Essay Writing + Faith

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(Written by Julie Bogart, Brave Writer 2005)

Just about all of my students are homeschooled and the vast majority are Christians. While I’ve taught kids from other religious backgrounds, Christian kids bring a perspective to essay writing that is unique to them.

The following discussion is aimed at kids who take their faith seriously and want to know what place it has in the academic world.

Expository vs Apologetics

There is a difference between expository essay writing and the discipline called “apologetics.”

One of the ways Christian students get into trouble in college (especially garden variety secular institutions) is that they’ve been trained to think “apologetically” about issues of faith.

They’ve grown up defending their beliefs against criticism with the goal of converting someone else or at the least, defending the truth claims that they hold dear.

Apologetics starts with a convinced position.

The apologist gathers support for his viewpoint and refutes challenges. Though this sounds similar to essay writing, the chief difference is that the apologist is defending a faith-based point of view against perceived attack. He is not exploring an issue or topic for the sake of defining nuances within it.

Most college essays are not specifically about whether or not Jesus’ resurrection is defensible scientifically. You most likely won’t write about whether or not the New Testament represents God’s best communication to man. In college, your subject matter will likely be related to the specific courses you take, such as psychology, history, politics, sociology, theater, literature, and so on.

Christian college students in secular universities sometimes confuse writing about issues of current interest with defending religious faith.

For instance, people of similar faith may disagree honestly about abortion, the death penalty, the role of religion in public schools and so on. To write an essay about any of these topics does not require one to defend the whole of Christian doctrine. Nor does a challenge to a point made about why abortion is wrong equal a challenge to the Christian faith as a whole.

• Apologetics is a tool designed to help Christians defend their religious faith against spurious challenge.

• Expository writing in an academic setting is about investigating evidence for a variety of positions, then siding with a perspective and commenting on it in a meaningful way.

College Expectations

So while your faith may be the key reason you oppose abortion, your college professor is asking you to cite reasons for that position that aren’t necessarily tied to your faith since the reader may or may not share your spiritual convictions.

In other words, if you resort to using the Bible or doctrine as the primary reasons for the positions you take in your college classes, you will probably get poor marks, not because you are being persecuted, but because you were asked to write an essay, not an apologetic for religious beliefs.

So the question arises, can I use my religious beliefs as support for my positions? In other words, is it okay for me to say that the Bible is in favor of the death penalty as a way to support my thesis that the death penalty is a justifiable use of force in the hands of the government?

Let’s look more closely at what constitutes adequate support in academic writing.

• Expository writing depends on making the best case for your points that you can. The best case is one that the broadest group of readers will find compelling and persuasive.

• Religious belief presupposes a measure of faith in ideas and convictions that can’t be proven and aren’t shared by everyone.

Even if you feel you can prove that the Bible is infallibly God’s word, to use that point as a way to support an argument means that you first have to convince your readers of the Bible’s authority to speak for God before you can then use that doctrine as support for the argument you are making. In almost every case, you will sidetrack your paper beyond what is reasonable if you go down that path.

So we must start with what to do if everyone doesn’t agree that the Bible is the Word of God.

Source of Authority

If the Bible (or the Torah or Qur’an) isn’t authoritative in a person’s life, appealing to it as a source of authority will have no effect on the reader.

There is no shame in this. You are not in the business of defending God when writing a paper. You are seeking to persuade readers to a particular, narrow perspective.

Since that is the mode you are in, you must evaluate arguments on their merits to persuade readers, not on whether they are the most convincing to you.

When writing about abortion, the goal isn’t to defend a Christian perspective of abortion (using the Bible or historical Christian practice or theological development as your source of authority). It’s not enough to say that God is against murder. The goal is to explain to the broadest range of readers why abortion is wrong.

That usually means that you won’t be using your doctrinal beliefs in your essays.

It would be better to write about abortion appealing to the science behind the development of the fetus. Then you could argue for why the fetus deserves the same rights as newborn babies using accepted medical practices that relate to when life begins and ends.

If you use the Bible and your personal convictions as the primary support, the only people who will be persuaded to your view are those who already share the same set of beliefs.

If you are writing for a Christian audience, then these supports will work beautifully. If, however, you are writing for a general audience (which is what most academic writing presupposes), you will not be able to use your beliefs as adequate support.

It can be difficult to accept that your religious convictions aren’t adequate support when arguing for a position. Some students feel that this is evidence of the marginalization of Christian faith. Let me make an appeal to you that may help you understand this position better.

Switch Stance

To get a feel for why religious beliefs aren’t adequate support for personal convictions in essay writing, turn it around. Replace your beliefs with the beliefs of another faith in the same paragraph and see how it hits you.

For instance, if a writer said that according to Allah and the Qur’an, animals ought to be allowed to live out their natural life spans and never be put to sleep due to injury or sickness, would this persuade you?

It’s what Muslims believe God commands. This argument (the appeal to the Qur’an) would persuade fellow Muslims, more likely. But for readers of other faiths, they simply dismiss the paragraph as irrelevant information.

Christians do not share the writer’s conviction that the Qur’an is authoritative so they are not persuaded by it.

There is a place for religious conviction and the Bible (or religious text of your choice) when writing. You can make a point and then show that your religious tradition or community also supports that point based on its religious beliefs. At this level, the faith statements become an affirmation of the point you’ve already made. They aren’t a substitute for making the point, however.

Let’s take the abortion debate again.

After offering scientific evidence that the fetus is a fully alive being in utero, a writer could underscore the need to value life by showing that people of several religious traditions believe abortion to be murder. Or the writer could show a personal viewpoint saying that her Christian convictions reinforce the value of that life by seeing abortion as murder.

In these instances, the religious belief is an affirmation of the original point, not the point itself.

Exceptions

There is one notable exception to this rule (to keep religious faith out of the main points of an argument).

If you are writing an essay that is about a specific set of beliefs (or a specific belief), then using religious terminology or citing references from the sacred text is appropriate.

For example, I wrote an essay in college about missionaries to East Africa in the early 1900s. I used biblical passages and theological arguments to make the case that Christians were motivated to be missionaries because of their spiritual convictions, not due to the lure of capitalism and imperialism.

I didn’t use the Bible to persuade the teacher (reader) to become a missionary. I used it to support my assertion that missionaries were motivated to work in Africa because they sought to obey biblical texts, not because of cultural imperialism. See the subtle distinction?

This is a difficult concept to grasp when you’ve spent your whole life learning the values and beliefs of a specific religion. The temptation is to assume that the unbelieving reader is showing prejudice against the believer by judging the doctrinal arguments.

The truth is, most professors or teachers are simply requiring you to work a little harder to make your case. Their challenges to your position aren’t attacks on your faith. They are calling on you to make a case that applies to a wider audience.

Learning how to use your beliefs in your writing is one big step toward being an effective communicator.

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