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The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics.
National polls show that approximately 50 million adult Americans are born-again Christians. Yet most Americans see their culture as secular, and the United States is viewed around the world as a secular nation. Further, intellectuals and journalists often portray born-again Christians, despite their numbers, as outsiders who endanger public life. But is American culture really so neatly split between the religious and the secular? Is America as "modern" and is born-again Christian religious belief as "pre-modern" as many think?
In the 1980s, born-again Christians burst into the political arena with stunning force. Gone was the image of "old-fashioned" fundamentalism and its anti-worldly, separatist philosophy. Under the leadership of the Reverend Jerry Falwell and allied preachers, millions broke taboos in place since the Scopes trial constraining their interaction with the public world. They claimed new cultural territory and refashioned themselves in the public arena. Here was a dynamic body of activists with an evangelical vision of social justice, organized under the rubric of the "Moral Majority."
Susan Harding, a cultural anthropologist, set out in the 1980s to understand the significance of this new cultural movement. The result, this long-awaited book, presents the most original and thorough examination of Christian fundamentalism to date. Falwell and his co-pastors were the pivotal figures in the movement. It is on them that Harding focuses, and, in particular, their use of the Bible's language. She argues that this language is the medium through which born-again Christians, individual and collective, come to understand themselves as Christians. And it is inside this language that much of the born-again movement took place. Preachers like Falwell command a Bible-based poetics of great complexity, variety, creativity, and force, and, with it, attempt to mold their churches into living testaments of the Bible. Harding focuses on the words--sermons, speeches, books, audiotapes, and television broadcasts--of individual preachers, particularly Falwell, as they rewrote their Bible-based tradition to include, rather than exclude, intense worldly engagement. As a result of these efforts, born-again Christians recast themselves as a people not separated from but engaged in making history. The Book of Jerry Falwell is a fascinating work of cultural analysis, a rare account that takes fundamentalist Christianity on its own terms and deepens our understanding of both religion and the modern world.
In the 1980s, born-again Christians burst into the political arena with stunning force. Gone was the image of "old-fashioned" fundamentalism and its anti-worldly, separatist philosophy. Under the leadership of the Reverend Jerry Falwell and allied preachers, millions broke taboos in place since the Scopes trial constraining their interaction with the public world. They claimed new cultural territory and refashioned themselves in the public arena. Here was a dynamic body of activists with an evangelical vision of social justice, organized under the rubric of the "Moral Majority."
Susan Harding, a cultural anthropologist, set out in the 1980s to understand the significance of this new cultural movement. The result, this long-awaited book, presents the most original and thorough examination of Christian fundamentalism to date. Falwell and his co-pastors were the pivotal figures in the movement. It is on them that Harding focuses, and, in particular, their use of the Bible's language. She argues that this language is the medium through which born-again Christians, individual and collective, come to understand themselves as Christians. And it is inside this language that much of the born-again movement took place. Preachers like Falwell command a Bible-based poetics of great complexity, variety, creativity, and force, and, with it, attempt to mold their churches into living testaments of the Bible. Harding focuses on the words--sermons, speeches, books, audiotapes, and television broadcasts--of individual preachers, particularly Falwell, as they rewrote their Bible-based tradition to include, rather than exclude, intense worldly engagement. As a result of these efforts, born-again Christians recast themselves as a people not separated from but engaged in making history. The Book of Jerry Falwell is a fascinating work of cultural analysis, a rare account that takes fundamentalist Christianity on its own terms and deepens our understanding of both religion and the modern world.
352 pages, Paperback
First published March 6, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
February 17, 2009
The most useful book I found during my semester at Liberty.
August 30, 2024
high 3/low 4. several really fascinating insights and claims. not sure it does everything it purports to do, though, and so I’d pair it with James Ault’s Spirit and Flesh (2004), which makes some parallel interventions about the flexibility of fundamentalist absolutism and language, but from within “the interpretive community” itself, i.e., his book concerns an actual congregation up close and not just the figurehead. also Harding’s book was a little haphazard in feel, as if it were written as individual essays and then stitched together
March 13, 2015
This book could be a good source for information on Jerry Falwell and his brand of Christianity, which the author calls and I'm sure Falwell would agree, Fundamentalism. Unfortunately the author spends far too much time on psychological analysis which she performs by letting Falwell and his ilk define the terms of what it means to be a "Bible-believer," which is nonsense. So-called Christian Fundamentalists do not believe the Bible that exists in the real world. They believe a Bible that never existed, a Bible of original autographs only. The typical Fundamentalist insists that God's word in the original autographs of the original writers was inerrant and infallible and that the versions we have are varying degrees of reliability, but all with errors. The God they believe answers their prayers and guides them daily is too weak to preserve His word. Therefore, his Bible is unapproachable, can't be questioned, has never been seen in one book, and has no power over him. Proof of this is how, since the flawed and heretical theories of Westcott and Hort were accepted in the late 1800's on the one hand and the so-named Textus Receptus has been elevated to a divine status on the other, American Christians no longer read their Bible through regularly from cover to cover. Even those of us who believe the King James Bible was the last real Bible translated will often admit they have never read the Bible through even once. Falwell and others like him used the Bible as an excuse for the political-social beliefs and agenda confusing their interpretation for the literal meaning of the Scriptures and confusing their political agenda for the intent of God in its original writings. Fundamentalism is a blight on American Christianity, not the shining light it thinks of itself as, and permitting Falwell and his associates to provide the narrative on which the author comments is like arguing with someone who doesn't believe in God and letting them define the nature of the God they don't believe in. It is foolishness. The most shocking thing about this book I found was that there was, according to the author, a World Trade Center brochure that said that the WTC was the closest that most of us will ever get to heaven. Sort of reminds me of every proud pronouncement of mankind from Babel "build a tower to heaven" to "Even God can't sink this ship" HMS Titanic. Perhaps we find a clue as to why they were brought down in that. Anyway, the book falls short on many points but it is interesting and a good reference book, but flawed.
December 9, 2014
For much of the twentieth century, both Christian fundamentalists and secularists agreed to a narrative in which fundamentalism was the opposite and counterpart of modernity. Susan Harding tells us that this was a useful fiction. "Fundamentalists were in fact always fully inside modernity." With unmatched depth of comprehension and skill in depiction, Harding examines the ways in which "born-again" preachers, and consequently born-again believers, rhetorically construct their world. Though Jerry Falwell's name graces the cover, the breadth of this work extends to the majority of what today would be called conservative evangelicalism. Harding has learned Christian-speak so well that she is even able to replicate it, interweaving it into her explanations. She has achieved nothing less than a translation of conservative Christian culture into a language comprehensible to outsiders. In doing so, she consistently rejects caricature and oversimplification to depict the fluid, shifting, adaptive character of born-again Christianity. She also proves that anthropologists can grapple productively with societies closer to home, overly familiar, even taken for granted.
February 22, 2015
Susan Friend Harding’s excellent anthropological study of born-again Christians is entitled, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics, but perhaps the subtitle should have been placed up front. Falwell’s ministry empire is the catalyst for this study rather than its focus. Harding does exactly what one hopes any good anthropologist would do. She enters into the mindset of the culture she is studying as far as she is able and gives outsiders a view as to what it means to live and speak, to vote and spend money, to watch the news and go to school as a fundamentalist.
Harding’s thick description of conservative Christianity centers on language and this emphasis sets her work apart from most histories of fundamentalists/ evangelicals. She eschews spectacle and judgment and instead gets the reader inside the fundamentalists’ heads. Her treatment of fundamentalist attitudes toward sacrificial giving is an excellent example of this. It’s easy to think of these folks as gullible rubes taken in by a slick religious con man, but from their point of view, they didn’t give money to Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. They gave it to God. This is the sort of insight that is absolutely key to understanding the phenomenon of fundamentalist fund-raising, but it’s just the sort of thing a historian or journalist would often overlook.
However, there are things that an historian or a theologian might have caught which Harding misses. She assumes that Fundamentalism was exiled after the Scopes Trial, and minimizes the significant actions of conservative Christians in the 40’s and 50’s despite the fact that the post-war years heavily influenced the shape of the fundamentalist revival she wants to explore. Here, Matthew Sutton’s work is a helpful companion/correction. However, Harding may be forgiven if she overlooks or misinterprets the history of the movement, since such is not really the focus of her research. Hers is the story of language, and for a movement created and sustained by Word and rhetoric, this is an essential way of telling their story.
Her account is sympathetic to born-again Christianity but doesn’t pull punches. Though Harding freely confesses that she is occasionally bewildered by her subjects, she is not interested in describing Falwell and company as villains or fools. In fact, there are times in Harding’s narrative when the preachers are so eclipsed by their rhetoric that the men themselves (the ministers treated in the book are all male) are almost superfluous. Certainly this is true in the book’s strongest chapter – “Speaking is Believing.”
In it, Harding powerfully recounts the story of an interview with Rev. Melvin Campbell, a fundamentalist preacher at a small church in Lynchburg. Campbell quickly turns the interview session into a chance to witness to an unbeliever. What makes the account so interesting is the way that Harding is drawn further into Campbell’s story than she anticipated or desired. “There is no such thing as a neutral position,” she says, “No space for an ethnographer seeking ‘information.’ Either you are lost, or you are saved.” Though Harding does not convert, she openly tells her readers that Campbell drew her into a liminal position somewhere between belief and unbelief. She herself is unaware of just how far in she has gone until a near accident on her drive home causes her to ask, “What is God trying to tell me?” Harding then works backwards from her own experience to identify the way(s) that Campbell’s rhetoric worked upon her. What she finds is a depth and complexity of speech of which Campbell is almost certainly unaware. Harding finds five rhetorical movements in Campbell’s witness that she believes are typical of how fundamentalists share their faith. 1) “He equated his present listener with the listeners in his stories.” 2) “He fashioned her as lost.” 3) “He fashioned the gospel speaker – himself and others – as saved.” 4) “He transformed lost listeners in his stories into gospel speakers.” 5) “He invited me to undergo the same transformation…and become a gospel speaker.” There is little doubt that Campbell would not have described his speech in such a manner, but there is also little doubt that he would find such a description accurate.
Fundamentalist preachers weave together a rich tapestry of biblical narratives untied by common themes – death and resurrection, loss and redemption, alienation and election, etc. These powerful themes from Scripture are seamlessly connected both to the life of the preacher himself and from there to the life of his listener(s).
Campbell was a compelling witness [because of] the extent to which, and eloquence with which, he gave his life, narratively speaking, to the language of Christ. This willingness to submit one’s life to God, to narrate one’s experience and fashion stories out of it in dialogue with God’s will and biblical truths, makes God, and his Word, most real and known and irrefutable to oneself and to one’s listener.
By reproducing large swaths of Campbell’s testimony and chronicling her reactions to it, Harding is able to show her readers how and why fundamentalist rhetoric is so powerful. And she extends this treatment beyond evangelistic language and into intra-fundamentalist debates like the one prompted by Frankie Shaeffer’s chapel sermon at Liberty College in 1982.
Schaeffer, like his father before him, sought to make major reforms in fundamentalist Christianity without sacrificing the heart of it, namely, biblical inerrancy. Harding presents his confrontational sermon at Liberty as a moment of change in Falwell’s approach to social and cultural engagement. With his claim that Christianity is truth not religion, Schaeffer pushed fundamentalists to change the world through vocations outside of the ministry. “The editor of the New York Times will be more influential than any preacher,” he argued. This rhetorical act had major consequences for Liberty, Falwell, and conservative Christianity in general. Yet even as he embraced this new path, Falwell managed to absorb these ideas into his bourgeoning rhetorical empire rather than simply change his direction.
Harding’s emphasis on language doesn’t stop her from addressing the controversial side of fundamentalism. Her treatment of Falwell’s anti-abortion book, If I Should Die Before I Wake, manages to navigate the trouble waters of the abortion debate without getting lost in the emotion and politics surrounding the topic. Rather than focusing on Falwell and other Christians use of the word “murder” to describe abortion, she examines his appropriation of feminist points of view, a new and far more interesting account of Christian opposition to abortion than the one typically presented. The final chapter of the book examines the “telescandals” of the 1980s, and here again Harding takes a surprising angle on the events. She dutifully gives the facts surrounding the case, stories of prostitutes and shady fundraising practices, but the lurid details are jettisoned and replaced by a fascinating examination of the language surrounding the events both in the national media and inside the fundamentalist camp. Indeed, Ted Koppel is a more prominent figure in this chapter than Falwell.
Harding has produced an engaging and readable book that brings a new and important point of view to the burgeoning field of inquiry surrounding the Christian Right in America. Hers is probably not the first book or the last that students of the movement should read, but it is an essential one nonetheless. Harding is a translator and a guide for those outside of conservative Christianity, and she helps non-believers understand their neighbors before passing judgment on them. Moreover, by her insightful examination of fundamentalist rhetoric and language, she helps those within the culture to follow that most essential of Socratic imperatives: “Know thyself.”
Harding’s thick description of conservative Christianity centers on language and this emphasis sets her work apart from most histories of fundamentalists/ evangelicals. She eschews spectacle and judgment and instead gets the reader inside the fundamentalists’ heads. Her treatment of fundamentalist attitudes toward sacrificial giving is an excellent example of this. It’s easy to think of these folks as gullible rubes taken in by a slick religious con man, but from their point of view, they didn’t give money to Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. They gave it to God. This is the sort of insight that is absolutely key to understanding the phenomenon of fundamentalist fund-raising, but it’s just the sort of thing a historian or journalist would often overlook.
However, there are things that an historian or a theologian might have caught which Harding misses. She assumes that Fundamentalism was exiled after the Scopes Trial, and minimizes the significant actions of conservative Christians in the 40’s and 50’s despite the fact that the post-war years heavily influenced the shape of the fundamentalist revival she wants to explore. Here, Matthew Sutton’s work is a helpful companion/correction. However, Harding may be forgiven if she overlooks or misinterprets the history of the movement, since such is not really the focus of her research. Hers is the story of language, and for a movement created and sustained by Word and rhetoric, this is an essential way of telling their story.
Her account is sympathetic to born-again Christianity but doesn’t pull punches. Though Harding freely confesses that she is occasionally bewildered by her subjects, she is not interested in describing Falwell and company as villains or fools. In fact, there are times in Harding’s narrative when the preachers are so eclipsed by their rhetoric that the men themselves (the ministers treated in the book are all male) are almost superfluous. Certainly this is true in the book’s strongest chapter – “Speaking is Believing.”
In it, Harding powerfully recounts the story of an interview with Rev. Melvin Campbell, a fundamentalist preacher at a small church in Lynchburg. Campbell quickly turns the interview session into a chance to witness to an unbeliever. What makes the account so interesting is the way that Harding is drawn further into Campbell’s story than she anticipated or desired. “There is no such thing as a neutral position,” she says, “No space for an ethnographer seeking ‘information.’ Either you are lost, or you are saved.” Though Harding does not convert, she openly tells her readers that Campbell drew her into a liminal position somewhere between belief and unbelief. She herself is unaware of just how far in she has gone until a near accident on her drive home causes her to ask, “What is God trying to tell me?” Harding then works backwards from her own experience to identify the way(s) that Campbell’s rhetoric worked upon her. What she finds is a depth and complexity of speech of which Campbell is almost certainly unaware. Harding finds five rhetorical movements in Campbell’s witness that she believes are typical of how fundamentalists share their faith. 1) “He equated his present listener with the listeners in his stories.” 2) “He fashioned her as lost.” 3) “He fashioned the gospel speaker – himself and others – as saved.” 4) “He transformed lost listeners in his stories into gospel speakers.” 5) “He invited me to undergo the same transformation…and become a gospel speaker.” There is little doubt that Campbell would not have described his speech in such a manner, but there is also little doubt that he would find such a description accurate.
Fundamentalist preachers weave together a rich tapestry of biblical narratives untied by common themes – death and resurrection, loss and redemption, alienation and election, etc. These powerful themes from Scripture are seamlessly connected both to the life of the preacher himself and from there to the life of his listener(s).
Campbell was a compelling witness [because of] the extent to which, and eloquence with which, he gave his life, narratively speaking, to the language of Christ. This willingness to submit one’s life to God, to narrate one’s experience and fashion stories out of it in dialogue with God’s will and biblical truths, makes God, and his Word, most real and known and irrefutable to oneself and to one’s listener.
By reproducing large swaths of Campbell’s testimony and chronicling her reactions to it, Harding is able to show her readers how and why fundamentalist rhetoric is so powerful. And she extends this treatment beyond evangelistic language and into intra-fundamentalist debates like the one prompted by Frankie Shaeffer’s chapel sermon at Liberty College in 1982.
Schaeffer, like his father before him, sought to make major reforms in fundamentalist Christianity without sacrificing the heart of it, namely, biblical inerrancy. Harding presents his confrontational sermon at Liberty as a moment of change in Falwell’s approach to social and cultural engagement. With his claim that Christianity is truth not religion, Schaeffer pushed fundamentalists to change the world through vocations outside of the ministry. “The editor of the New York Times will be more influential than any preacher,” he argued. This rhetorical act had major consequences for Liberty, Falwell, and conservative Christianity in general. Yet even as he embraced this new path, Falwell managed to absorb these ideas into his bourgeoning rhetorical empire rather than simply change his direction.
Harding’s emphasis on language doesn’t stop her from addressing the controversial side of fundamentalism. Her treatment of Falwell’s anti-abortion book, If I Should Die Before I Wake, manages to navigate the trouble waters of the abortion debate without getting lost in the emotion and politics surrounding the topic. Rather than focusing on Falwell and other Christians use of the word “murder” to describe abortion, she examines his appropriation of feminist points of view, a new and far more interesting account of Christian opposition to abortion than the one typically presented. The final chapter of the book examines the “telescandals” of the 1980s, and here again Harding takes a surprising angle on the events. She dutifully gives the facts surrounding the case, stories of prostitutes and shady fundraising practices, but the lurid details are jettisoned and replaced by a fascinating examination of the language surrounding the events both in the national media and inside the fundamentalist camp. Indeed, Ted Koppel is a more prominent figure in this chapter than Falwell.
Harding has produced an engaging and readable book that brings a new and important point of view to the burgeoning field of inquiry surrounding the Christian Right in America. Hers is probably not the first book or the last that students of the movement should read, but it is an essential one nonetheless. Harding is a translator and a guide for those outside of conservative Christianity, and she helps non-believers understand their neighbors before passing judgment on them. Moreover, by her insightful examination of fundamentalist rhetoric and language, she helps those within the culture to follow that most essential of Socratic imperatives: “Know thyself.”
November 27, 2025
An anthropological study of a Christian denomination is, at least to me, a bit of a novelty. I know next to nothing about anthropology, but I’m pretty familiar with mainstream Christian discourse, and Falwell’s discourse belongs in that tradition. Harding introduced me to the terms ‘emic’ and ‘etic,’ meaning insider’s and outsider’s point of view respectively. An anthropologist attempts to understand / explain a culture as it is understood by those who inhabit it, ie. the ‘emic’ perspective, which eschews the subject-object approach to the material described. She does, however, permit herself to vent some opinions about Falwell and his particular brand of Fundamentalism. She makes the point that Protestantism of Falwell’s sort emphatically privileges white males.
In the American Protestant tradition rhetoric is theology and vice-versa, so Harding pays close attention to the rhetoric. Biblical typology is a way of thinking about history and Christianity that, with my very tame Anglican upbringing, I didn’t encounter until I read Milton at university. The preaching of Falwell and ‘born again’ Christianity is redolent of it. This medieval paradigm is radically different from secular ideas about history and, if one is inclined to belief, very persuasive. Why, I wondered when I first encountered it, had it been withheld from me? I felt that I had been cheated, and toyed with the idea of ditching my atheism and returning to the Church. I got over it, but there is no doubting the power and seductiveness of a way of thinking about prophecy that Dante and many others took very seriously.
I admit that I was expecting the book to contain some juicy scandal, but there is nothing to speak of really. Falwell has been accused of a few financial improprieties, but not of corruptly enriching himself, nor of sexual misconduct. Harding shows us Falwell’s social and theological ideas evolving. It seems hardly fair to accuse him of deceit; everyone should be entitled to revise their ideas in light of experience, or even to some extent according to what it is politically feasible to preach. Falwell’s achievements are ecumenical (uniting Fundamentalists, Pentecostalists, Charismatics, et al. under the rubric of ‘born again’ Christianity), and in converting his followers from strict quietism to political activism.
In my book Falwell remains a tedious God-botherer, a Pro-Life zealot, a strident socially conservative bigot, and a flag-bearer of the deplorable American Christian Right. But I understand him better now, and I’m willing to grant him a certain grudging respect for a degree of integrity that I had formerly not appreciated.
In the American Protestant tradition rhetoric is theology and vice-versa, so Harding pays close attention to the rhetoric. Biblical typology is a way of thinking about history and Christianity that, with my very tame Anglican upbringing, I didn’t encounter until I read Milton at university. The preaching of Falwell and ‘born again’ Christianity is redolent of it. This medieval paradigm is radically different from secular ideas about history and, if one is inclined to belief, very persuasive. Why, I wondered when I first encountered it, had it been withheld from me? I felt that I had been cheated, and toyed with the idea of ditching my atheism and returning to the Church. I got over it, but there is no doubting the power and seductiveness of a way of thinking about prophecy that Dante and many others took very seriously.
I admit that I was expecting the book to contain some juicy scandal, but there is nothing to speak of really. Falwell has been accused of a few financial improprieties, but not of corruptly enriching himself, nor of sexual misconduct. Harding shows us Falwell’s social and theological ideas evolving. It seems hardly fair to accuse him of deceit; everyone should be entitled to revise their ideas in light of experience, or even to some extent according to what it is politically feasible to preach. Falwell’s achievements are ecumenical (uniting Fundamentalists, Pentecostalists, Charismatics, et al. under the rubric of ‘born again’ Christianity), and in converting his followers from strict quietism to political activism.
In my book Falwell remains a tedious God-botherer, a Pro-Life zealot, a strident socially conservative bigot, and a flag-bearer of the deplorable American Christian Right. But I understand him better now, and I’m willing to grant him a certain grudging respect for a degree of integrity that I had formerly not appreciated.
June 25, 2021
Sensitive and readable study of the language use of born-again Christians, showing in a series of thematic case studies how Falwell and others are able to adjust to changing circumstances while continuing to position themselves and their experiences within a biblically-inspired narrative.
August 15, 2016
This ethnographically-informed book is superb. Reading it, I not only learned a lot about American Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, but I learned a lot from Harding about how to navigate one's anthropological research terrain when one does not necessarily share the worldview of one's research community. Harding does not dismiss people's beliefs as deluded or naive; she grapples with them herself, and seeks to understand the contexts surrounding these same beliefs. I think her approach should be applauded.
“Social scientist and professed unbelievers in general do not let themselves get close enough to “belief” to understand it, or, for that matter, even to see what it is. […] [Born again Christians believe that] God is really real. To continue to think otherwise would be irrational; it is disbelief that is false and unthinking. The appropriate question then is: how does this supernatural order become real, known, experienced, and absolutely irrefutable?” (Susan Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell)
“Social scientist and professed unbelievers in general do not let themselves get close enough to “belief” to understand it, or, for that matter, even to see what it is. […] [Born again Christians believe that] God is really real. To continue to think otherwise would be irrational; it is disbelief that is false and unthinking. The appropriate question then is: how does this supernatural order become real, known, experienced, and absolutely irrefutable?” (Susan Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell)
June 18, 2024
This was required reading for one of my Cultural Anthropology classes in college. I would consider it almost essential reading for those who want to understand the strange Frankenstein's Monster created between Fundamentalist Christians and Anarcho-Capitalists in the U.S. You need to understand your enemy to know how to stop them.
Jerry Falwell wasn't interesting as a person but what became of his deeds and coalitions are (sadly) a powerful force in America today.
Jerry Falwell wasn't interesting as a person but what became of his deeds and coalitions are (sadly) a powerful force in America today.
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March 16, 2013This is one of the more horrifying books I've read in awhile. Honestly, I am not sure I'm going to be able to finish it.
I am always appalled at the perceptions that non-Christians have of Christians, many of which are justified, unfortunately. What is worse is how the characteristics of high-profile Christians like Jerry Falwell (of whom I am not a fan), are assumed to be characteristic of all Christians. An example is the author's comparison of Jerry's tendency to puffing and embellishment as characteristic of THE BIBLE, i.e. why wouldn't a Christian make things up, the Bible does it. Aaarrrgfgghhhhhh.....
The book is optional for a graduate level anthropology course I'm taking (I was to choose one from a list to report on). It remains to be seen if I have the stomach to finish it. :<
I am always appalled at the perceptions that non-Christians have of Christians, many of which are justified, unfortunately. What is worse is how the characteristics of high-profile Christians like Jerry Falwell (of whom I am not a fan), are assumed to be characteristic of all Christians. An example is the author's comparison of Jerry's tendency to puffing and embellishment as characteristic of THE BIBLE, i.e. why wouldn't a Christian make things up, the Bible does it. Aaarrrgfgghhhhhh.....
The book is optional for a graduate level anthropology course I'm taking (I was to choose one from a list to report on). It remains to be seen if I have the stomach to finish it. :<
January 29, 2009
It's not really about Jerry Falwell and the Televangelists; well yeah it is. It's so much more though. Most people who generalize anthropology think of bones or living in exotic loactions with natives. An ethnography of people you may meet and interact with made this book so much more exciting. Beyond that is the fact that Susan Harding writes as a post modern anthropologist would, knowing that her presence shifts outcomes and that she is susceptible to habituating doctrines that she hears and sees on a daily basis. This might have been the book that committed me to wanting to pursue a degree in anthropology.
April 30, 2008
Umm... Terrifying
December 20, 2008
Boring.
OST NON-FICTION ADULT STK 280 HAR
OST NON-FICTION ADULT STK 280 HAR
May 20, 2013
Really useful look at the language and culture of fundamentalist and, to some extent, evangelical Christianity. Harding is not always the most succinct of writers, however.
laid-down
December 11, 2008Bored now.
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