In the speech code of American evangelicalism, the symbolic term “Christian worldview” and its companion term “biblical worldview” are ubiquitous. Speech codes theory (SCT) holds that symbolic terms simply and quickly communicate complex ideas, values, and meanings that are taken for granted in the shared culture of a speech community. Symbolic terms accomplish this work by activating community members’ cognitive schemata or shared mental organization of cultural knowledge. The present study elaborates the historical and contemporary ideas, values, and meanings tacitly conveyed by “Christian worldview,” reports field observations of a one-year “worldview” small group Bible study and interprets this symbolic term as a defining marker of American evangelical culture. SCT holds that a distinctive culture manifests a distinctive speech code of socially constructed meanings that shape its cultural life. The study argues that the symbolic terms “Christian worldview” and “biblical worldview” shape American evangelical culture life according to meanings essential for interpreting that culture and for the discursive constitution of evangelical subjectivity.

Margaret Thatcher made history in 1979 when she became the first woman prime minister in the history of the United Kingdom. Unlike many of her predecessors, Thatcher regularly drew on her religious faith in her rhetoric and her approach to shaping policy. This article argues that Margaret Thatcher’s public speeches, memoirs, and official biographies of her life, when taken together, offer a coherent statement of her understanding of Christianity that we call a rhetorical theology. Thatcher’s rhetorical theology offers a justification for her fiercely individualistic public policies from within her articulated religious perspective. We analyze fragments of discourse by and about Thatcher that we argue constitute her rhetorical theology: an understanding of Christianity that offers a muted British version of the prosperity gospel to justify conservative economic and social policies.

This article clarifies and extends “going nowhere correctly” (Arnett, 2010) as a metaphor for religious communication scholarship. The temporal context of “going nowhere correctly” is clarified by analyzing Augustine’s philosophy of time in Confessions. The existential conditions are clarified by analyzing the play Waiting for Godot. I propose that in practical religious discourse, “going nowhere correctly” implies a religious discourse of speaking while dwelling, which amounts to a form of epideictic rhetorical discourse. Further, I propose that a turn to this epideictic discourse remedies some problems in contemporary religious communication.

“Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” was the title of a 1922 sermon by Harry Emerson Fosdick, announcing a question that fueled public dispute in the fundamentalist–modernist controversy in 1920s America. The question persists today, but this article turns to the metaphors of apocalyptic rhetoric and routine cynicism to suggest a deeper question energizing fundamentalist and antifundamentalist rhetoric: What does the future of faith look like in an era of cynicism? This article brings a philosophical hermeneutic approach to Fosdick’s sermon as well as the rebuttals of John Roach Straton and Clarence Edward Macartney. Macartney’s distinctive form of apocalyptic rhetoric, this article argues, offers a possible way to counter fundamentalism’s dangers without tacitly accepting its methodological premises of marginalization and polarization.

Even in academic spaces, the ontology of plagiarism is contested, but it is even more so in Protestant evangelical contexts. Thus the very notion of plagiarism in the academy—and now in religious spaces—is unclear and may be subject to criticisms of power and questions of who gets to define what plagiarism means. In this article, we aim to elucidate the reemerging conversation about plagiarism in sermonic discourse captured in the 2021 #Sermongate scandal. We introduce the systematic, histo-cultural factors which have worked to shape these ontological beliefs about sermonic plagiarism and advocate for a general set of plagiarism standards.