Lost in Inculturation: On the Invisible and Fragmented Body of Christ in Literary Studies at the Present Time

"The turn to religion" describes a recent surge in papers, books, and panels on religion or a religious subject. This marked increase seems to come from three different factors: 1) 9/11 and the post-9/11 climate, which have foregrounded religion's power; 2) prominent literary theorists writing on religion; 3) scholars who have always been interested in this subject but whose work is now more noticeable than before or who are now finding their voice. In this climate, it is particularly important for Christian scholars to be aware that individual critical strategies fall into patterns and that these patterns have histories. Individual Christians often end up making the same intellectual moves as their Christian colleagues, even when they work independently and in ignorance of their peers and predecessors. I have used the trope of "culture" to describe these intellectual patterns, because "culture" conveys more of a totality of being than "pattern." Such totality in intellectual terms includes logic, language, theory, belief, values, frame of reference, bibliography, network, aesthetic taste, and practices (research, publishing, pedagogy). Other possible, but inadequate, terms for "culture" include "methodology" "rhetoric" "theoretical orientation," "discourse community," and "a shared conception of literary studies." American evangelical scholars have had a different intellectual culture than that of other segments in the academy, and this cultural difference is a significant but unexamined factor in Christian dialogue with critical theory. Although members of this culture are concentrated in evangelical Christian colleges, there are American evangelicals in secular institutions who demonstrate the same intellectual traits that I'm calling a "culture." These traits come in combination with Christian belief and are not the beliefs themselves. Because this culture is an intellectual culture, it corresponds to what Wilson Brissett has called the "secular self." American evangelicals, even when working independently, tend to have similar ways of defining and developing their secular selves, which sometimes diverge from the secular selves of non-American-evangelicals (whether non-evangelical-Christian, non-Christian, or non-American). Scholars who think in categories like "Christian scholarship" tend to believe that academic dialogue only involves the encounter between Christian and non-Christian, or religious and secular. However, this contact also involves divergent conceptions of "scholarship" itself, which complicates any religious divide. Since the "scholarship" part is supposed to be the common ground between Christian and non-Christian scholars, these concepts have been rather difficult to explain to American evangelicals, especially those who have been most committed to reading theory. Yet differences in intellectual culture, not anti-Christian bias, may explain why the extensive number of titles like Christian Criticism in the Twentieth Century: Theological Approaches to Literature (Cary 1975), Toward a Christian Poetics (Edwards 1984), Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology (Ingraffia 1999), or Towards a Christian Literary Theory (Ferretter 2003) (2) have been largely invisible--even to those most interested in this subject. Susan Felch has remarked that my use of the trope of culture represents a paradigm shift from the previous generation of American evangelicals, who seemed to conceptualize their presence in the academy in terms of war. Through readings of five Christian responses to postmodern theory, I will attempt to show concretely how intellectual cultures affect the writing and reception of literary criticism. I chose samples from the previous decade because it allows some historical distance for analysis and because a mature effort toward critical dialogue today should be informed by similar efforts of the past. The first two examples come from American evangelicals situated at Christian colleges. …