Scripture as External Authority

In these schools (and in many other communities) scripture is understood and experienced as an “external authority,” itself making claims and commanding action, even if that authority was understood as that of an “agent of God” rather than a final, ultimate authority. There was a key difference in how the Qur’an and Bible were approached both individually and collectively, with the Qur’an understood as a slightly more difficult text that required more expert interpretation and the Bible understood as democratically available and hermeneutically clear. Scripture gains its authority in a few ways. First, it functions as a powerful boundary from other communities. Second, it is understood and described as an autonomous agent that acts in people’s lives. Third, scripture maintains its power through its role as a practice in people’s day-to-day experience of relating to the text, especially reading and memorizing.

It’s Dangerous Out There

The author lists the book’s key contributions. First, he shows how the distinction between “essential” and “accidental” helps to clarify our understanding of boundaries. He then builds upon practice theory to show how practices matter in the sociology of religion and sociology of culture in three ways: to show how “orthodox” religions are just as practiced as “orthoprax” ones, to show how boundaries are also practiced, and to show how practices help to maintain “external authorities.” External authorities are similar to institutions, except they are experienced as agentic and authoritative, therefore helping to solve “the problem of power” by offloading coercion to something like “the Bible” or “Science” instead of a specific individual making a command. The chapter ends with a description of worries about what students would become after they left the schools, with community members emphasizing the need to ground students’ identities in boundaries and external authorities.

Science as External Authority

All four schools denied the theory of evolution, distinguishing between neutral and praiseworthy “science” and atheist scientists who “preached” evolution. People in the schools liked science itself, and understood it as a kind of actor, authorizing certain practices and forms of knowledge. Unlike scripture and prayer, science was an authority largely shared with the secular world, and it gained its power through a more complex network of authorizing practices and arguments, seen most clearly in the roles of teachers and tests created by secular entities. To hold to creationist science was to situate oneself within this network of various kinds of scientific claims and authorities, attempting to leverage certain authorities against others. Perhaps ironically, it was in disagreeing with the scientific theory of evolution that science—or what they thought of as science—became most obviously an agent capable of action in the world.

Politics and Public Schools

Chapter 2 examines how the four schools distinguished themselves from public schools, a distinction that helped them establish what was essential (or fundamental to their identity) about their own communities and their politics. The chapter also establishes some of the debates about what was “accidental” (or not fundamental to their identity) in the schools. It then turns to how the schools engaged broader questions of politics, especially how both conservative Protestants and Muslims felt excluded by the United States, with Protestants feeling the rest of the nation had forgotten America’s “Christian identity” and Muslims feeling a mix of hope and discouragement that they might be accepted as just another American religion. In discussions of both public schools and politics, community members described essential differences between themselves and the rest of the world, and they expressed frustrations that outsiders disagreed with them about which differences were essential and which were accidental.

Differently Differentiating Gender

Both the Christian and Muslim schools emphasize their boundary from the outside world through their performance of gender. For the Muslim schools, the difference was rooted in actual physical activity, especially how males and females separated from each other, while for the Christian schools, the difference was rooted primarily in what people—especially women—said about their actions. Evangelicals’ history of proclamation means their boundaries take on a different character, formed by opposition to ideas as itself a key practice, over and above the more explicitly bodily practices of gender and sexuality. In contrast, there is more interpretive flexibility for Muslims about gender-related practices. The hijab and gender separation can serve an important double function: they can simultaneously allow patriarchs to believe they are maintaining male dominance while allowing others to believe Muslim women are maintaining these practices for entirely different reasons.

Authority and Essence

The first chapter outlines the book’s central theoretical questions and contributions, emphasizing the importance of boundaries and authorities. These boundaries—politics, gender, sex, and the Internet—help to establish the distinctions from the outside world that ground each school’s identity. That identity is then experienced as real through certain practices, and those practices are maintained via certain “external authorities,” especially scripture, prayer, and science. These external authorities are at once practices themselves and the institutionalization (what some might call reification) of these practices, things that people do (read the Bible, pray, invoke science) but at the same time, things that seem to exist above and beyond any individual person, and seemingly with the ability to act on people themselves. The chapter ends by describing the four high schools—two Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Protestant—where the author conducted fieldwork.

Prayer as External Authority

Prayer is experienced in these schools as an “external authority” that acts in people’s lives and works as an “agent” between individuals and God. Prayer’s authority is maintained and made to feel natural and obvious through the maintenance of key boundaries and the continuation of key practices. This chapter begins with a historical overview and then describes boundaries, going over how prayer is experienced as agentic and authoritative and describing how people improve at the performance and interpretation of prayer in ways that help prayer maintain its authority. In the Muslim schools, prayer is a more complex process requiring explicit instruction, especially the memorization of key phrases for du’a and the various physical actions and recitations involved in salah. In the Christian schools, prayer was often framed as a “relationship,” so even if there were specific rituals associated with the act, these were de-emphasized so as not to make the action appear formulaic.

Sex and the Internet

The Internet was widely understood as a good thing at these schools, yet it also had risks: pornography, unsupervised access to the opposite sex, and a tendency to coarsen discourse and interactions. Maybe the greatest risk was also the most existential: what if the Internet led children away from the faith? The Internet and sex were often discussed together at these schools, and so this chapter also highlights how discussions of sexuality at all four schools emphasized the importance of virginity and minimized the possibility of same-sex attractions except as temptations from a fallen world. Students were divided about how they could best engage questions of fairness to LGBTQ people, and at least one bisexual student at Good Tree shared her struggles with the author, saying she wanted to avoid the temptation of a gay relationship, but she believed people with attractions like hers should be more welcomed and understood.