Introduction

The questions of how religious, especially evangelical Christian, undergraduates engage in academic writing and how best to teach them to participate in academic inquiry and prepare them for civic engagement have been widely discussed in the fields of rhetoric and writing studies. This chapter introduces an empirical study that combined qualitative interviews with ten evangelical undergraduates at a public university and document analysis of over 200 samples of their writing for college. This study yielded surprising findings, uncovering the presence of evangelical student writers who had already assimilated the values and norms of a secular imaginary and whose academic writing largely operates within the immanent frame.