Book Reviews
Issue 34.2 Fall 2006
| HTML Printer-Friendly Format | Issue PDF |
Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism, by Sharon Crowley. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. 256 pp. 130-33
Reviewed by Brenda Glascott, University of Pittsburgh
Pioneering books bear a heavy burden – they suggest the range of work yet to be done but cannot do it all themselves. Sharon Crowley’s Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism is no exception to this predicament. In her latest book, Crowley analyzes Christian fundamentalist rhetoric, arguing that it threatens the civil discourse necessary to democracy. Crowley is convincing in her argument that American civic discourse has reached an impasse that arises from the hostility, suspicion, and dismissiveness which characterize relations between fundamentalist and liberal rhetors. As a solution, she argues that the field of rhetoric needs to be “rehabilitated”; she believes that by recovering ancient rhetorical concepts that address emotion and affect, liberal rhetors will find the means to engage fundamentalist Christians in dialogue. Revitalizing modern rhetorical study and practice, Crowley believes, will revitalize civic discourse, making possible rhetorical engagements with Christian apocalyptists – Crowley’s name for fundamentalist Christians who ascribe to a literal belief in an approaching apocalypse.
Crowley’s book is among the first in what I expect will be a new wave of scholarship that looks at American religion from the perspective of English studies and the writing classroom. The “turn” to religion has seemed imminent ever since Stanley Fish declared that religion will supersede high theory as well as race, class, and gender as the focus for scholarly research. Composition studies has just begun to theorize the role of religion in writing classrooms and in culture more generally. Recent activity included a special interest group on Critical Thinking and the Christian Tradition at the CCCC and a conference on Rhetoric and Christian Tradition in 2005 organized by scholars including Anne Ruggles Gere and Elizabeth Vander Lei, one of the authors of Negotiating Faith in the Composition Classroom (2005). Crowley’s book moves this nascent discussion out of local concerns about teachers and students of faith into a larger landscape that includes the kinds of rhetoric circulating in the classroom, the pulpit, government, and the public.
Central to Crowley’s argument is what she characterizes as the incompatibility between liberal and fundamentalist Christian epistemologies. For Crowley, liberal argumentation, characterized by emphasis on reason, fact, and neutrality, cannot successfully contest fundamentalist arguments that rely on “revelation, faith, and biblical interpretation” (3). The clash between reason and faith is old and familiar; however, instead of following the well-worn path of simply exposing the inadequacies of fundamentalist argumentation, Crowley asks liberal argumentation to adapt to a rhetorical landscape in which emotion and belief are as important as reason and fact.
According to Crowley, the way out of the clash of civilizations between liberal and fundamentalist epistemologies is to “rehabilitate [ancient] rhetoric” (34). In chapter 2, “Speaking of Rhetoric,” Crowley traces a history for modern liberal rhetoric, demonstrating that the rhetoric most often deployed and taught today is an artifact from the birth of liberalism and the Enlightenment. Liberal rhetorical theory emphasizes reason and tolerance, necessarily relying on a neutral audience to be effective. This dispassionate rhetoric cannot refute claims based on faith or emotion. Crowley argues, then, that public rhetoricians and teachers of writing need to revive the lost rhetorical tradition that seeks to move audiences “not only by the provision of proofs but by establishment of ethical, evaluative, and emotional climates in which . . . changes can occur” (58).
Crowley is aware that suggesting the answer to modern problems lays in the distant past is problematic; she emphasizes, instead, adapting ancient rhetorical “notions” “to address contemporary rhetorical situations” (47). She argues that in practice concepts like ethos, logos, and pathos have been reduced, through “the school tradition” to “bit[s] of formalist lore” (46). Crowley seeks to rectify this situation by urging scholars to revisit and revise established interpretations of ancient concepts. For instance, Crowley argues that “doxa,” reduced since the nineteenth-century to a synonym for “opinion,” has lost the rich meaning it had in ancient Greece. A recovered definition of doxa, which would “designate current and local beliefs that circulate communally,” would, Crowley argues, give postmodern rhetoric a powerful way to conceptualize civic discourse. She hopes, further, to revive appeals to pathos, which she claims have been shed in liberal rhetorical argumentation. While I am not convinced that we need to go as far back as ancient rhetoric for a conceptual language which will “restore” emotion and affect to modern rhetorical practices, I am intrigued by Crowley’s argument that “ancient rhetorical theory has much to offer postmodernity” (45).
Crowley is at her best in chapters 4 and 5, “Apocalyptism” and “Ideas do Have Consequences: Apocalyptism and the Christian Right,” when she performs readings of contemporary apocalyptic writing. The texts she reads include apocalyptic prophecy; fiction, including the Left Behind series; and television appearances by Jerry Falwell and other fundamentalist public figures. Crowley takes seriously the threat she sees to liberal society by a fundamentalist Christian movement which, according to Crowley, seeks to impose its values and beliefs on a heterodox nation. At stake in Crowley’s search for a productive mode of civil discourse is American democracy itself, endangered, she argues, by Christian apocalyptists’ refusal to listen to or engage with non-believers. This refusal to engage in civic discourse is an emerging crisis as Christian apocalyptists amass power through the ascendancy of the Christian Right.
Crowley’s readings of fundamentalist texts are sobering if not frightening, particularly when she turns her attention to writers who advocate actively working to induce the apocalypse. However, I wish she had broadened her historical perspective, since the struggle between “secular” and religious Americans over “the place of religious and moral values in civic affairs” is as old as the American republic and the establishment clause in the Bill of Rights (3). I wonder if, in part, one way of diffusing the emotional urgency of a rhetoric about America’s fall from grace is to remind ourselves, and those making these claims, that there have been many such iteration during American history. The language Crowley worries over about “restoring Biblical values” in American society is recycled from the nineteenth-century and earlier, and, as I’ve seen in my research into nineteenth-century evangelical literacy campaigns, this rhetoric has significantly affected the formation of American literacy pedagogy.
The final chapter, “How Beliefs Change,” is the most tentative in the book. In this chapter Crowley she shifts her attention, briefly, to the discipline of Composition/Rhetoric and offers suggestions about effective rhetorical practices. Crowley asks her reader to accept on faith that teachers of composition and rhetoric are hamstrung by their ignorance of alternatives to liberal rhetorical argumentation, and, as proof, she alludes to unnamed composition textbooks. Many of Crowley’s suggestions are familiar; others may leave writing teachers wondering where they come in. For instance, like George Lakoff and other political linguists, Crowley urges liberal rhetors to use story and to engage in discourse about values. Further, she advises critics of apocalyptic rhetoric to “disarticulate a particular belief from the other with which it is articulated” (201). Crowley means that we should try to introduce gaps between the discrete beliefs which, collectively, constitute ideology. Some of Crowley’s other proposals extend far beyond the purview of writing instructors. She urges, for example, blocking efforts by fundamentalist communities to isolate themselves. She also argues that it is the “subalterns” within these fundamentalist communities who are most likely to be open to re-thinking their beliefs and changing the minds of those around them.
While I recognize that Crowley’s central task was to describe the American discursive landscape, I kept hoping she would turn, eventually, to the writing classroom. Of course, one book cannot do it all, and Crowley is not so much constructing a “new” rhetoric as suggesting a path for further work in rhetoric. Thus, Crowley wisely ends her book with an invitation, urging her readers to “open” more “paths of invention” (201).
Work Cited
Fish, Stanley. “One University Under God.” The Chronicle of Higher Education 7 Jan 2005 The Chronicle of Higher Education 23 Aug 2006 <http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18c00101.htm>.
Pittsburgh, PA
