Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism.

• Author: Krueger, Ben
• Position: Book review

Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism. By Sharon Crowley. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006; 256 pp. $25.95 paper.

Sharon Crowley's Toward A Civil Discourse joins a chorus of recent books attempting to analyze the stalemated climate that has characterized American politics during the first decade of the twenty-first century. While Bernard Brock, James F. Klumpp, Mark E. Huglen, and Sharon Howell (2005) blame the stalemate on a proliferation of nonideological discourse, Crowley sees the stalemate as a battle between competing hegemonic discourses of liberalism and fundamentalism. Sweeping in scope, Toward a Civil Discourse offers an insightful overview of the religious landscape surrounding contemporary American politics and offers a postmodern theoretical framework for changing rhetorical praxis.

Toward a Civil Discourse rests on the central assumption that contemporary American political discourse is dominated by the discourses of liberalism and fundamentalism. Liberalism emphasizes rational thought rooted in an Enlightenment ideal while fundamentalism emphasizes emotionalism rooted in a Biblical reality. Both discourses fail to understand the assumptions made by the other side and grow subsequently frustrated with their inability to persuade non-adherents. The United States has grown divided, Crowley claims, because "these two discourses paint very different pictures of America and of its citizens' responsibilities toward their country" (p. 3). In this view, liberalism celebrates individuality, rational thought, and emphasizes facts in argument, while fundamentalism roots itself in faith and Biblical inerrancy based in what Crowley terms "passionate commitment." Crowley's description of the rhetorical structures underpinning rational reason and more emotionallypinned "ideologics" (p. 59) will be of particular interest to argumentation scholars concerned about the quality of deliberation in the contemporary public sphere.

In chapters one, two, and three, Crowley sketches the political fault lines between liberalism and fundamentalism in the current political climate before introducing rhetorical argumentation as a possible theoretical solution. Rhetoric, she posits in chapter one, provides vocabulary attuned to difference between liberalism and fundamentalism: "Since antiquity rhetorical theorists have understood the centrality of desires and values to the maintenance of beliefs" (p. 4). Crowley further...