if he inadvertently stretches a principle in making a particular discourse choice. And the results of such casuistic stretching could have identity ramifications. As Burke explains, casuistic stretching can result in “demoralization,” the undermining of the morals or principles held by an individual (Attitudes 229).

When considered in terms of identity and writing, casuistic stretching can serve as a process through which an individual not only engages with a perspective other than one’s own, but also comes potentially to identify with and then interiorize it. As such, casuistic stretching may be a means through which students who believe in absolute truth move from dualism toward relativism, a key stage of development that Perry outlines in Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years. Writing about dualistically minded students, Perry explains that encounters with pluralism in college can raise questions of whether absolute truth exists (68). Such encounters with “otherness” eventually lead to “transformations in [the] structure” of dualistic thought (71). These are not transformations in which students will immediately abandon a dualistic perspective for a relativistic one—demoralization, to put it colloquially, doesn’t happen overnight. Rather, Perry explains, dualism “is first modified and loosened by a series of accommodations necessitated by its assimilation of the pluralism of both peer group and curriculum” (61). These accommodations lead individuals to acknowledge what Perry calls the “potential of legitimacy in otherness,” the view that there are legitimate perspectives other than one’s own (64, 71). What facilitates such recognition of legitimacy is the fact that, as Perry and his researchers found, “students appear to bring with them the expectation of identification with the college community” (65). Of course, an expectation to identify with peers and the curriculum may not come to fruition—some students, upon encountering pluralism, will retreat toward dualism. But the very encounter with pluralism, coupled with the desire for identification, is what can challenge an individual’s belief in absolute truth—a belief held by many evangelicals.