More Than Preaching to the Choir: Religious Literate Activity and Civic Engagement in Older Adults

 

Of the thirteen regular members, twelve were white and one was African-American. At the service planning meetings, five of the thirteen regular members volunteered to write original material that would be presented to the entire congregation. However, all members of the group participated in the group’s lively conversations, some of which directly appeared in the service. Group members also provided feedback on drafts of the writers’ texts as well as behind-the-scenes organization and support for the event.

The methodology for this study foregrounds literate activity, as described by Paul Prior, who writes, “Literate activity, in this sense, is not located in acts of reading and writing, but as cultural forms of life saturated with textuality, that is strongly motivated and mediated by texts”  (138). Because a literate activity framework positions writing as situated, mediated, and dispersed, it is essential to use research methods that capture more than just a final textual product. The materials I analyzed for this article included ethnographic observation field notes, transcripts of meetings, drafts of texts written for and based on the church service, and text-based interviews. Three out of the five primary service writers agreed to be interviewed three months after the service was conducted to give them time to reflect on  how their ideas settled internally for each writer personally, as well as how the ideas settled in the congregation. The interviews I conducted with the writers were semi-structured as well as text-based (Odell, Goswami, and Herrington). In text-based interviews, the interviewer brings a copy of the writer’s work to specifically guide the questions to the manuscript, allowing the writer to discuss the significance of particular choices he or she made during the writing process.

Rather than beginning analysis with a pre-determined set of codes, I used open coding as my initial method when working with this wide range of participant manuscripts, meeting and interview transcripts, and field notes (Strauss). I also drew on tenets of Kathy Charmaz’s grounded theory approach to qualitative research, namely its commitment to centering practices that participants find important and an emphasis on collecting and analyzing data simultaneously in a recursive process (2-3). This approach proved fruitful when I noticed that group members did not spend as much time discussing the assigned texts as I thought they would, instead frequently connecting the concepts from the texts to what was happening in their own community. Since this was a practice that seemed important to the group, I then began to code for patterns related to intertextuality in their discussions, writings, and interviews. As Charles Bazerman writes, “intertextuality often seeks to create a shared understanding of what people have said before and what the current situation is. That is, intertextual reference can attempt to establish the social facts upon which the writer is attempting to make a new statement” (313). Since the Pub Theologians underwent a process of re-negotiating their own social facts about race and criminal justice (i.e., moving from believing the system is inherently fair and works well for everyone to acknowledging and working against racial disparities in that system), instances of intertextuality became relevant to understanding how and where they had changed their ways of thinking about this issue of civic importance. I also coded for the genres, or typified oral and written communication patterns (Bazerman 316-8), that the Pub Theologians used most frequently and for how they interpreted those generic conventions and eventually chose to deploy them in their Sunday service.

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One of the more insidious effects of the decline narrative as it pertains to the literacies of older people is that it assumes that older people’s literacies and literate practices only stagnate and decline. Much of the work about older people within literacy and composition studies has shown how older people have a much more complex and nuanced relationship with their literacies than decline ideology would allow, whether it is learning the use of new literate technologies (Bowen) or using the literacies they already cherish to shape a meaningful path through the end of their lives (Rumsey). Building on that work, I show in this section how the Pub Theologians use habitual literate practices as a vehicle for significant change. Reading and discussion of local news stories as they connected to their book selections drew individual members closer together as a group. Their religious literate practices also drew them into caring about issues that did not directly affect them personally, in contrast to the greedy geezer stereotype, which presumes that older people only care about their own benefits and bank accounts. At most meetings, someone would bring up an article from that week’s newspaper, and the discussion would center more around making intertextual connections between the newspaper and the books rather than just close reading the assigned chapters. All participants were familiar with The Daily Tribune, and the following interaction about content found in this shared text was typical. The group begins to discuss a story about a young African-American male getting pulled over for failing to use a turn signal that ended in his arrest on a drug charge.

Michael: I bet none of us reads the paper the same way we did six months ago. 

Anita: Oh my gosh.

Tom: (louder) You know, that is [so true!]³ I find myself=

Teresa:                                      [Absolutely] 

Anita: Did you see the paper today?

Tom: I find myself =

Anita: =There was something in the paper today that was right on point with this book. 

Tom: I find myself when I look at the police blotter or the stories about so and so, I, you are so right Michael, I am now reading that wondering as you were, when we were going around about okay, what’s the backstory here that isn’t being reported?

Anita: In the paper today there was this article that I thought, oh my gosh. It was just a small, I don’t know if you saw it, about the guy that didn’t use his turn signal.

Michael: Right.

One of the recurring concerns of the Pub Theologians as they discussed these particular books was that of processing difficult emotions. As a result, during their planning and writing meetings as they composed their service, they often discussed how they wanted the congregation to feel as a result of their performance: moved to action, but not judged or attacked. In this section, I will show how the Pub Theologians used their long-standing knowledge of the genre conventions as practiced at this church in order to compose a service that both comforts and challenges their fellow churchgoers to feel and think differently about racism and the criminal justice system.  Their efforts with this church service are especially relevant to extending arguments like Martinson and Minkler’s, that civic engagement as practiced by older people should not be limited simply to providing free volunteer labor wherever someone else decides it is needed. Instead, the church gives the group members the space and the visibility necessary to deploy their civic-minded literacies in a self-directed manner. The Pub Theologians are able to remediate the content of their books into the shared genres of how God is worshipped in this community, and in so doing, find a way to engage their fellow churchgoers with a topic they previously may have ignored.  

One of the main genres present in Sunday services at the church besides the sermon is group prayer, or the direct address of God by the congregation as they read from their weekly bulletins in unison. The exact text of these prayers varies from church to church, but it usually contains a statement of the collective sins that churchgoers have committed throughout the week for which they seek forgiveness from God (“Book of Common Prayer”). While many Christian churches use the Prayer of Confession on a weekly basis, this church chooses not to use it as frequently, alternating it with other types of prayers so as not to focus only on sin. Because the group chose to include a confession of sin that was related to their reading, they needed to write one themselves. Michael, a regular and enthusiastic participant in weekly Pub Theology meetings who nonetheless took care to describe himself as “not very religious,” was the first to volunteer to write the prayer of confession for the Sunday service. He stuck to the genre’s conventions as typically practiced in this church setting, basing his prayer on the way that the church’s longtime former minister, Rev. Jack Good, would write and deliver his prayers of confession. In an interview, Michael explained, “When [Rev. Good] would do the prayer of confession each week specifically, it was thirty years ago, twenty-five or thirty years ago. Sunday after Sunday, I would just be mesmerized. Often teary… Something about the way he did that, framed that, just got that. And so I knew I wanted write the Call to Confession.” For Michael, the repetition of the genre, “Sunday after Sunday,” served as a point of significance rather than stagnation. Since the genre had been so emotionally resonant for him, he was especially concerned that the prayer he wrote would likewise evoke an emotional response in his audience.

The following is an excerpt from the final version of the prayer that Michael wrote and then led from the podium at the front of the church and the congregation at their Sunday service.

Michael: Let’s join together in our confession. God who steadfastly seeks wholeness, even as we try to break things how can this be? 

Congregation: How can this be? How can we have done this? How can we have overlooked this? 

Michael: We’re ashamed of our silence. In Your name we agreed to notice hatred and we didn’t. And so we are here in this quiet place to cry out, who can treat another person like they’re invisible? Who can hold someone down until they cannot breathe? Who can imprison another spirit in poverty or in discrimination?

Congregation: We can. We did. If only by our silence, we do.

In keeping with the traditional form of a Prayer of Confession, the congregants take responsibility for their wrong actions, sin, and also the things they have left undone that potentially could have made the world a better place. Remediating this long-established tradition of accounting for silence and inaction as being sinful and wrong, Michael is then able to name staying silent and inactive about racism as also being sinful and wrong. As scholars like Deborah Mutnick have noted in the pages of this journal, contemporary colorblind ideologies that present American racism as an anomaly from the past make it difficult for people to discuss the topic at all, whether in the college classroom or at church (73). Present-day American cultural notions of being racist usually involve saying something overtly racist, and Mutnick and other scholars (e.g., Trainor, “Critical,” “My Ancestors,” “Rethinking Racism”; Winans) have described how white people who do not participate in such overt behaviors are often very resistant to thinking about themselves as being racist. By drawing intertextual connections between the ideas in their books and the patterns of confessional prayer as practiced in this church community, Michael draws on years of shared language to persuade fellow white church members to take up what may be an unfamiliar or troubling idea.

When discussing the writing process of the prayer in an interview following the service, he discussed the significance of the choice he made when writing the first series of questions asked by the congregation. He explained, “To say ‘How can that happen?’ is too empty. It’s more like, ‘How could we let that happen, we as the people of compassion, as some would say, the people of God?’ How could we have just turned aside and not known this?” Over the course of their time spent on these books, the Pub Theologians became closer not only to the suffering of their fellow citizens but also to the ways that they themselves had helped prolong that suffering, if only through their ignorance. In moving from the impersonal “How could this happen?” to “How could we let that happen?” Michael pushes the largely white congregation to make the same shift towards recognizing their own role in that suffering that Pub Theology members did. He invites them to admit out loud that racism and mass incarceration are something they are involved in, which is no small feat in an American culture steeped in colorblind ideologies. 

Although Michael stayed largely within the familiar genre conventions of a typical Prayer of Confession, the group decided to completely forego another recurring genre within the Sunday service, that of the “special offering,” again in hopes of having a specific emotional effect on their audience. This church usually holds a few themed services each year about social issues like hunger or refugees. After learning about a given issue during the service, the money taken up that week is given to a related charity. The charity is usually written about in the bulletin and spoken about from the pulpit, and this action is a way for the people sitting in the pews to participate immediately in helping those affected by that week’s issue. Even though this group had not put on a themed service of their own before, they were familiar enough with the genre to know that it is a common practice and would probably be expected by their audience. The following interaction occurred during a planning meeting, right after Lou simply asked where the special offering money would go, as she assumed they would take up this genre convention:

Michael: One thing quoting Michelle Alexander now, or thinking about her, what we don’t want to do is end, after the service, is get people off the hook.

Tom: Oh for sure.

Pat: Oh God, yes. 

Michael: So I put money in a special offering, done.   

Tom: Right.

Anita: Oh no.

Pat: That’s a good point.

Tom: That’s a good point. No, what we want to do is inspire them to [do more.]

Michael: [They need] to think and suffer like we did.

Pat: And suffer (laughter) like we did.

Michael: I’m serious.

Tom: Because [we did]

Mary: [And struggle] with it

Tom: There were times we did. 

This excerpt again shows their attunement to the emotional experience of the congregation being one of the most important aspects of the service. After a little more conversation, the group decided to eliminate the familiar and comforting action of the special offering. Instead, Jeanne put together (with the help and input of most group members in an email chain) a detailed insert in the bulletin that included a bibliography of books and documentaries, local racial and prison justice organizations to volunteer time with, and upcoming community events to attend. The handout Jeanne compiled also gestures to a richer conception of civic engagement than either just giving money or signing up for regular volunteer hours. While the organizations listed were happy to receive donations or regular volunteers, the group signaled that becoming educated in informal venues and attending community events were just as important in terms of engagement with these issues. It also suggests that the Pub Theologians consider themselves part of a longer-term effort in terms of continuing their own education about these issues rather than considering it finished after making a donation or completing the presentation of their church service.  

The group split the sermon writing responsibilities into three parts, both to give a wider range of representation of voices and to take the pressure off of one person having to be the only preacher. Tom summarized the facts, figures, and arguments of the books, Pat related the specific actions taken by the group as a result of their reading, and Harvey took up the finale of the sermon with a portion titled “What Can We Do.”  Harvey occupied a unique position in the group as its only African-American member and its only member employed in the legal profession, as a public defender and criminal defense attorney. His life experiences, both personal and professional, led him to be completely unsurprised by the information in the books the rest of the group was finding quite shocking. Harvey and his wife Anita told many stories to the Pub Theologians about getting pulled over for “driving while black and white” over the course of their long marriage. Harvey also provided local legal context for many of the issues the group read about, and group members often asked him follow-up questions that applied his legal expertise to what they were reading in the books.

Since Harvey’s experience of the readings was not one of changing his mind so much as adding his personal and professional history to the discussions, he volunteered to compose the part intended to spur the congregation on to action. His sermon portion kicked off with the lines, “What can we do? We need to educate, we need to congregate, and we need to agitate.” Within those three bullet points, Harvey lays out a comprehensive vision for civic engagement around race-related issues that includes becoming more informed and building informal relationships in the community, as well as taking more concrete steps. He tells the congregation that in order to agitate, “We should welcome jury service. We should attend meetings of county boards, city councils. We should demand accountability from those types of organizations. We must be prepared if necessary to run for office ourselves so that our voices and other voices can be heard.” The way the service had been written up to this point had laid the emotional groundwork for Harvey’s concluding calls to action. After equating racism with sin and not allowing for easy emotional resolution through giving money and forgetting about it, Harvey’s concrete suggestions do allow for potential resolution through taking action, whether that action is educational, relational, or expressly political. As Harvey “preached to the choir” here, he provided the congregation a variety of ways for them to get involved in this issue of public concern. Just as the Pub Theologians’ civic engagement with this issue is self-directed and varied, they did not present a one-size-fits all solution to the congregation either. The group’s familiarity with the textual conventions of the Sunday service allowed the group to put this issue into words that the community would understand and connect to, multiplying the reach of this relatively small book club.

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The presumption that preaching to the choir is largely an insular activity does not take into account the unexpected ways that said preaching can leave the pulpit and the pews and take on different forms for different audiences. In this section I will show how two Pub Theology members, Tom and Michael, brought their religious literate activity outside the walls of the church, broadening the scope of their civic engagement in the process. Tom and Michael both reported completing a significant piece of writing in their workplaces that grew out of what they learned over the course of their year reading these texts. While acknowledging Gullette’s point that plenty of older people get pushed out of their workplaces prematurely due to ageism and decline ideology, Tom and Michael use their positions of relative privilege within their fields to bring pieces of what they learned to a completely different audience from their fellow churchgoers. Both men were able to draw upon their years of previous work experience and familiarity with the expected genres in those settings in order to make their co-workers and others in their field aware of some of the concepts and ideas that their religious literate activity provided them.

Tom, a writer of one of the sermon parts and the de facto organizer of the Pub Theology group, wrote a speech about white privilege that he delivered to a large group of his co-workers at an annual conference that brought together employees from various satellite offices of his workplace. He said that as an “old-timer” in his position, he had attended many of these conferences over the years. This year’s conference, though, was the first year that an upper-level administrator had asked him to lead a trust walk, which was intended to get the employees to reflect on implicit bias and white privilege. He said that, “To do that amongst my co-workers, to be the one putting myself out there, was a pretty significant stretch for me.”

As part of his work leading the trust walk, Tom’s boss asked him to write up an introduction to the activity to deliver orally to all of the employees present at the retreat before the activity began. He writes,

I have held the job title of Computer Training Specialist for almost 25 years now. Amazing. But during all that time, I have always maintained that I am not a computer expert, but just an advanced user trying to stay one step ahead of those I am training. Sometimes I have successfully stayed one step ahead. Other times not even close. I stand before you today feeling much the same talking about White Privilege. I am not an expert on this topic, I am not even an advanced user. I am sure many of you in this room have more knowledge on this topic than I. I have done some reading in the past two years that have [sic] caused me to look more openly at situations and people around me that live differently than me. As a white, straight, Christian male, at the top of the food chain I am beginning to better understand the privileges that have been bestowed upon me just because. I have a lot of work to do.

While the full length of Tom’s remarks is about four times what is excerpted here, this introductory paragraph illustrates how he puts the commitments he made at church into discourse appropriate to his workplace. In drawing an analogy between being an “advanced user” in his position as a Computer Training Specialist but not an advanced user when it comes to white privilege, he opens up what might be a foreign or uncomfortable topic by using common professional language that most of the group would be familiar with and understand. While he briefly brings up that he is Christian, he does not directly reference the fact that this reading has been, for him, part of his religious commitment. While this sensitivity to the demands of a professional audience might seem an obvious move, the rhetor with religious commitments is often depicted by the field as being extremely heavy-handed and unable to rearticulate those commitments in different ways depending on the setting (e.g., Crowley). While this might hold true for some religious rhetors, it is worth considering the ways that others utilize different strategies in different settings to achieve similar ends. In Tom’s case, his desired end of his literate activity, educating and persuading people to examine white privilege and its harmful effects, is the same in both the pulpit and at work.

While Tom is quite able to change up the content of his speeches to make them appropriate to each context, he reiterated that “again, after [supervisor] asked me to do that, I knew, I knew that I had to. I just knew I had to. You know, having come out of these book readings and the church service, if I was going to be true to myself and true to what I said, statements I made in church, I knew I had to do this.” Tom makes clear that reading these books and sharing them first with a church audience had made his engagement with the topic both serious and heartfelt, and it also provided him with a sense of urgency for taking action on the topic in other areas of his life. Tom’s experience illustrates that it is not simple to cordon off certain types of literate activity as religious and others as professional and still others as public or civic. In the tangle of practice that is Tom’s life, he learned at church about a public or civic issue that then led to him writing a text that shares those commitments in a professional context. It can be difficult to measure and categorize something like Tom’s speech at a work retreat as civic engagement, but this literate action clearly grows out of a desire to identify and address this issue of public concern.

Michael similarly devoted a significant amount of time and energy to a professional activity based upon what he learned from participating in the Pub Theology reading group. Michael is semi-retired, having transitioned out of working full time at his private therapy practice, but still gives consultations, participates in conferences, and creates short films dealing with the mental health issues of young children. He describes the film that he was inspired to make after reading these books, a film about the effects of having incarcerated parents on the mental health of young children: “This is the sixth in this particular series where I write what I think little kids think and what they would say if they were old enough to talk. I’m representing kids who don’t talk yet or who talk in incoherent ways… I mean the whole idea came out of the Jim Crow book for me.” As with his previous short films, he wrote the entire script himself and then collaborated with others for the voice acting and video editing. Though the idea came out of what he had learned about and committed to in the context of the church group, the final film script also does not highlight religious concerns and is usable by a variety of audiences. Michael has shared film in a community room in the local public library and at far-flung conferences and has been offering it for free on his website. He said that “This is the first one I’ve ever made that I’m offering for free, I feel that strongly about it.”

What emerges from Michael and Tom’s professional experiences after their Pub Theology Sunday service is civic engagement that is both richer and more complex than a one-size-fits-all ethos of volunteerism that has been foisted on older people. While each of their involvements looks quite different, they both utilize their past professional literate activities to bring their newfound (or at least newly reinvigorated) sense of civic engagement into conversations with their colleagues and others in their fields. Tom opens himself up in a new way to his coworkers, allowing them to see him in a different, more vulnerable, light, as an older person who is still actively learning and changing his mind about social justice issues. Michael reported that his film also brought him to a conference that put him in contact with people he would not have met otherwise, perhaps leading to future projects and collaborations. While preaching to the choir can and does rally the faithful, it also has the potential to spill out into the world in surprising, ongoing ways. Tom and Michael’s experiences suggest that when older people are allowed to shape the ways they civically engage according to their interests and proclivities, more spheres are affected than either decline ideology or productive aging ideology allow.