Essentializing the Evangelical - Defining Evangelical - The KKK Evangelical Mythology (Part 4)

Part 5 soon to follow...

This is a paper that I have developed for a class I am taking at New York University on Interpreting Popular Culture.

I would love to hear your feedback and recommendations.

If you have missed any parts of this paper, you can click on the following hyperlinks:

Part One: Introduction
Part Two: Defining the Evangelical: Melting Pot or Mosaic?
Part Three: Constructing the Mythology of the Evangelical
Bibliography
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The French narratologist/post-structuralist, Roland Barthes wrote a critical book entitled, Mythologies (Barthes, 1972). Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright aptly summarize Barthes definition of myth as:

…the ideological meaning of a sign that is expressed through connotation…the hidden set of rules, codes and conventions through which meanings, which are in reality specific to certain groups, are rendered universal and given for a whole society. Myth thus allows the connotative meaning of a particular thing or image to appear to be denotative, hence literal or natural (Sturken & Cartwright, 2001, 360).

I would like to recommend that there is a naturalized idea of what evangelical connotes as represented in the media which is being presented as universal and literal; and that there is a growing hegemonic co-optation to this idea. This mythology is constructing what I am calling “the KKK evangelical mythology.” It is the myth that all evangelicals are a combination of being:

• uncritical and narrow-minded
• radically right-wing fundamentalist
• puritanical
• white
• isolated and over-protective
• middle-class
• racist (or at least prejudice)
• misogynistic
• homophobic
• bigoted
• megalomaniacal
• mid-western Americans

Not all evangelicals are on a white-hooded, cross-burning crusade (or witch-hunt) to eradicate anything which is different to who they are and what they believe in. This ‘KKK evangelical myth’ seems to be represented in three predominant ways which I will illustrate:

1. The Kook
2. The ‘K’on (Con)
3. The ‘K’onquistador (Conquistador)

Over the next three postings, I will elaborate on each of these representations.

Go to Part 5 - Essentializing the Evangelical - Representation: The Kook