"losing my religion": the rhetoric and poetics of religious deconversion narratives
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“Losing My Religion”: The Rhetoric and Poetics of
Religious De-Conversion
Sally Edith GreenProgram for Writing and Rhetoric University of Colorado at Boulder
WRTG 3020, “Rhetorics of Faith”
“Rhetorics of Faith” vs. “Rhetoric of Faith”
Preliminary choices in teaching religious rhetoric
In the modern era, with its multivalent progress toward human freedom, it is ironic that so many individuals willfully choose to follow restrictive religions.
Est. 4 in 10 Americans belong to conservative ProtestantismEst. 3 in 10 believe the Bible is the literal word of God46% believe in Creationism
Gallup Polls
And yet many believers do, in the end, resist fundamentalism.
WHY???
• Intellectual Questioning• Moral Criticism • Life Crisis/Personal Epiphany• A meaningful relationship of
unconditional acceptance with a tolerant outsider.
Anita Freeman, website
“To arrive at a warrantable belief in religious truths, we may use rhetorical processes– indeed, this is our only pathway unless vouchsafed a mystical vision.”
Patricia Bizzell
“For many evangelicals, conversion was “incomplete”- unrecognized- until it was formed and structured through the rhetoric of conversion discourse; the “experience” of conversion was consummated only by their ability to speak the language of conversion.”
The Self and the Sacred, Conversion and Autobiography in Early
American Protestantism, Rodger M. Payne
Booth’s Conversion Story Variables
•Truth Claims•Distance Travelled•Dramatic Irony•Instrument and Pace of Conversion •Consequences•Audience •Coherence of Stated Values with Implied Values of the Story
•In conversion fiction, the quality and desirability of the post-conversion world that is offered.
“In one sense, every conversion is a deconversion and every deconversion a conversion. The “turning from” and “turning to” are alternative perspectives on the same process of personal metamorphosis, stressing either the rejected past of the old self or the present convictions of the reborn self.”
John D. Barbour, Versions of Deconversion, Autobiography
and the Loss of Faith
Deconversion
•Intellectual doubt or denial of the truth of a system of beliefs•Moral criticism of the system’s way of life•Emotional upheaval, including grief, guilt, loneliness, and despair•Rejection of the community to which the autobiographer previously belonged
Barbour
“My problem for decades, then, became that of finding some new story, not just about Joseph Smith and the Mormons, but about the world, about my own path through life. … How could I hope to find a story equal in power to the glorious tales I had now discarded?”
Wayne Booth
“It is often said of liberal rhetors that they are policy wonks who lack ‘an emotionally compelling vision.’”
Sharon Crowley, Toward a Civil Discourse, Rhetoric and Fundamentalism
“…liberals gain little by trying to convert apocalyptists to liberal beliefs or policies by means of reason. Rather, a would-be rhetor should focus her persuasive efforts on the arousal of passion and desire.”
Sharon Crowley
“It was like tearing my whole frame of reality to pieces, ripping to shreds the fabric of meaning and hope, betraying the values of existence. It was like spitting on my mother, or like throwing one of my children out a window. It was sacrilege. All of my bases for thinking and values had to be restructured.“ Dan Barker, Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists
“My relationship with God was connected to everything– my family, my friends, my sense of justice, my vocation, my way of being in the world. I lost more than belief.” Sarah Sentilles, Breaking Up With God, A Love Story
“But…” or, the Problem of Audience
The Problem of Audience, con’t.
“I never understood how you could believe any of that shit in the first place.”
“I’m very happy in my church. You just took everything way too far.”
“You’re going to hell.”
But it’s o.k. if you were in a cult
“I've called my group a cult for three years and what it really is, is a mainstream Christian group. But I definitely want to have backing on it when I do say that because it could get violent. At least emotionally. I've been in therapy for a few months now to discuss the hate and violence just from my blog, alone. ”
“From my experience with another TV network they didn't even want [me] to mention the word church or Christianity at all. I had to use the word cult and not church…. It took me awhile to wrap my head around that--this is for entertainment after all and they want to stay out of trouble so it's safest if they don't get into the politics of it all.”
Lisa Kerr, author of “My Cult Life” blog, personal correspondence
“I had nothing to love.” John Ruskin
“Evangelical religion, or any religion in a violent form… divides heart from heart. It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal, in the barren pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent affections, all the genial play of life, all the exquisite pleasures and soft resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul, are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative.”
Edmund Gosse
The Victorian Aesthetic Revolt
“[In the remote mountainous location of the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse]… leaning on the window sill I said… something about the effect of the scene outside upon religious minds. Whereupon, with a curl of his lip, ‘We do not come here,’ said the monk, ‘to look at the mountains.’ Under which rebuke I bent my head silently, thinking however all the same, ‘What then, by all that is stupid, do you come here for at all?’”
John Ruskin, quoted in Barbour
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Audre Lorde
“After I broke up with God, I still had all the language of my faith– salvation, resurrection, crucifixion, savior, sin, grace, Christian, priest– but I couldn’t make it mean anything anymore.” Sarah Sentilles
Rhetorical-poetic-metaphorical invention or constraint
Some writers use the same religious language to describe their deconversions.
Gosse does so ironically
Frederick Douglass’ “signifyin’”
Rhetorical-poetic-metaphorical invention or constraint, con’t
Others scrupulously avoid religious language or imagery.
Mary Daly invents new language entirely
Sarah Santilles uses the extended metaphor of a love relationship gone sour
Rhetorical-poetic-metaphorical invention or constraint, con’t
“I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”
Frederick Douglass
“If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” Gloria Steinem
“On a trip to Kings Canyon one summer, Eric took me on a hike to see a waterfall. It looks like a cathedral, was my first thought, and then, No, a cathedral looks like this.”
Sentilles
“Who would Jaysuz Bomb?” Ex-Christian.net
Usefulness of Disarticulation, Rearticulation
“Those of us who want to preserve a space for secular negotiation and discussion would do well to construct and tell exemplary stories about America’s founding that serve those purposes.”
Crowley
“If religious faith meant the end of doubt and of longing for further understanding, it would be better not to have faith.”
Barbour
Barbour, John D. 1994. Versions of Deconversion: Autobiography and the Loss of Faith. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.Barker, Dan and Richard Dawkins. 2008. Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists. Ulysses Press. Bizzell, Patricia. 2007. “Religion and Rhetoric: Reason, Emotion, and the Sensory in Religious Persuasion. In Sizing Up Rhetoric. Ed. Zaefsky and Benanka Booth, Wayne C. 2004. In Comprehending Fundamentalisms. Ed. Marty and Appleby. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press. Crowley, Sharon. 2006. Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism. Pittsburgh: U. of Pittsburgh Press. Freeman, Anitra L. 2002. “A Psychological Analysis of Fundamentalism.” www.anitra.netGarver, Eugene. 2006. “How Can a Liberal Listen to Religious Argument? Religious Rhetoric as a Rhetorical Problem” in How Should We Talk About Religion? Perspectives, Context, Particularities. Ed. White. Notre Dame: U. of Notre Dame Press. Jacobs, Janet Liebman. 1989. Divine Disenchantment: Deconverting from New Religions. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.Payne, Rodger. 1998. The Self and the Sacred, Conversion and Autobiography in Early American Protestantism. Knoxville: U. of Tennessee Press. Roof, Wade Clark and J. Shawn Landres. 1997. “Defection, Disengagement, and Dissent: The Dynamics of Religious Change in the United States.” Religion and the Social Order, Vol. 7. Ratcliffe, Krista. 1996. Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich. Carbondale: SIU Press. Sentilles, Sarah. 2011. Breaking Up With God: A Love Story. NY: Harpercollins. Streib, Heinz. 2012. “Deconversion.” Oxford Handbook on Religious Conversion. Ed. L.R. Rambo and C.E. Farhadian, Oxford: OUP. Winell, Marlene. 1993. Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion. Oakland: New Harbinger Publications.
