Inside Evangelicalism: The Culture of Conservative White Christianity

(Hardback)

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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 evangelicalisms 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. Wards 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 insiders critical yet balanced eye on conservative white Christian culture. Inside Evangelicalism complements existing scholarship within anthropology and sociologywhere evangelicalism has been studied in conjunction with the rise of the Religious Rightwhile 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.

Reviews

The author provides a fascinating insider's perspective of an under-researched and often misunderstood faith community. Academically rigorous and rich with vivid detail, this autoethnographic study offers key insights for scholars, teachers, and students of communication and media studies, particularly religious and organizational communication. -- Janie M. Harden Fritz, Duquesne University

Author Bio

Mark Ward Sr. is Professor of Communication at the University of Houston-Victoria.