Mark Ward Sr.
Description
In <i>Inside Evangelicalism</i>, Mark Ward Sr. combines ethnographic, autoethnographic, and sociolinguistic research to identify and analyze white eva
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ngelicals' 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. <i>Inside Evangelicalism</i> 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.
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