Read more
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.
About the author
Mark Ward Sr. is Professor of Communication at the University of Houston - Victoria and serves on the Executive Council of the Religious Communication Association (RCA) and the Editorial Board of The Journal of Communication and Religion. His books include Deadly Documents: Organizational Discourse, Technical Communication, and the Holocaust (2014); Organizational Communication: Theory, Research, and Practice (2015); The Electronic Church in the Digital Age: Cultural Impacts of Evangelical Mass Media, Vol. 1 & 2 (2016); The Lord's Radio: Gospel Music Broadcasting and the Making of Evangelical Culture, 1920-1960 (2017), God Talk: The Problem of Divine-Human Communication (2022), and Inside Evangelicalism: The Culture of Conservative White Christianity (Lexington Books, 2025).
