The Everydayness of Religious Literacies (original) (raw)

2021, Ideas that changed literacy practices: First-person accounts from leading voices

IN HER BOOK JESUS and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Kristin Kobes Du Mez (2020) writes about Marabel Morgan, an evangelical proponent of gender complementarianism, particularly female sexual submission. Morgan's main message had to do with the need for women to sexually satisfy their harried husbands because "to be a man was to have a fragile ego and a vigorous libido" (Mez, 2020, p. 64). The main thrust of Kobes Du Mez's argument is the notion that evangelicals-and, in this case, we can emphatically add conservative Catholics as well-emerge as products and producers of a consumer culture manufactured through media which exceeds the bonds of "clear institutional authority structures" (2020, p. 9), which is to say that the violent masculinity, this fragility of ego that runs through a performative libido embraced by many Christian religious circles in American society, emerges out of the discursive possibilities made available to its adherents: It is a literacy practice. My work is deeply concerned not only with attending to these broadly conceived religious literacies but, over the years, has also become increasingly focused on wondering what it might mean to read literacies back through theological lenses, those that are critical, queer, and feminist. In other words, what might we regain as a field by reconsidering the sacred in new ways? This was not the work I entered graduate school to do. Midway through my second year of doctoral studies at Michigan State University (MSU), I switched advisors. This had nothing to do with dissatisfaction with my prior advisor; indeed, she and I have written together recently around the topic of religious literacies (Juzwik et al., 2019), and her work has been foundational in my finding a way toward scholarship in the field of literacy about and around religion. But I'd misread my admission letter to MSU and showed up a year early to enroll. Luck and privilege conspired to find me a spot in the cohort-good news since I'd already quit my job in Boston-which meant that I was sort of barnacled to the already-full advising load of a pretenure faculty member. Also, sometimes, repressed, passive-aggressive Irish Catholic kids who struggle with guilt and confidence issues get nudged by a guy behind them in line to get coffee on a frozen Michigan afternoon and their trajectory changes. Earlier in the day I'd been to a brown-bag talk on literacy issues and, as these were often crowded, plopped down on the floor and tried not to look uncomfortable for the hour and a half of things that went over my head. I'd been a high school English teacher and spent my first year as a PhD student taking classes in the rhetoric and writing department