Full Description
In Inside Evangelicalism, Mark Ward Sr. combines ethnographic, autoethnographic, and sociolinguistic research to identify and analyze white evangelicals' distinctive culture and speech code from a perspective rooted deeply in both communication studies and the evangelical community. The Bible emerges as evangelicalism's one dominant symbol that unifies all meaning and divides the world into a cosmic dualism between secular humanism and an all-encompassing "biblical worldview." The associated language of literalism drives evangelical culture, cognition, and identity, creating a system of ordered social relations enacted through patriarchy, anti-intellectualism, authoritarianism, and white Christian nationalism. Ward's positionality as both an ethnographer of religious communication who has observed white evangelical culture for two decades and a self-identified evangelical for four decades makes him uniquely qualified to cast an insider's critical yet balanced eye on conservative white Christian culture. Inside Evangelicalism complements existing scholarship within anthropology and sociology—where evangelicalism has been studied in conjunction with the rise of the Religious Right—while contributing unique insights from religious communication studies. The book is also a landmark in its own right, a work that demonstrates the productive complementarity of ethnographic and autoethnographic research and the first study to describe evangelical culture through the ethnography of its communication.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: The Pew
1: Yes, That's the Book for Me!
2: I Was Saved at an Early Age
3: Ladies, Bring Your Best Dishes
Part II: The Pulpit
4: I Can't Half-Preach!
5: God's Man
6: Knowledge Puffs Up
Part III: The Parachurch
7: Electronic Church Redux
8: We Need to Pray for Our Country
9: The Christian Worldview
Part IV: The Problem
10: Professor in the Pew
11: Worship is Like a Drug
12: Who Am I?
Conclusion
Chronology
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
