Praying “Straight from the Heart”: Evangelical sincerity and the normative frames of culture in action

Abstract

Based on ethnographies of two Evangelical Christian contexts in the U.S., this article investigates how Evangelicals’ expectation that prayer be sincere – i.e., an honest reflection of the praying subject’s true thoughts, feelings, and desires – enabled prayer to do particular kinds of cultural work for Evangelicals at the same time it created a series of troubling dilemmas surrounding the practice itself. Through this empirical analysis, we develop the more general theoretical concept of normative frames to draw broader sociological attention to how groups’ normative expectations regarding how cultural tools should (and should not) work interact with and influence the pragmatics of culture in action. We discuss how future sociological scholarship on the possibilities and problems of culture in action can benefit from further study of the complex and sometimes paradoxical interplay between cultural tools and their normative frames.