Volume 4 Number 1 Article 1 2020 “Knowledge Puffs Up”: The Evangelical Culture of Anti—Intellectualism as a Local Strategy Mark Ward Sr. University of Houston-Victoria,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://mds.marshall.edu/sermonstudies Part of the Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics Commons, and the Organizational Communication Commons Recommended Citation Ward, Mark Sr.. "“Knowledge Puffs Up”: The Evangelical Culture of Anti—Intellectualism as a Local Strategy." Sermon Studies 4.1 (2020) : 1-21. https://mds.marshall.edu/sermonstudies/vol4/iss1/1 Copyright 2020 by Mark Ward Sr. This Original Article is brought to you by Marshall Digital Scholar. For more information, please contact the editor at
[email protected] “Knowledge Puffs Up”: The Evangelical Culture of Anti—Intellectualism as a Local Strategy Cover Page Footnote Mark Ward Sr. is an associate professor of communication at the University of Houston-Victoria This article is available in Sermon Studies: https://mds.marshall.edu/sermonstudies/vol4/iss1/1 Ward Sr.: The Evangelical Culture of Anti-Intellectualism “Knowledge Puffs Up”: The Evangelical Culture of Anti-Intellectualism as a Local Strategy1 Mark Ward Sr. “Knowledge [does] what?” asked Pastor Lonnie,2 stepping to the side of his pulpit and cupping his hand to his ear to elicit a response from the audience. “Puffs up!” answered the 140 souls gathered for the Sunday morning service at Riverside Bible Church, a nondenominational and evangelical congregation located in a midsized city of the southwestern United States. Seated in my usual pew that morning, I was not surprised that Lonnie’s flock could so easily fill in the phrase taken from 1 Corinthians 8:1, “Now about food sacrificed to idols: We know that ‘We all possess knowledge.’ But knowledge puffs up while love builds up” (NIV).