Literary Practice and Imagined Community in Christian Secondary Schools

Imagined communities are not bound by space or time, they exist in opposition to other communities, and the members perceive themselves as existentially similar. Multiple case studies and interviews revealed that the seven Christian schools in this study functioned as imagined communities, and their literary practices served to establish, maintain, and, sometimes, expand the borders between members and non-members of the imagined community. Whether these literary practices were used to reinforce existing divisions or to foster a broader sense of communal self depended in part on whether the schools had static or dynamic identities.