“Yes, That’s the Book for Me!”: Ethnographic Insights on White Evangelical Biblicism

The flip side of white evangelical biblicism is “othering” perceived opponents of the Bible. This cognitive process establishes the group’s distinctiveness and prestige as it stands for God’s Word, makes believers aware of Bible “skeptics” with whom they are in competition, and bonds evangelicals over perceived threats to the Bible.

See also Inside Evangelicalism: The Culture of Conservative White Christianity (Lexington, 2025).

By Mark Ward Sr. 
University of Houston-Victoria
January 2025

            One Sunday morning several years ago, I took a seat in my usual pew. In the minutes before the service began, the buzz of “fellowship” filled the sanctuary at the evangelical church I then attended. Yet despite the noise, my attention was drawn to a half dozen eight-foot-long 2x4s on the platform. Fieldnotes recorded my impressions:

Four boards are upright and joined in a square, while the other two form a triangle above the square. The ensemble represents a house and will be used that evening for a children’s Vacation Bible School presentation. ... The two uprights that represent the walls are labeled FAITH, the crossbeam that represents the ceiling is PRAYER, the two diagonal boards that represent the roof are JESUS, and the peak of the roof is GOD. What most draws my attention, though, is the beam on the floor; it represents the foundation of the house and is labeled BIBLE. Thus, the house is built not on the foundation of God; it is built on the Bible.[1]

This is the stuff of ethnography, moments when a mundane cultural practice sheds its “naturalness” and becomes a unit of analysis. But it requires a conscious effort to mentally distance myself, because I am an ethnographer of my own culture. Nearly five decades ago, I “came to Christ” as a college student and later spent twenty years in evangelical ministry. In time, I left ministry to earn a doctorate in rhetorical and communication studies and begin a second career in academe. Yet I maintain a “dual passport” as a professional scholar and professing evangelical. And though my dual identity may at times require mental distancing in my fieldwork, I can also perceive taken-for-granted meanings and connections that others would miss.

The Bible as Dominant Symbol

           The meaning of the Vacation Bible School “house” is a prime example. That the whole white evangelical “house” is founded on the Bible is a constant in all my fieldwork: four years with a touring gospel quartet, three years at a nondenominational Bible church, two years at a Southern Baptist church, two years observing a men’s Bible study group, ongoing ethnography of evangelical media. After my quartet touring and visits to some 200 evangelical churches in 17 states, I drew on anthropologist Victor Turner’s[2] scheme of dominant and instrumental symbols to explain what I observed:

Much more so than the cross, the Bible unifies all other instrumental symbols within the total system. ... Moreover the Bible, as dominant symbol, forms the two poles of Fundamentalists’ moral obligation (to read, heed, proclaim, and defend God’s Word) and personal desire (to know God better by reading His Word and commune with God as He speaks to the believer through His Word).[3]

Twenty years of research into white evangelical culture has reaffirmed this finding many times over. My approach is grounded in sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication[4] as I interpret evangelical culture by interpreting the shared assumptions around which its “speech code” is patterned.[5] For example, in my three years of observing a nondenominational Bible church I was struck by how language socially constructed a culture of biblical literalism. With the ubiquitous adjective “biblical,” as in “biblical worldview” and “biblical principles,” the “evangelical community is rhetorically sustained as its literalist genres function as ‘bearers of culture’ that incorporate evangelical cultural knowledge.”[6] This language activates evangelicals’ shared cognitive scripts[7] so that the “genres socially typify the recurring social exigency of perceived threats to the Bible ... [and] may be continually reproduced to meet the exigency.”[8] 
            My most recent fieldwork at a Southern Baptist church and men’s Bible study group continued to affirm my findings. Consider this declaration in a Sunday morning message as the pastor testified how as a teenager

I fell more and more in love with the Word of God. On top of that, I began to notice the Bible’s impact on my life. The Word of God truly began to produce fruit. Additionally, the sense of call that I had [to preach] only grew stronger. Something began to burn inside me as I made a habit of reading and studying the Bible.[9]

Later in the message, however, the pastor warned his congregation:

It was only later in my life that I discovered that there were people who dismissed the Bible ... [as] filled with inconsistencies. ... So how do we answer such people? When the Word of God means so very much to us, how do we engage with those who dismiss it?[10]

Again, as evangelicalism’s dominant symbol the Bible polarizes all meaning around the poles of a personal desire to know God through reading his word and a moral obligation to defend the Bible from skeptics. Could these meanings be any clearer than in the pastor’s sermon? 
            I had also been noticing that “biblical worldview” functioned among white evangelicals as a symbolic term that simply and quickly communicates complex ideas, values, and meanings that are taken for granted in the speech community.[11] I was preparing a larger study[12] of the term’s origin and popularization when serendipity stepped in and my men’s Bible study group began a video series called Wretched Worldview produced by a national broadcast ministry.[13] The Wretched Worldview Study Guide set forth the goals of the course:

Wretched Worldview will equip you with a 7-part framework for developing a truly biblical position on any topic. After watching all 22 episodes, you will be trained to boldly approach any question and thoughtfully develop a position that is soundly biblical.[14] 

My fieldnotes of our first group meeting convey the tenor of the course: 

The first session began as the group leader stated that the purpose of the study was “to know what the Bible says” and “be aligned with God.” ... Then in the Lesson 1 video titled “Worldview,” [the speaker] explained how the study would help students come to “the right conclusion” that reflects the “Christian position” and “Christian worldview” and rebuts the “secular worldview.”[15] 

When I explained to the group that the “7-part framework for developing a truly biblical position on any topic” amounted to proof texting, the ten men present were unfamiliar with the concept. In evangelical culture, tossing off a Bible verse is normal talk. So, the men pushed back—or as one man put it, “Why wouldn’t you quote the Bible?” At last, the discussion ended when one man articulated the group consensus: “Anything that doesn’t line up with the Bible isn’t true!”

Bible Believers and Skeptics

         A group identity requires boundaries: Who do you define yourself against? Social identity theory holds that an individual has both a personal and a social identity.[16] The latter is cognitively constructed through the perceived distinctiveness and prestige of the group, awareness of and competition with outgroups, and group formation factors including physical proximity, interpersonal relations, attractiveness, similarity, shared background, and common threats or aspirations. So, the flip side of white evangelical biblicism is “othering” perceived opponents of the Bible. This cognitive process establishes the group’s distinctiveness and prestige as it stands for God’s Word, makes believers aware of Bible “skeptics” with whom they are in competition, and bonds evangelicals over perceived threats to the Bible. 
          This emerged during my three years of observing a nondenominational Bible church. And here I come to the major theoretical advance of my career, a tripartite picture of a speech community as comprising three levels of discourse: a macro level of institutions that disseminate mass-mediated representations of cultural norms; a meso level of planned locally public rhetoric that structures local deliberation of the norms; and a micro level of spontaneous natural talk and role enactments that reproduce the norms.[17] 
            Who then are the Bible “opponents” against whom white evangelicals define themselves? At the Bible church, macro-level institutional representations came into play over twelve Sunday evening services as the pastor screened The Truth Project.[18] Produced by Focus on the Family, the video lecture series is a “ground-breaking small group curriculum on ... the relevance and importance of living the Biblical worldview in daily life.” The introductory lesson declared that “contemporary culture stands in direct opposition to the truth-centered worldview presented in the Bible.”[19] Then the twelve lessons in the series proceeded to explain the opposition between intellectual elites and a “biblical worldview” in philosophy, ethics, and theology.[20] 
           For the church youth group, the pastor screened a Focus on the Family ten-part video series titled Is the Bible Reliable?[21] In one lesson, the series host averred that people who “know about [the Bible] and reject it ... may be motivated to criticize it. Some college professors have given their entire careers to this endeavor.” Another lesson warned viewers “to watch out for your professors’ presuppositions,” especially “some professors who have prejudices or even a chip on their shoulder towards Christians who hold to a strong faith.” The concluding lesson ended with a charge for college students: 

So, when you get that skeptical professor who’s sneering at you from the front of the classroom, who’s telling you that by the end of his class you won’t be a Christian, don’t feel intimidated. Truth stands up to scrutiny and the truth that you find in the Bible is something that you can build your life on. 

When The Truth Project concluded, its norms were transmitted in the meso-level discourse of Sunday morning sermons. For the pastor’s series on the gospel of Mark, my fieldnotes recorded more than a dozen times when the pastor warned about “scholars” being opposed to “true knowledge.”[22] Often, he made these “applications” from Jesus’s confrontations with scribes and Pharisees. His warnings culminated in Mark chapter ten when the pastor preached on verse 14 (“Suffer the little children to come unto me”) and verse 25 (“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”). In his “applications,” scholars are the modern equivalents of those who would deny access to Jesus and will find it difficult to enter God’s kingdom. 
            At the micro level of spontaneous Sunday school talk, I recorded many instances where laity reproduced “othering” of intellectual elites. An exchange between myself and a Sunday school teacher typified this discourse. When the class came to the second chapter of John’s gospel and the account of Jesus overturning the tables of the moneychangers in the Jerusalem temple, I raised my hand: 

MARK: But in the other three Gospels, Jesus cleanses the temple at the end of his ministry, not the beginning.
TEACHER: It’s just easiest to believe the Bible and that Jesus cleansed the temple twice. 
MARK: Could John have changed the chronology to serve his theological point?
TEACHER: That’s what the so-called “higher critics” say. But you have to remember that they’re [spiritually] unregenerate and hate God and use their scholarship to undermine the Bible.
MARK: Have you read any of these higher critics or are you taking that opinion from conservative commentators you trust?
TEACHER: That’s the opinion of conservative commentators I trust.[23]

That white evangelicals hear only conservative Bible interpretations was likewise brought home during my two years of observing a Southern Baptist church. In denominational Sunday school curricula, critical views are mentioned rarely and only characterized as the positions of “some scholars.” For example, the lesson book for the gospel of Mark asserted that “many Bible scholars today assert that it was written by John Mark” and “Many Bible scholars believe” that Mark recorded Peter’s remembrances.[24] The curriculum for the gospel of John averred, “Christian scholars generally agree [the apostle] John wrote his Gospel,” while “Mark recorded Peter’s recollections about Jesus” and “Matthew, an eyewitness, shared what he knew and saw.”[25] These are only two among scores of example
             In one Sunday school, our teacher declared, “Most Bible scholars believe ...” To that, I interjected, “To be fair, you should qualify that by saying, ‘Most Bible scholars in our circles believe ...’” He answered, “You’re right, there are all kinds of scholars,” implying equivalency between “faith-based” and critical scholarship. The following week, the teacher prefaced an assertion about the authorship of an otherwise anonymous biblical book by stating, “Most scholars believe ...” For a second week, I rejoined, “To be fair, I checked on that. The broad consensus among most scholars is that the prophet did not write the book.” The teacher replied, “Well, I won’t argue with you. I know that you go to different references.” Again, the implication that faith-based and critical scholarship are equivalent. To my teacher, all scholars necessarily follow a priori assumptions. Evangelical scholars presuppose that the Bible is true, critical scholars that the Bible is not true. So the “correct” scholarship is obvious. 

How the Bible Works

          Many anthropologists, ethnographers, and sociologists have studied American evangelical biblicism to discern “how the Bible works.”[26] Evangelicals “read their Bibles in a conversation with God,” listening for “the way the words intentionally lead them to respond.”[27] Bible study focuses on “not just a passage’s meaning in general but its specific meaning for us right now, in this context, given our particular dilemmas or needs.”[28] Because scriptural texts are taken as authoritative on their face, “literalism does not constitute a hermeneutic method” but instead enables the “most widespread form of interpretive activity ... an ongoing attempt to apply biblical texts to their everyday lives.”[29] In practice, “this avowal of literalism” is not allowed to “conflict with any actual restrictions to a text’s historical meaning which would severely constrict the Bible’s ongoing relevance.”[30] 
          Most readers of The Bible and Interpretation, however, are not anthropologists or ethnographers. So, consider the observations of Luke Timothy Johnson, a prominent New Testament scholar and historian of early Christianity. He noted that liberal and conservative scholars both ground their Bible interpretations in “historical” facts, except that conservatives assume the factual historicity of the biblical accounts. As such,

the Bible is less a text to be read than a talisman to be invoked. The fundamentalists’ claim to take the literal meaning of the New Testament seriously is controverted by their neglect of any careful or sustained reading. What they take seriously are claims about the authority of the Scripture: its divine inspiration, its inerrancy, its holiness. But as a source of meaning, the text is rarely engaged. When texts are used at all, they are lifted atomistically from their context as adornment for a sermon or lesson that has not in any fashion actually derived from the text. ... [This] enables fundamentalists to make claims about inerrancy and noncontradiction in the Gospels, because they have never actually engaged the texts in a way that would enable some basic critical issues to emerge.[31] 

Similarly, a recent study of mine analyzed two representative sermons delivered in my presence: a “springboard” sermon preached by an itinerant evangelist who threw out a proof text and never referenced it again as he extemporized folksy stories of old-time religion, and a “word study” in which a pastor produced a list of Bible verses that contained the same English word and riffed on each one.[32] In contrast to liturgical traditions that use printed texts, the oral composition of white evangelical sermons reproduces a culture of primary orality that privileges repeatable oral formulas, agonistic storytelling, and immediate application to life rather than reflection and abstraction.[33] 
            In closing, I go back to that Sunday morning when I saw the “house” made of 2x4s. My mind drifted between the display on stage and my own Vacation Bible School as a child in our family’s mainline Protestant church. I remember sitting at the feet of Mrs. Potts and singing, “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world.” My own children and grandchildren, however, learned a different song in their evangelical churches: “The B-I-B-L-E, yes, that’s the book for me; I stand alone on the Word of God, the B-I-B-L-E!” White evangelicals wage the culture wars so vigorously because, for them, it all goes back to the B-I-B-L-E and a fierce determination to “stand alone on the Word of God.” 

Bibliography

Ault Jr., James M. Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church. New York: Knopf, 2004.

Bielo, James S. Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study. New York: New York University Press., 2009.

Howell Jr., G. B. John 1–11: Explore the Bible: Adult Personal Study Guide. Nashville, TN: Lifeway Christian Resources, 2022.

Hymes, Dell. Foundations of Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974. 

Is the Bible Reliable? Colorado Springs, CO: Focus on the Family, 2010.

Johnson, Luke Timothy. The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.

Luhrmann, Tanya M. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. New York: Vintage, 2012.

Malley, Brian. How the Bible Works: An Anthropological Study of Evangelical Biblicism. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 2004.

Miller, Carolyn R. “Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre.” In Genre in the New Rhetoric, edited by Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway, 67–78. New York: Taylor & Francis, 1994.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Taylor and Francis, 1982.

Philipsen, Gerry, and Tabitha Hart. “Speech Codes Theory Propositions (Speech Codes Theory 4.0).” In Contending with Codes in a World of Difference: Transforming a Theory of Human Communication, edited by Gerry Philipsen and Tabitha Hart, 249–52. Vancouver, BC: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2024.

Quinn, Naomi, and Dorothy Holland Quinn. “Culture and Cognition.” In Cultural Models in Language and Thought, edited by Dorothy Holland and Naomi Quinn, 3–40. Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Selby, Brett, and Greg Pouncey. Mark: Explore the Bible: Adult Personal Study Guide. Nashville, TN: Lifeway Christian Resources, 2023.

Tajfel, Henri, and John C. Turner. “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict.” In The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, edited by William G. Austin and Stephen Worchel, 33–47. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1979.

The Truth Project. Colorado Springs, CO: Focus on the Family, 2008.

The Truth Project Leader’s Guide. Colorado Spring, CO: Focus on the Family, 2020. https://www.focusonthefamily.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/the-truth-project-leader-guide.pdf.

Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967.

Ward Sr., Mark. “‘All Scripture is Inspired by God’: The Culture of Biblical Literalism in an Evangelical Church.” Journal of Communication and Religion 45, no. 1 (2022): 86–110.

———. “‘Christian Worldview’: A Defining Symbolic Term of the American Evangelical Speech Code.” Journal of Communication and Religion 46, no. 3 (2023): 5–28.

———. Inside Evangelicalism: The Culture of Conservative White Christianity. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2025.

———. “‘I Was Saved at an Early Age’: An Ethnography of Fundamentalist Speech and Cultural Performance.” Journal of Communication and Religion 33, no. 1 (2010): 108–44.

———. “‘Knowledge Puffs Up’: The Evangelical Culture of Anti-Intellectualism as a Local Strategy.” Sermon Studies 4 (2020): 1–21.

———. “Speech Codes in Private, Locally Public, and Communal Speaking.” In Contending with Codes in a World of Difference: Transforming a Theory of Human Communication, edited by Gerry Philipsen and Tabitha Hart 53–77. Vancouver, BC: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2024.

Wretched Worldview Study Guide. Alpharetta, GA: Gospel Partners Media, 2021. https://shop.wretched.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Wretched-Worldview-Study-Guide.pdf.