Carson (marginal)

In chapter 4, I located Carson in the inbound group of participants based on the rhetorical moves he used in his testimony narrative; he included Moves 1 (personal

background), 3 (reflection on prior ignorance), 4 (personal appropriation), and 5 (change in behavior or attitude). Yet Carson’s testimony, though it contained four of the five moves discussed in chapter 5, did not exactly follow the same time elements as the other

participants’ testimonies. Moreover, the manner in which Carson participated in the subsequent interviews and the lack of Christianese elements in his speech encouraged my relocation of Carson to the non-participatory marginal group in the IWU community of practice.

Carson attended a Christian school for the entirety of his education prior to studying at IWU, but he contrasted his experience with classmates in his Christian high school and students at IWU with amazement:

“The students, the kids, my friends, we never talked about [God]. We never talked about reading the Bible or doing any of that / … All the friends I’m making [at IWU] are all willing to talk about it, all want to talk about it…” (Carson, #1, lines 52 & 64) And that intrigued him to the point where he decided to start reading the Bible.

In the first interview, Carson mentioned an identity shift from being an introvert in high school to being an extrovert at IWU and seemed to connect this to his recent interest in his faith. At the small Christian schools he had attended, “I knew everybody, everybody knew me, and you’re kind of locked into this idea of ‘you’re this person’ and you can’t change” (#1, line 26). He further stated, “And I guess here, it was like, ‘Oh, I can be that

person,’…it got to that point here in which I just became an extrovert in college” (#1, line 30, emphasis in original). He also noted, “Every person I’ve ever met here has always been willing to talk about anything – spiritual or [not]” (#1, line 166). And this seemed to encourage him to get involved in various activities, such as unit devotionals (#1, line 198), hanging out at Steak ‘n’ Shake (#1, line 210), and dinner with their sister hall (#1, line 222).

As I discussed in chapter 5, Carson mentioned God a total of nine times during the first interview: he gave God agency once and kept personal agency in the other eight instances. The activated reference to God came in the context of his retelling of an event at the beginning of the academic year. In this account, his activated God reference came from his hall chaplain, not his own sense of God actively working in the situation. Moreover, throughout the remaining interviews, he was often reticent to talk – offering brief answers to my questions and many “I don’t know” and “probably” responses.

Carson referred to God only in his first interview; the remaining three interviews had zero references to God. When examined more closely, though, he distanced himself from God in each of the God references in the first interview. Five of the nine references passivated God as a topic of conversation between a friend and him. When he relayed his testimony narrative, he passivated God in terms of His presence, saying, “I grew up hearing all the stories about how you feel God’s presence” (#1, line 16), but added that he had never felt that until his first day at IWU. Two of the references passivated God when he talked about how his RA and RD prayed to God for him at the beginning of the academic year. In this same narrative about the prayer, he activated God in terms of seeing into his darkest parts (or sin, though he did not use that term): “We were supposed to write the deepest, darkest things that we don’t want to look at, we don’t want God to look at, we don’t want anyone else to see” (#1, line 337). Then they symbolically tore up the paper and had one of the resident staff pray for them. Carson appeared to have a significant spiritual start to his first

year, but with no other references to God in the remaining interviews, it is difficult to

ascertain if this spiritual awakening went further for him. In his use of language, he remained on the margins of the IWU community.

Despite Carson’s lack of God references in the remaining interviews, he provided some insight regarding the connection between language, faith, and practices. In the second interview, the conversation shifted to how students open up to each other about their faith. Carson commented how there are some “people who seem to be really good at [talking about their spiritual life with others]” (#2, line 192). When I prompted for further explanation, he hinted at practices that recall the Wheaton College students’ construction of the “perfect standard” (Cumings, Haworth, & O’Neill, 2001) when he added, “They just do all this stuff that I don’t do./…Read the Bible all the time. They know all these verses. They know to talk about all this stuff, and it’s easy for them” (#2, lines 196 & 198, emphasis in original). Carson implied that these practices came easily to these students, possibly naturally, and this made him “want to do it, too” (#2, line 202). Shortly after this, I asked him to tell me about a significant experience from his first semester at IWU, and he mentioned his conversion that occurred during New Student Orientation but did not want to explain it again: “I’m pretty sure I talked about this the first time” (#2, line 276), referencing the first interview. Yet the second interview ended within two minutes of that statement even though he also asserted, “I just like talking to people” (#2, line 290). His reticence to speak about his significant

conversion experience that had occurred just two months prior to the second interview, along with no further God references after the first interview, revealed his lack of participation in the linguistic practices of the community. In the third and fourth interviews, he mentioned attending unit devos, the spiritual gatherings in residence halls where students pray or study the Bible together, but he did not connect these with other areas of his life as many of the other participants did in their interviews. Thus, he acknowledged the importance of one’s

personal conversion to the community of practice, as well as one of the common phrases used to describe spiritual gatherings in the dormitories, but he demonstrated a lack of commitment to further practices.

Regarding metaphor usage, Carson again demonstrated his trajectory of looking outward from the community. He used a total of five metaphors in the four interviews. Two occurred in the first interview, and three occurred in the third interview. Yet four of these metaphor uses veered away from the typical usage by other participants. When he talked about his visit to IWU, he said, “Everyone I saw really just had a happy glow…they always looked like they were enjoying whatever they were doing” (#1, line 108). Here he used a light metaphor to illustrate the friendly nature of the IWU community, while other light metaphors generally referred to God in some way. Additionally, he employed the atmosphere metaphor bubble to refer to possible areas of interest: “[Graphic design] is something I’m looking into. It’s in the bubble” (#3, line 224) and “It’s in my bubble of things I’m kind of interested in” (#3, line 260). He used this metaphor three times, which

demonstrates his awareness of the bubble metaphor; however, he did not apply it in the usual manner of indicating atmosphere within this community.

The last metaphor Carson used was from the agriculture domain when he described how a friend at another university became an accountability partner for him via texting. He said, “It was coming to this school, and I said I felt like I was growing spiritually” (#1, line 302). As I mentioned in chapter 6 (section 6.2), I had asked each participant in the first interview if they were actively working on their spiritual growth. He did not use any

agriculture metaphors immediately in response to that question; he used growing about two minutes later in the interview when I had asked about his involvement in any small group or accountability group for his renewed interest in reading the Bible. Moreover, after this first

interview, Carson failed to include any metaphors typical to the IWU community of practice, again demonstrating his outward trajectory from the community.

Despite some evidence of awareness of linguistic practices at IWU, Carson remained difficult to interview over the year as he repeatedly demonstrated reticence to engage with my questions. Despite his decision to stay at IWU (#4, line 202), his demeanor, attitude, and responses throughout the series of interviews portrayed a conflicting perspective. He

established his marginal identity of non-participation in the IWU community of practice by acknowledging awareness of certain behaviors (like prayer and Bible study) and some of the linguistic resources (like testimony and metaphors) but ultimately choosing not to draw from these resources. It was no surprise when I bumped into him on campus at the end of his second year, and after some small talk, he explained his decision to leave IWU and train in a new career outside of academia.