| Writing about Faith |
| Introduction
Writing About Faith |
The department in which I work has built a strong and well-defined first year writing program in which students write, among other things, autobiographical narratives. Since many students’ affective and educational lives have been shaped by their encounters with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, religion and faith are frequently mentioned in these essays. Program administrators and instructors ask students to think critically about their experiences and to examine their narratives in the context of what other students in the class have to say. Students are also asked to examine their subject in light of the assigned readings. Many composition instructors, however, react negatively when students write about religion. These negative responses are the result, perhaps, of having received essays similar to one that I received last week, which used the Bible to support arguments against civil rights for gay and lesbian people. The series of assignments that I present here do not ask students to use their faith as grounds for an argument. Instead, I ask them to perform textual analysis in order to determine the various ways that faith can be expressed. In my introduction to this assignment, I describe the differences between a faith-based argument, the kind that can cause so much consternation in a composition class, and an essay that takes faith as its subject. The differences are rhetorical. The grader of an argumentative essay is not likely to accept faith-based evidence. This assignment, however, both highlights and sidesteps that rhetorical concern by asking students to analyze texts that express belief. By preventing students from writing about religion at all, we limit their potential to think critically about their beliefs. If students are prevented from writing about their religious views, their opportunities for looking at their beliefs among people whose religious training is not identical to their own is diminished. As Mark Browning puts it, "classroom practice marginalizes religious thought and expression. Few teachers would utterly ban religious thought and sources, yet even in this apparent openness, teachers' actions and attitudes communicate clearly that such material is suspect at best and offensive at worst" (9). If students are actively discouraged from writing about their beliefs, they are less likely to express their views around people who do not to some degree share those beliefs. Janice Neuleib writes that instructors responding to students' Advanced Placement exams "found religious zealotry or passion inappropriate in the formal academic setting of the AP test [and] wanted to give instant low scores to the writers who presented religious arguments" (42). Interestingly, the question to which students had been asked to respond read as follows: "The first chapter of Ecclesiastes, a book of the bible, concludes with these words: 'For in much wisdom is much grief, and increase of knowledge is increase of sorrow.' Write a carefully reasoned, persuasive essay that defends, challenges, or qualifies this assertion. Use evidence from your observation, experience, or reading to develop your position" (41). Neuleib tells us that many "religious writers knew who Ecclesiastes might have been, what some of the issues of suffering and redemption suggested by the passage might be, and what sort of stand they wanted to take on those issues," yet the graders of the essay had difficulty looking beyond the language of the essays (42). In responding to this exam question, some students were taking advantage of their rhetorical strengths by writing about a subject that they knew well. In most contexts, composition instructors would welcome this kind of rhetorical situatedness. Because of the subject matter, however, instructors reacted negatively. Neuleib's example demonstrates the ways in which writing about faith can enhance a writer's rhetorical stance, and it also describes some of the disciplinary mechanisms instructors invoke when we read these essays. In addition to providing an opportunity to think about their faith in a new context, this subject offers many students, especially religious students, powerful rhetorical and affective grounds from which to write. In this way, the students are similar to the students who enrolled in Harriet Malinowitz's lesbian and gay themed writing courses. These students were allowed, perhaps for the first time in an academic setting, to write about subjects that are tacitly and sometimes verbally, violently forbidden. In many of my classes, a significant minority of students are returning missionaries—members of the LDS church who spend the first two years out of high school proselytizing for the church. At the same time, students who have grown up in this region who are not members of the church frequently have powerful memories of being outsiders. It is not uncommon to hear students talk about having been shunned by LDS families, or of having been prevented by the parents of LDS classmates from pursuing or continuing friendships. I am not arguing that students who write about faith-based topics suffer the same kinds of material violence that lgbtq people suffer. What I am arguing is that for many students, writing about faith provides an affirmation of their experiences, both positive and negative, that they don't expect from school. The subject of religion allows these students to draw directly from their experiences. Encouraging students to write expressively about religion is one way of creating a classroom that serves as a point of relevance to their lives outside the classroom. As Beth Daniell puts it, "public education sometimes alienates rather than enlightens in that it fails to take seriously the spiritual and religious values of students and parents" (239). Based on students' written responses to the assignment that I describe below, they can be pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of this subject. As one student writes, "[t]his was a great assignment and I loved looking into all the different views of heaven and God. These lyrics were really nice to listen to. I especially liked the song called, 'Church'. I go to church and to me it is also like a 2nd home and a place where you can feel welcomed and accepted. I think these verses did a good job of describing what church is all about" (Jody). The song that this writer describes, "Church," is performed by Big Boi on his Grammy winning album of the year, Speakerboxxx. In this example, the student's experiences of church are valued and recontextualized when she identifies her experience in the lyrics of this song. The song that she refers to is categorized by its producers as rap/hip hop, a genre of music not usually associated with expressions of faith. Inviting students to write about their experiences with religion, whether they are religious students are not, and articulating the concept of religion to the concept of popular music, is one way of providing students access to their rhetorical strengths and of making the writing they do in our classes resonate outside the classroom. To the extent that our classrooms examine social practices (and mine is a service-learning course that looks explicitly at social practices) it seems arbitrary to ignore writing about a social practice that, as Cheryl Glenn writes, offers "daily enactments in churches, with their programs ranging from Sunday services and meals-on-wheels to twelve-step and child-care programs; in shelters for the homeless, diseased, and abused; and in soup kitchens and hospices" (33). The series of assignments that I suggest here allows students to write about faith without requiring them to defend or even reveal their own status. Instead, students are encouraged to think about the variety of ways that faith can be expressed. As Samuel Cohen in his essay on the relationship between belief and identity writes, my goal is to provide a space in which we can "examine, anatomize, perhaps denaturalize—to take the givens and treat them as constructions" (33). The subject of religion serves as an invitation to those who have experienced religion as insiders and those who have experienced it as outsiders. Since the writing that students create is expressive and analytical rather than explicitly argumentative, and because they are asked only to read one another's essays and not to respond critically, students can draw on their knowledge and experiences and be exposed to a number of different viewpoints without being asked either to interrogate each other or to defend themselves. As John Groppe writes in his analysis of using religion as a subject in the writing class, what "the students will discover and can bring to each other is a number of rich dialectics" (9). One student, for example, writes that "this assignment was very useful in helping me understand the different ways that people can view God and how they can express it" (Eric). As another student writes, "[a]s I read the lyrics and watched the videos, I questioned what my own beliefs were and how I am closed minded to what other people believe. When I think of the discourse of these writings I feel a sense of compassion for them. I couldn't stand in judgment of what the truth is for them" (Paul). |