Inside Evangelicalism: The Culture of Conservative White Christianity, (Paperback)

In <i>Inside Evangelicalism</i>, 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. <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.

• Inside Evangelicalism: The Culture of Conservative White Christianity, (Paperback)
• Author: Mark Ward Sr
• ISBN: 9798216381709
• Format: Paperback
• Publication Date: 2026-09-17
• Page Count: 360