This article is an ethnographic study of Covenant Baptist Church and the Reverend Cantrell for the expressed purpose of exploring the language of conversion. It does that, but sadly in a way that is too personal, too adversarial and disrespects the subjects of the study. Some value comes from the descriptions found within.
Susan Harding wrote this article in 1987 and from the first sentence of her article she positioned her study as a confrontation between the fundamentalism of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority and the rest, "their culture is premised on a commitment to assimilate "the world" on fundamentalist terms..."(167) Her purpose is to scrutinize "...a bundle of strategies—symbolic, narrative, poetic and rhetorical—for confronting individuals, singly and in groups, stripping them of their cultural assumptions, and investing them with a fundamentalist mode of organizing and interpreting experience”(167). This type of language is reactionary and off-putting. She throws objectivity out the window before she begins her investigation. This framing, from the tone of her opening description to the use of selected psychologists’ and social scientists’ view that there is something flawed in the mind of those who convert, places Harding on a witch-hunt. Otherwise good observations about the language of conversion, the culture in which it takes place, and meanings assigned by the speakers and hearers sharing their faith, are tainted by her excess. While she attributes much of the language to appropriate religious categories she infuses hostile aggressive motives to the speakers. The Reverend Cantrell is after her, engaged in, “…his final pitch for my soul.”(179) At one point she talks about how close she came to conversion,
“the membrane between disbelief and belief is much thinner than we think. All I had to do was listen…it drew me across that membrane in tiny ways so I began to acquire the knowledge and vision and sensibilities, to share the experience, of a believer.”(178)
Fortunately, or I guess unfortunately from the Baptist perspective, Ms. Harding was able to come to her senses before she “went native.” I have a hard time with this work because she seems so bias and lacking credibility. However, I do think some of her categories and descriptions of the rhetoric of conversion are useful.
I doubt there was an IRB involved in Susan Harding’s investigation of this Baptist congregation. It is unlikely they would communicate so freely with a person who was made to fully disclose the nature of her investigation. Ethical considerations aside the ethnography yielded details, nuances, and intimacy with the subject no other method could match. She was able to get in close and hear and discuss what she wanted to investigate in greater detail than any other method I’ve read. When you are that close I believe you need to treat the subjects with greater respect than when they are anonymous statistical entries. Harding glaringly crosses that line many times and it hurts her article.
