Problematizing the Center: Affirming Christian Identities and the Complexity of Faith

By Jeffry C. Davis & Adam Q. Corbin

An article published in The Dangling Modifier last year, “Converting the Center: Considering Christianity in the Everyday Writing Center,” upholds the argument put forth by Harry Denny in Facing the Center: tutors need to take seriously identity politics in the context of writing center work. Michael Mohon and J. Michael Rifenburg rightly observe, however, that Denny’s work fails to address the role of religious identity in writers; thus, his otherwise insightful book ignores an important aspect of tutor-client negotiation in the writing center. The authors go on to assert that “Christian fundamentalist composers are particularly sensitive to their ethos and are often hesitant to engage properly with counter-arguments, a common feature of academic writing. Such sensitivity and hesitation makes our work as writing tutors all the more challenging.” In response to these specific identity challenges, Mohon and Rifenburg suggest that tutors should encourage fundamentalist writers to view their convictions through a more critical lens, with the help of Peter Elbow’s Believing and Doubting game. They conclude their piece with a call to continue the conversation on “how Christianity impacts and forms the identities writers may bring with them into our centers.” Our response intends to do just that.

Clearly, Mohon and Rifenburg express a sincere desire to understand the identities of their writing center clients, especially with regard to religious belief. And for that they are to be commended. In her landmark CCC essay from over two decades ago, “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing,” Maxine Hairston observes, “It’s worth noting…religion plays an important role in the lives of many of our students—and many of us, I’m sure—but it’s a dimension almost never mentioned by those who talk about cultural diversity and difference” (191). She criticizes those who co-opt student-centered writing, who “put ideology and radical politics at the center” (180), and who “show open contempt for their students’ values, preferences, or interests” (181). For instance, she is alarmed by David Bleich’s pedagogical perspective, especially when he states, “Religious views collaborate with the ideology of individualism and with sexism to censor the full capability of what people can say and write” (167). Eschewing such notions as “hostile,” Hairston asserts, “a teacher who believes in diversity must pay attention to and respect students with deep religious convictions” (191). In this light, Mohon and Rifenburg appear to stand in good stead.

Undoubtedly, the attempt to understand the religious convictions that form a writer’s identity warrants a respectful approach, one that humbly acknowledges the complexity of human beliefs and recognizes the distinguishing characteristics that represent distinct faith traditions and correlative titles. As Denny reminds us regarding face-to-face writing center sessions, “At its core, face is about identity and raises questions about who we are, and how we come to know and present identity as a phenomenon that’s unified, coherent, and captured in a singular essence, or as something more multi-faceted and dynamic” (2). And to this point, Mohon and Rifenburg’s article raises a poignant question: How can they know when they have truly encountered a writer who embodies the “Christian fundamentalist” identity?

Actually, it seems doubtful that writers coming to a writing center would self-describe as a fundamentalist Christian—it’s possible, but not typical. John C. Green, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Akron, and a Senior Fellow with the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, explains, “There has been a move away from strict fundamentalism. In fact, if you look at surveys today, there are actually relatively few people who identify themselves as fundamentalists.” So, apart from any explicit acknowledgement of commitment to the tenets of Christian fundamentalism by a student writer, Mohon and Rifenburg’s approach necessarily requires an interpretation of prima facie (at first face) data by the tutor. In other words, based upon certain characteristics communicated through a given student’s writing, or conversation, an interpretive judgment regarding identity must be made.

The authors give an indication of the factors that would lead them to ascertain when they are dealing with a fundamentalist Christian: some demonstration of a writer desiring to be “a good witness” (a profession of the Christian faith) and a writer affirming “a Christian code” (an adherence to biblical perspectives on life). Still, these indicators alone should not automatically lead the authors, or any tutor, to conclude that a writer is a “Christian fundamentalist.” There are many Protestants who readily profess their faith in the Christian orthodox belief and draw upon the Bible as the basis of their worldview, but they would never refer to themselves by the label “fundamentalist” or be comfortable with that identity designation. Moreover, the term “fundamentalist” should not be used interchangeably with “Christian,” as Mohon and Rifenburg do. Actually, many evangelical Christians (often confused as fundamentalist Christians) see “fundamentalist” as pejorative and restrictive from a theological and intellectual standpoint.

“Christian fundamentalism” actually represents a very specific movement within American Protestantism in the early twentieth century—a relatively recent phenomenon in the two millennia of Christian history. As George M. Marsden expounds in Fundamentalism and American Culture, “The question of history was central to the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. Should Christianity and the Bible be viewed through the lens of cultural development, or should culture be viewed through the lens of Scripture?” (259). While the Christian faith claims approximately 76% of the American population as practicing adherents, of this number about half identify themselves as Protestants, and a quarter of these identify themselves as evangelicals (Slepika 12), of which fundamentalists constitute a clear minority. Consequently, for Mohon and Rifenburg’s tutoring approach to be credible, it seems imperative that they provide a more careful basis for identifying “fundamentalist Christians” in the writing center, while at the same time realizing that not all bibliocentric Christians fall into that identity category.

Furthermore, and possibly more concerning, the authors’ description of how to address “fundamentalist Christian” students in the writing center presents a problematic construal of identity negotiation, relative to the aims of academic culture. Their thesis—“Christian fundamentalist composers are particularly sensitive to their ethos and are often hesitant to engage properly with counter-arguments”—suggests a puzzling contradiction between their stated motivations and subsequent methods. Recent scholarship on how to respond to student writers who profess various kinds of Christian faith takes a decidedly different tack. Central to the authors’ solution is a flawed conceptualization: “our role as writing tutor is to encourage and continue pushing the Christian composer to doubt, to question her/his position,” and that “doing so moves Christian composers in a productive academic direction while not forgoing their important religious convictions.” However, this approach expresses an attitude towards Christian religious writers that appears neither to understand the discourses within which these writers operate, nor to affirm one’s faith identity as a substantive place from which to compose.

Priscilla Perkins, in her article “‘A Radical Conversion of the Mind’: Fundamentalism, Hermeneutics, and the Metanoic Classroom,” links such attitudes to profound epistemological differences between the largely liberal and secular academic discourses that writing instructors inhabit and the faith-based hermeneutical practices of conservative Christian students. Describing her experience teaching undergraduate students in the “Bible Belt” culture of southwestern Oklahoma, Perkins notes that she originally assumed, along with many writing instructors, that one could somehow separate religious belief from cultural identity. Her chief pedagogic goal was to “get students to question their fundamentalism” so that they could take “the first step toward intellectual and economic self-determination”—but eventually she realized that “if students replaced evangelical approaches to textual authority with more ‘liberal,’ more dialectical ones, they might lose their sense of themselves as faithful Christians” (589). This problematization of her previous attitudes concerning her religious students caused her to ask herself (and her fellow writing instructors) a probing question: “Could I respect my co-learners while I attempted to change them against their wills?” (589). Accordingly, Perkins decided to take an approach that allowed her students to genuinely inhabit their own epistemological frameworks by treating the Bible as a “generative text” for student writing, “a culturally indispensable object that students could simultaneously use in order to evaluate nonbiblical materials and phenomena” (592). In striking contrast to the pedagogic goals expressed by Mohon and Rifenburg, Perkins re-articulates the purpose of the writing instructor of fundamentalist students as helping them “see their Bible reading as inherently interpretive and to look at their academic reading as a positive, potentially faith-affirming extension of their more culturally central reading practices” (595). In doing so, bridges can be built between the religious discourses of fundamentalist students and academic discourses that might have otherwise been too threatening for them to seriously consider; therefore, they can gradually discover in these alien worlds perspectives that not only challenge, but broaden, deepen, and more powerfully articulate their own self-conceptions as students of faith.

In view of work by scholars such as Perkins, it becomes clear that those who take identity politics seriously, in relation to academic writing, need to consciously adopt a proactive stance toward the religious commitments of their students. In “What in God’s Name? Administering the Conflicts of Religious Belief in Writing Programs,” Elizabeth Vander Lei and Lauren Fitzgerald propose that resisting binary thinking about the relationship between the academy and religious discourse is a good place to begin. They decry three “secular ideologies of religion” that currently influence writing instructors: 1) the idea that the First Amendment regulates the discussion of religion in higher education; 2) the assumption that faith and reason are opposed to one another; and 3) the view that religion is a private matter and has no place in the public sphere (186). Mohon and Rifenburg fall prey to such binary thinking in their assumption that the religious identities of fundamentalist Christian students prevents them from engaging in the kind of critical thinking that has academic value.

Part of the problem is in their application of Peter Elbow’s Doubting and Believing epistemological game, a pedagogical method epitomizing binary thinking. Mohon and Rifenburg claim that fundamentalist writers are adept at listening but resist doubting—a fairly simplistic and reductive analysis. (The believing game, as Elbow defines it—“the disciplined practice of trying to be as welcoming or accepting as possible to every idea we encounter” (1)—seems, if anything, more alien to the fundamentalist students that Mohon and Rifenburg describe.) The solution, they urge, is for fundamentalist students to learn how to stand back from their own positions in order to consider them more doubtfully—more critically. But perhaps it is neither the believing game nor the doubting game that would best serve fundamentalist college writers, or other devout Christian students who are mistaken for them, but rather an approach along the lines of what Perkins suggests: not demanding that students doubt their own faith convictions as a prerequisite for legitimate academic learning; instead, encouraging them to explore other discourses by using hermeneutic tools that are not threatening to their personal identities. Maybe then fundamentalist writers, however they choose to express their identity in a writing center context (or not), will more readily be willing to analyze critically, and to engage authentically, positions other than their own.

 

Works Cited

Bleich, David. “Literacy and Citizenship: Resisting Social Issues.” Lunsford, Moglen, and Slevin 163 (1990): 69. Print.

Denny, Harry C. Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring.  Logan: University of Utah Press, 2010. Print.

Elbow, Peter. “The Believing Game—Methodological Believing.” English Department Faculty Publication Series (2008). Web. 10 October 2014.

Green, John C. Interview with Frontline. The Jesus Factor, 29 April 2004. Web. 10 Dec. 2014.

Hairston, Maxine. “Diversity, ideology, and teaching writing.” College Composition and Communication (1992): 179-193. Print.

Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print.

Mohon, Michael and J. Michael Rifenburg. “Converting the Center: Considering Christianity in the Everyday Writing Center.” The Dangling Modifier 19:2 (2013): n. pag. Web. 10 October 2014.

Perkins, Priscilla. “‘A Radical Conversion of the Mind’: Fundamentalism, Hermeneutics, and the Metanoic Classroom.” College English 63 (2001): 585-611. Print.

Slepicka, Amie Joy. Faith in Phenomenography: A New Approach to Evangelicalism in the College Writing Classroom. Thesis: Montana State University, 2012. Print.

Vander Lei, Elizabeth and Lauren Fitzgerald. “What in God’s Name? Administering the Conflicts of Religious Belief in Writing Programs.” WPA: Writing Program  Administration 31:1-2 (2007): 185-195. Print.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *