Proselytizing is not evangelism: epistemic virtue and religious suasion at a post‐fundamentalist church in Nashville
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This essay proposes a moral epistemological explanation for many US evangelicals’ growing unease about proselytizing. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at a church in Nashville, Tennessee, it highlights how a particular kind of epistemological certainty became a driving value of evangelical biblicism when early nineteenth‐century evangelicals attempted to apply the precepts of inductive science to textual interpretation. Members of the church I studied routinely express regret about this historical entanglement, which they blame for their denomination's dogmatic and ultimately unsuccessful fixation on persuading other people to believe the exact same things as they do. Against ‘proselytizing’ driven by ‘the desire to be right’, my interlocutors are trying to develop a practical social ethics whose explicitly biblical inspiration, they hope, will motivate others to want to become Christians. I show that as an analytic, religious suasion makes concepts like ‘proselytizing’ and ‘evangelism’ ethnographic again by sending them back to the field where our interlocutors themselves define and critique them. Doing this allows us to better grasp nuances in evangelicals’ own evolving ideologies and practices for making their religion intelligible to themselves and others.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".