Lula Pace (1868–1925), a Texas Baptist science professor, ultimately weathered an antievolution campaign that roiled her denomination. Responding to this controversy, Pace engaged in demarcation (that is, discursive boundary-work) regarding the relationship of science and religion. Pace employed ethos strategies that blended the scientist’s supposedly gender-neutral expertise, the engaged educator’s concern for students, and the sincere Christian’s exercise of those individual freedoms privileged in Baptist tradition. This blended ethos highlights how scientific expertise and religious identity may serve as resources for developing a personal rhetoric to negotiate diverse community values and how ethos strategies depend upon demarcation.

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This article examines the ways evangelical rhetors Rachael Denhollander and Beth Moore engage in enclave deliberation regarding their community’s responses to sexual violence. Their contextual theological analysis proceeds through “casuistic tightening,” an inventive repurposing of casuistic stretching. Examining Denhollander’s and Moore’s rhetorical activity as a repurposing of casuistic practice helps explain how they productively revise theological abstractions—platitudes about forgiveness—that stymie robust deliberation, thus facilitating enclave deliberation. They confront the theological problem of an implicit-yet-operational antinomianism toward sexual violence, a problem that creates rhetorical difficulties: distinguishing sexual violence from sexual immorality generally and differentiating divine grace from human forgiveness in instances of assault. Negotiating this difficulty, Denhollander and Moore critique forgiveness as instant forgetting and magical healing, and they argue for a reinvigorated understanding of forgiveness.

In this essay, I develop a pedagogical stance called the “free exercise of rhetoric” as a way to approach teaching and student writing at the intersection of LGBT and religious discourses. Through this stance, I work with students’ personal commitments and build their rhetorical competence using a process that involves encountering uncommon arguments, valuing misreading, and embracing unpredictability. I suggest the free exercise of rhetoric as a pedagogical option for taking religion seriously as a topic and identity in writing classrooms, but one that does not start from students’ personal experience with religion.