We seek here, consequently, to make explicit the reading practices that help us to become more wise or prudent (terms we will use interchangeably) and, as a result, less hostile. Saint Thomas Aquinas defines prudence as “good counsel about matters regarding man’s entire life and the end of human life.”27 Because prudence is having wisdom about both everyday decisions and the meaning of life itself, it is a virtue that speaks directly to our knowledge of worldviews, the ways we internalize them, and how such knowledge affects our habits and lifestyle. Pieper draws attention to the manner in which prudence is both internal and action-focused when he describes it as “the circumspect and resolute shaping power of our minds which transforms knowledge of reality into realization of the good.” It is both “the filter of deliberation” and “the brave boldness to make final decisions.”28 James K. A. Smith accordingly encourages our development of wisdom when he instructs his readers to analyze worldviews by determining their telos. He argues, “We should be discerning to what ends all sorts of cultural institutions are seeking to direct our love. In short, we will only adequately ‘read’ our culture to the extent that we recognize operative there an array of liturgies that function as pedagogies of desire.”29 We need prudence, therefore, in order to “read” charitably and properly the telos at which certain liturgies are aimed, and reading books gives us the opportunity to develop this virtue.

  Much of the worldview criticism we have encountered aspires toward wisdom by championing a righteous vision of life, but in its rigid categorization of righteous versus unrighteous, this approach misses the mark of prudence. For example, Leland Ryken’s desire to elevate “truth” rather than lies, and “good” rather than “bad behavior,” resonates with theological descriptions of wisdom.30 Nevertheless, Ryken’s reductive categories tend to flatten out the complexity of a text and valorize the reader’s rash dismissal of a text and worldview as wrong or defective. This kind of harsh judgment of a text (and by extension, a person, community, or idea) ultimately celebrates and condones hostility. It is not prudence at all but what theologians call “false prudence,” which we defined earlier in this chapter. W. Jay Wood writes that “false prudence directs us to inappropriate appetites, desires, cares, concerns, loves.”31 Pieper refers to “cunning” as false prudence, which is “the insidious and unobjective temperament of the intriguer who has regard only for ‘tactics,’ who can neither face things squarely nor act straightforwardly.”32 Further, Pieper, in the passage about “immoderate straining” quoted above, likens false prudence to covetousness.33 Although aspiring to wisdom, much of evangelical worldview criticism is often false prudence, with its intolerance for difference and narrow definitions of human flourishing. This lens for interpreting texts does not cultivate wisdom but instead hones our expertise in tactics that are hostile to difference, that demand adherence to a certain exclusive set of ideas and principles.

  On the other hand, when we learn to read prudently, we are formed not according to false prudence or critique but according to virtue. In contrast to the false prudence that cultivates our suspicion and fear and seeks recognition of the superiority of our ideas, Pieper argues that “the virtue of prudence is dependent upon the constant readiness to ignore the self.”34 Prudence “necessitates that the egocentric ‘interests’ of man be silenced in order that he may perceive the truth of real things.”35 Whereas much of worldview criticism is competitive and strives to eradicate or delegitimize opposing views, we seek a method for interpreting worldviews that is prudent—that helps us to “ignore the self”: to eschew our egocentric interests and “perceive the truth of real things.” One cannot become prudent by reading in order to dominate or refute ideas and people that appear to be a threat.36 Overt focus on the self and on the different ways a text is offensive prevents one from perceiving reality.

  When we approach worldviews with prudence, then, we find that we can learn to love our neighbors—rather than to be afraid of them—and to respond charitably to difference. The prudent reader, consequently, is the person who reads deeply and widely with the intent to learn and understand, or, as Pieper writes, to “perceive the truth of real things.” The prudent reader is one who not only reads widely (what we will call “promiscuous reading” in the sections below) but who also can forget oneself and enter into the experiences of others in order to learn from them, becoming a more empathetic, charitable person. Finally, reading prudently means being able to distinguish between a text’s presentation of cultural mores and universal notions of good and evil. Whereas a rash, imprudent reader will consider cultural differences an occasion for harsh judgment, a wise reader will distinguish between cultural mores and presentations of evil. These three features of becoming a wise reader—reading promiscuously, forgetting the self, and distinguishing between cultural mores and presentations of good and evil—will inform the practices we put forth in the sections below.

  Promiscuous Reading

  Reading widely, or promiscuously, subverts two practices of hostility that are common in both Western culture and among Christians: book banning and censorship. Becoming a promiscuous reader in any age is difficult; it requires the ability to recognize culture wars and commit oneself to reading widely in spite of pressures to remain in the echo chamber of one’s own perspective and biases. Evangelical Christians may have a particular difficulty with reading promiscuously, as our cultural mores—such as worldview criticism—often teach us to maintain a defensive stance toward people and ideas that are considered our enemy. As a result, we are known for listening to uncharitable summaries of works that threaten our worldviews and forming impulsive, often damning, conclusions about them. We are known for seeking to censor or ban books or ideas about which we know very little. We are, consequently, often imprudent in our judgment, conclusions, and actions regarding ideologies with which we disagree or by which we feel threatened.

  Avoiding such imprudent hostility requires that we resist the temptation to smother or ignore unfamiliar worldviews or those with which we disagree. As we stated in chapter 3, two recent topics of culture wars that teachers have encountered are evolutionary theory and critical race theory. In the last few years, many books being banned from schools are those that focus on issues of race and of sexuality, particularly LGBTQ+ issues. In ten years, another hot-button issue will likely exist that we have not yet anticipated. Both now and in the foreseeable future, parents, board members, and the like are prone to investigate the reading lists and curricula of instructors who are accused of teaching ideas that resonate with controversial content. Whereas the censorship impulse exists in every community, we are particularly concerned with these impulses among Christians. In his research on censorship and free expression, Gordon S. Jackson states, “Far from seeking to advance and protect free speech, Christians are far more likely to generate attention for doing exactly the opposite: seeking to have a particular book banned in school or slamming a government-funded art exhibit with a sexual theme.”37 Jackson writes out of a desire to correct Christians’ tendencies to act as hostile censors or book banners when he argues that “free expression” is “foundational to the ideal community God wants us to be striving towards” and that “Christians should be among those who most vigorously champion freedom in our churches, our local communities and our society as a whole.”38 We agree with Jackson that free expression is a facet of the Christian life. Moreover, a commitment to free expression, when applied to the intellectual life, leads to the virtuous practice of promiscuous reading, a practice that promises to help us grow in wisdom and charity.

  The term “promiscuous reading” comes from the seventeenth-century writer and politician John Milton, who is best known for his epic Paradise Lost. In 1644, Milton published a political tract, Areopagitica, that argued against a censorship policy implemented by the British government in relation to the printing press. Milton argues “for the liberty of unlicensed printing” out of his belief that our exposure to both truth and lies develops our ability to judge rightly and to identify both truth and falsehood. He writes, “The knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth,” that “we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity . . . by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason.”39 He concludes that “this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.”40 Milton’s argument for promiscuous reading has become a cherished guide for educators and readers in the last several centuries, including Prior, who attests to the positive outcomes of this practice. In her reading memoir, she notes, “Many of the books I read in my youth filled my head with silly notions and downright lies that I mistook for truth, but only until I read something else that exposed the lie for what it was.”41 Megan Phelps-Roper is another writer and reader who recently attested to the liberating power of promiscuous reading. After making a decision to leave her family and the infamous Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka (the one known for picketing, among other things, the funerals of soldiers and the businesses of LGBTQ+ people), Phelps-Roper checked into an AirBnb with her sister, and several boxes of books, for the sole purpose of setting aside time to read. She writes, “I couldn’t think of a more suitable use of our newfound freedom: trying to see the world from the perspectives of others.”42 Prior makes a Miltonic argument when she asserts, “It seems to me to be an entirely negative, not to mention ineffective, strategy to shield children from reality rather than actively expose them to the sort of truth that emerges organically from the give-and-take of weighing and reckoning competing ideas against one another. Discovering truth is a process that occurs over time, more fully with each idea or book that gets added to the equation.”43 Readers of Milton, then, have for centuries emphasized the discovery of truth in promiscuous reading, a practice we argue here is connected to the acquisition of wisdom.

  The hostility we see embedded in Christians’ tendencies to ban, censor, and otherwise malign books and ideas might be subverted if we recognized and corrected our imprudence and alternatively committed to growing in wisdom through promiscuous reading. It is imprudent to approach ideological texts (and ideology in general) with fear, suspicion, and defensiveness. If Milton is right that truth will not only endure but will cast a shadow over falsehood, we need not catastrophize the existence of lies, disturbing though they may be. It is also imprudent to allow ourselves to be influenced by the hysteria that crops up in our communities when books and ideas appear that challenge values integral to our beliefs and lifestyle. Although we the authors are not advocating for the blind acceptance or embrace of new books and ideas, we see great damage done to our communities when Christians conspicuously join slanderous censorship campaigns, often at the directives of attention-seeking talking heads who benefit financially from creating drama and pitting disparate groups against one another. We advise against the following three hostile practices that are at odds with promiscuous reading and the development of wisdom: (1) hearing about controversial texts in conversation or reading summaries of them and forming loud, damning, and definitive judgments from cursory contact with them; (2) assuming that controversial books that challenge our beliefs have no value or have nothing to teach us; and (3) seeking to censor or ban controversial books or ideas without slow and thorough deliberation conducted by a diverse group of people.

  To subvert these practices of hostility that we see repeatedly in our Christian communities, a commitment to promiscuous reading helps us develop prudence—ultimately giving us wisdom to guide our decisions and actions in the real world. Promiscuous reading means sitting down to read every word of a book that has come under fire by one’s community as well as a variety of perspectives on it—both those that endorse the book and those that condemn it. It means entering into conversation with those who have long engaged the controversial topic in question and making a genuine effort to understand the different, often opposing, values that inform the conversation. It means reading with charity a book that has been lambasted by one’s community—doing one’s best to understand what the author seeks to communicate rather than approaching it with the goal of dominating and destroying the ideology that is at odds with one’s own. It means reading primary texts rather than spiteful summaries of them, and reading them charitably, with the motivation to understand their values, their assumptions, and the specific vocabulary they use.

  When we have read promiscuously, we will come to the end of a book with which we disagree and find that our appreciation for truth has been deepened, and we can appreciate the book for playing a part in our spiritual formation. Promiscuous readers do not walk away from a false book with hate, hostility, or self-righteousness in their hearts but with wisdom—an understanding of their neighbor and themselves, recognition of sin and lies, and love for truth and goodness. Wood argues that “prudence is the deeply anchored, acquired habit of thinking well in order to live and act well.”44 The wonderful thing about the existence of books is that we can develop this wise “habit of thinking” through our promiscuous reading.

  Thus far in this chapter we have purposely avoided giving substantial attention to any one hot-button issue because we believe, with Milton, that evil and lies will eventually be overshadowed by truth and goodness, and thus we do not want to give undue space to topics that may not concern readers in the years to come. Nonetheless, we will offer one example from our own experience: promiscuously reading books centered on race and racism. All three of us have found issues of racial justice to be not only prevalent in American culture and in education but also immediately relevant as we teach in diverse classrooms. As white educators, we needed to stay abreast of the cultural conversations on topics of racial justice in order to become more just and equitable teachers, so (among other things), we read multiple books on racial justice and on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) topics. Reading these books gave us a general, though far from comprehensive, understanding of the conversation, specifically the values and assumptions of people engaged in DEI efforts and the language and vocabulary that shapes the discourse and the work itself. Having this foundation has given us an introduction to the DEI conversation and to issues of racial justice, so that we recognize key terms and understand why advocates in these areas ask certain questions and scrutinize situations we would otherwise consider unremarkable. We would not have this foundation from reading only one article or only one book, much less an uncharitable summary or review written by someone with a vested interest in lambasting DEI or racial-justice efforts. Further, what we learned from reading a number of books on the topic is that DEI advocates and conservative Christians could likely find common ground and ways to work with one another. What we saw overwhelmingly by reading widely was that if both groups learned to read one another with wisdom—rather than fear or suspicion—less hostility would exist between them.45 As we read promiscuously on these topics, we were formed by our posture of openness to consider the needs and experiences of others rather than focusing on ourselves.

  Forgetting the Self

  Indeed, another way to subvert hostility with prudence is to avoid self-focused and individualistic habits of reading. This is easier said than done, as all three of us encountered such individualistic modes of reading in our evangelical Christian communities, starting in childhood. For instance, when I (Roberts) was in elementary school, my mother, noting my interest in reading and particularly in fantasy literature, brought me Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time with a recommendation and a warning. The recommendation was that I would probably enjoy the book (she was right!), and the warning, likely shaped by her own experiences as a teacher in a Christian elementary school, was that some Christians did not think this was an appropriate book to read. This brief conversation with my mother remains one of my earliest memories of a conflict in ideology between my own Christian household and the broader evangelical community in which I was raised and educated. In such communities, books that feature magic (as L’Engle’s does, with at least one character calling herself a witch) are sometimes met with suspicion, prompting responses with biblical references such as Deuteronomy 18:10–11, which says, “Let no one be found among you who sacrifices their son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead,” and Micah 5:12, “I will destroy your witchcraft and you will no longer cast spells.” Such responses are particularly ironic given L’Engle’s affirmation, in Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, that not only is she a devout Christian but A Wrinkle in Time is, in her view, “theologically a completely orthodox book.”46

 

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