Faith-based universities with large Evangelical student bodies are prevalent throughout the United States. Evangelicalism has been widely researched and discussed, yet little research has been directed at the religious discourse in these faith communities. Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU) is one such institution with a majority of Evangelical students, offering a rich environment in which to study this religious discourse, often dubbed Christianese by those who speak it.
This paper is part of a broader study, in which I interviewed thirty-one students at four different points in their first year at IWU (2015-2016) to explore how they use Christianese to construct a particular kind of identity. One of the presumed characteristics of Christianese discourse is the way in which agency is employed, namely, giving God agency for certain actions (Smith & Denton, 2005; Dean, 2010). In this paper, I use van Leeuwen’s (2008) socio-semantic framework of representing social actors to explore how first-year students in this setting talked about God during their interviews. This provides a more nuanced approach to examine the actual language used by the participants to discuss God, allowing a greater understanding of agency in religious discourse. I counted 1,234 “God references” in the data set of 124 interviews and identified 13 categories that described how the participants referred to God. The analysis reveals two important results. First, significant variations in agency occurred depending on the ways in which God was referenced (i.e., the thirteen categories). For example, students activated God as agent in 89% of “God references” regarding the Plan, whereas students passivated God in 97% of “God references” regarding Relationship. Second, how students identified God, e.g. as authority or friend, was strongly connected to their own identity within the Christian university community.
References:
Dean, K. C. (2010). Almost Christian: What the faith of our teenagers is telling the American church. Oxford University Press.
Smith, C., & Denton, C. L. (2005). Soul searching: The religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and practice: New tools for critical discourse analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
