Xvangelical: The Rhetorical Work of Personal Narratives in Contemporary Religious Discourse

Abstract

Evangelical women who write from lived experience—in blogs, social media, and memoirs—develop a personal narrative rhetoric to negotiate contentious currents of religious thought. This essay studies the work of Sarah Bessey and Jen Hatmaker, who use this rhetorical strategy to destabilize mainstream evangelical discourses of gender and biblical authority. This study expands understandings of rhetorical practices in North American evangelicalism, particularly the contemporary, female-led Xvangelical movement. Analyzing their writing illuminates the interplay among feminist and conservative agendas in debates over gender roles and biblical authority. Because they take conservative doctrine seriously, Hatmaker and Bessey invoke an audience of evangelical readers disappointed with the political and patriarchal commitments of their churches. Finally, this essay advances conversations about the rhetoric of personal narrative. Bessey and Hatmaker explore the ways life writing creates knowledge and offers alternatives to argumentation based in certainty that often characterizes evangelical rhetoric.

Keywords:

• evangelical
• feminism
• personal narrative
• religion

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Emily Murphy Cope and David Gold for their generous and perceptive comments on early versions of this essay. Susan Jarratt and two anonymous reviewers provided valuable recommendations for revision. Finally, I thank Cheryl Glenn and Jess Enoch for encouraging me to take on the subject of evangelical women’s rhetoric.

Notes

¹ I select the term “personal narrative” because it encompasses blogs, oral storytelling, and essay collections that rely on recounting lived experiences. These are the primary genres that Xvangelical women use to advance new religious stances and commitments.

² I paraphrase evangelical pastor and scholar Eugene H. Peterson, who writes, “Story is the most natural way of enlarging and deepening our sense of reality, and then enlisting us as participants in it. Stories open doors to areas or aspects of life that we didn’t know were there, or had quit noticing out of over-familiarity, or supposed were out-of-bounds to us. They then welcome us in. Stories are verbal acts of hospitality” (13). Peterson’s description finds a parallel in Foss and Griffin’s vision of rhetoric that “offers an invitation to understanding—to enter another’s world to better understand an issue and the individual who holds a particular perspective on it” (13).

³ The use of personal experience as a source of authority is part of both secular and evangelical culture. Autobiography scholar Rak dates this memoir boom to the years “roughly spanning the first decade of the twenty-first century” (Boom! 3). Gilmore expands that definition slightly to include “the surge in life narratives published in the late twentieth century” (85). Gray-Rosendale discusses the increasing turn toward the personal, and its implications for multimodal writing and online pedagogy, in her introduction to Getting Personal: Teaching Personal Writing in the Digital Age.