After thinking about the idea of public-facing scholarship — the idea that the work done in the academy must be for the benefit of the broader public outside the academy — I find myself thinking about the same thing with regard to religion and the way the authors the Press publishes do or do not embody public-facing faith. 

What would it mean to have a public-facing faith? Considering what it means in the world of academic scholarship, I would think it would require the way someone shares their faith and faith-based insight to be for the benefit of those outside the particular religious community.

I’ll pause here for an important aside: many Christians, especially of the evangelical variety, might hear that and think of the idea of “witnessing,” also known as proselytizing. That is not what I mean here by public-facing faith. Despite the fact that writing done in the apologetic mode is indeed targeted toward an external audience, the purpose is still to serve the in-group — precisely because the goal of such writing is to lure and assimilate the external target audience into the in-group. The equivalent of this in public-facing scholarship would be a kind of discourse that invites/coerces people into academia. While there may be limited value in this mode of discourse, it would not be seen as an essential function of academic work; nor should it be in religion.

What I mean by public-facing faith, then, is not only faith-based discourse that speaks to an external audience but also faith-based discourse respects the divide, even while attempting to bridge it rhetorically in pursuit of the communication of truth that is relevant and valuable to both groups.

So the question is: does it happen? At the risk of copping out, I’ll say sort of. Well, maybe, barely. The reality is that, at least within the worlds of Christianity that I’m familiar with, most discourse is by and for Christians.

Market forces are a big factor here. The reality is that religious texts for non-religious people just don’t seem to be in very high demand. It makes sense: Christians accept some key premises that non-Christians don’t, so the writer would be starting in a different place than the reader — making for quite an odd reading experience.

There is one area especially that public-facing faith has started happening, especially just in the past few years: evangelical studies. When the forty-fifth president was elected, it happened largely because of the support of eighty-one percent of white evangelicals. Even though the connection between outwardly religious people and a blustering, incompetent demagogue was bewildering to many, even in spite of recent historical allegiances of white evangelicals to the Republican party. 

Journalistic analysis responded to the demand for understanding to an extent, but no one could respond to the demand as well as those who had emerged from within the evangelical world. The insight of these authors has been as cutting as it is empathetic, because they understand first-hand the allure and danger of white evangelicalism’s alliance with right-wing American political power. The Press has published several of these kinds of books, but the best-known have come from other publishers: books like Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez and White Evangelical Racism by Anthea Butler. 

So, for now at least, those interested in having a public-facing faith have been able to help the nation process its collective trauma endured since 2016 (or, arguably, earlier). Are there other contributions a public-facing faith can make? One such attempt is being made by those who find essential connections between the Christian tradition and social justice movements. Those doing so find encouragement and legitimacy in the historical link between Christianity and abolitionism, for example. (Of course, in doing so, they have to contend with the contradictory historical link between Christianity and slavery.)

My overarching question is whether public-facing faith can provide anything into social justice discourse that isn’t already available from other sources — especially the lived experience of those at the receiving end of injustice (although of course there is a great deal of crossover here for Christians in marginalized groups — take, for example, Reading While Black by Esau McCaulley). 

I’m skeptical about the growth potential of public-facing faith, but I do think the attempt itself is valuable in making our world a less insular place, where people of different groups actually engage one another in dialogue.