Rejecting exclusion, embracing inclusion: conversation as policy-making at a US Baptist conference on sexuality and covenant

While much of the work on language, policy, and religion has focused on how discourse is influenced by policy, this article presents a case study of how discourse is used to construct policy itself. These policy-making discourses tend to occur in institutional settings; however, non-institutional discourse may also be instrumental in the development and implementation of policy. The strict separation of institutional and non-institutional discourse is problematized as it fails to account for the ways in which both types of discourse are ideologically constructed and often co-occurring. The article analyzes how the non-institutional discourse model of 'conversation' was promoted in the institutional setting of The Baptist Conference on Sexuality and Covenant as a way to explicitly avoid policy-making. However, it is argued that the framing of a conversation did not ultimately circumvent the implications of policy-making but rather promoted a policy of inclusion over a policy of exclusion.