Dr. Bethany Mannon’s new book, ‘I Grew Up in the Church’: American Evangelical Women Tell Their Stories, centers personal narratives that women wrote between 2008 and 2018 to bring about change within the evangelical movement. Dr. Mannon chose to focus on this particular period of time due to the decline in white evangelicals as a portion of the American population, and the concern of leaders within the movement about this decline. Rather than focusing on these leaders, Dr. Mannon was interested in how evangelical women responded to this decline through memoirs, social media, podcasts and blogs. Inspired by a number of tweets in 2016 from women tellings their stories of sexual assault and harassment, Dr. Mannon began her seven-year process of research and writing.
As a result of her book, Dr. Mannon was invited to write a guest post for a theology and religious history blog. As part of her writing journey, Dr. Mannon feels that she learned that rhetoric can’t just stop at describing and theorizing what happens in a text, but rhetoric scholars should also pay attention to the effect that it has on the people who are reading.
While Dr. Mannon was interested in the rhetorical aspects of a variety of evangelical women’s personal narratives, she struggled with the best way to write about very conservative evangelicals. However, she found this part of the process most rewarding too. Many of the other writers which Dr. Mannon included in her book are people she admired, although tried to include more than just the positives of those writers. As part of her writing, Dr. Mannon wanted to pay close attention to the voices of the women she wrote about without forcing those voices to simply meld into her argument.
‘I Grew Up in the Church’ begins by defining evangelical rhetoric through history and studying genres that are typical and meaningful within the movement. One chapter of the book is about Rachel Held Evans, an ex-evangelical writer. Other chapters focus on progressive writers and those women who wrote from their position as leaders. After writing the bulk of the book, Dr. Mannon’s editors suggested she write an epilogue, due to the amount of change that had happened in only the years since 2018. For most of the drafting stages, Dr. Mannon tried to write every day, sending a chapter of the book out to journals to gauge interest, while at other times, she took a break as editors reviewed what she had already written.
As a result of her book, Dr. Mannon was invited to write a guest post for a theology and religious history blog. As part of her writing journey, Dr. Mannon feels that she learned that rhetoric can’t just stop at describing and theorizing what happens in a text, but rhetoric scholars should also pay attention to the effect that it has on the people who are reading. Dr. Mannon’s next book project, The Rhetorical Grace of Rachel Held Evans, seeks to explore some of these effects through studying the influence of one particular evangelical woman. As part of this project, Dr. Mannon is interviewing some of Evans’ contemporaries and using rhetorical theory to analyze her texts. Dr. Mannon is also in the process of co-editing a collection of essays on rhetoric of the religious left, leaving readers much more to look forward to.
Written by: Grace Buckner
Dr. Bethany Mannon smiles and stands in from of a brick wall.
Bethany Mannon