Abstract
In 2012, Chris Stedman, then the Humanist chaplain at Harvard University, published the memoir Faitheist. Stedman (2012) argues that nonreligious people ought to join with people of faith in working toward social justice in the world rather than taking antagonistic positions on religion in the vein of so-called New Atheism. To build his argument, Stedman reflects on his own upbringing in a passively nonreligious family, his teenage conversion to evangelical Christianity, his discovery of his own queer identity, his subsequent acrimonious rejection of religion, and his eventual shift to a less militant atheism that sought commonality with persons of faith. Drawing on scholarship about the role of civility in public discourse and the study of narrative genres, this essay builds the case that Stedman’s narrative includes a number of conversion stories, as well as a coming out story (which shares many features of the conversion narrative genre). The generic (that is, related to genre) patterns that emerge in these various stories cohere to help Stedman make a case for the radical potential of (non)religious civility—amid differences—by finding common ground in shared values.
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