One pervasive feature of modern public discourse is the theoretical clash between the sacred and the profane. This tension often manifests itself in interminable conflicts between appeals to absolute values and consequentialist calculations of outcomes. In this essay, I examine Blaise Pascal’s famous Wager argument in light of the sacred/profane dichotomy. I argue that the central logical conflict in the Wager is Pascal’s attempt to warrant a sacred belief (the belief in God) through a profane, consequentialist calculation (the outcome of a bet). Since sacred appeals permeate modern political discourse, this essay examines the role of the sacred and the profane as competing modes of reasoning. Finally, I envision how a responsiveness to these differing logics can create a new empathetic and charitable approach to political, cultural, and moral controversy.

Research outlines positive associations between religiosity, forgiveness, and relational satisfaction. This mixed-methods analysis examines how religiosity influences transgressions and forgiveness among friends. A total of 251 adults described transgressions and forgiveness in their friendships, forgiveness-granting strategies, relational outcomes, and religiosity. Religious participants utilized more nonverbal and explicit strategies to communicate forgiveness than non-religious respondents. Religiosity was positively associated with a stable relational outcome, following forgiveness. An inductive analysis illuminated differences based on religiosity. Whereas non-religious respondents and Protestant females favored the discussion-based, conditional, and explicit forgiveness strategies, Protestant males and Catholics tended to withhold forgiveness following a relational transgression or even terminate the friendship.

Following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, both immigration and the refugee crisis became heated topics of debate within evangelical life as many feared possible terrorist attacks and cultural change, while others considered hospitality toward refugees as a core issue of the faith beckoning empathy and action. After framing Warner’s (2005) concept of poetic world making among religious publics and counterpublics through the use of sacred text, Leff’s (1997) discussion of hermeneutical rhetorics is invoked to reconsider differences within conservative evangelicalism, even while all interpretations are said to be grounded in Scripture. To develop a greater understanding of the differing vernaculars within evangelicalism and their enactment of imitatio, two sermonic discourses regarding immigration are placed in conversation to distinguish major differences between what is ultimately deemed a dominant political public and an orthodox counterpublic.

This paper argues that the twenty-year U.S. war in Afghanistan can persuasively be viewed as a holy war prosecuted on behalf of American-style liberalism. To make this argument, it develops a framework for understanding holy war as an issue of communication and draws on the work of Émile Durkheim, Patrick Deneen, James K. A. Smith, and Judith Shklar to situate liberalism as a religion. It then details how U.S. presidents proclaimed and prosecuted holy war in Afghanistan in five acts, showing how the conflict developed as a (liberal) religious war under Bush and continued until the August 2021 U.S. military withdrawal.

This study examines the effects of deductive and inductive preaching in a church setting. A sermon fulfills Bitzer’s description of a rhetorical event in context, exigence, and nature of utterance (1968). A series of deductive and inductive sermons was preached to gauge the preferences of listeners and impact of these rhetorical events on their lives. Two focus groups, as well as six interview subjects, participated in this qualitative study through pretests, post-tests, and interviews. Findings contribute to the field of communication by exploring ramifications of inductive and deductive preaching and the effects of each in a congregation situated in an increasingly biblically illiterate culture, specifically in the context of Churches of Christ.

Haredi Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods of New York have been aggressively targeted by anti-vax groups. Reaching the Haredim with misinformation is facilitated by the very accommodations used to keep the lifestyle separate and incorruptible. Actually, most rabbis, the experts on Jewish law, advocate for vaccination, and this comes straight from the communication of scripture. Despite the fact that the principles of a fundamentalist religion can complicate some life decisions, an understanding of religious law and a rabbi’s interpretation of scripture as the ultimate authoritative sources may best counter medical misinformation, both for the group itself and the public’s impressions of them.

This essay analyzes the form of Hillsong Los Angeles’s live Sunday services and Hillsong California’s digital services using Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic analysis. Specifically, it extends Burke’s concept of the “representative anecdote” to accommodate the sequence of formal choices made in Hillsong church services. Furthermore, it considers the dialectical interactions of this underlying narrative, the material aspects of the service, and ritual enactments of the discourse therein. The essay offers a processual look at how one of the most popular global church movements articulates an organizationally coherent message in a local setting and also contributes to our understanding how millennial-led ministries influence the contemporary religious marketplace.

Despite the Mormon Church having policies and doctrines that discriminate against 2SLGBTQIA+ folks, some queer people choose to stay in the organization. This study explores how collective forgetting is used as a strategy among queer Mormons as they navigate Othering. By employing a critical thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 15 queer and actively involved members of the Church, this research examines the tensions of remembering and forgetting discrimination and traces how official religious rhetoric influences interpersonal and identity decisions. Discussions on how the findings connect with whiteness and anti-queerness are presented within the context of the Church. Limitations and future paths of study are offered.

This essay examines Rev. Dr. Howard-John Wesley’s adoption of the Persona of the Humble Teacher while presenting a Bible study about sexuality to Alfred Street Baptist Church. The Persona of the Humble Teacher is a newly identified rhetorical persona that can be useful in discussions about debated topics within Christianity. In examining the methodology, the Humble Teacher uses rhetorical theology to bridge the educational gap between persons with opposing views. The goal is to increase the listeners’ consciousness by moving the listeners toward a deeper understanding of one another. In exploring the rhetoric of the Humble Teacher, I argue that Wesley develops the rhetorical situation as outlined in the seminal article “The Rhetorical Situation” by Lloyd Bitzer. Wesley uses both constitutive and invitational rhetoric to create the boundaries necessary for healthy dialogue. Given the Black church’s lack of discourse around LGBTQIA issues, religious leaders can adopt the Persona of the Humble Teacher as exemplified by Pastor Howard-John Wesley to engage in dialogue about sexuality and other taboo topics within the church.

In this study, we identify the privacy rules of people with religious beliefs different from the exclusivist Christian religious beliefs of their family members. Sixteen individuals with significantly different religious beliefs than their exclusivist Christian family members were interviewed to discern the privacy rules guiding their decisions regarding their religious belief revelations. An analysis of interview transcripts demonstrated that participants created privacy rules about what information about their religious beliefs to reveal and how to reveal information about their religious beliefs. Results are considered in light of preceding literature on religious belief revelation and privacy management.

On June 17, 2015, white supremacist Dylann Roof walked into Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Charleston, South Carolina, with a .45 caliber Glock handgun while members conducted their Wednesday night bible study. After sitting through the mid-week bible study, near the close of the meeting and after praying with them, Roof shot and killed nine people who became known as the Emanuel Nine. Black pain again was on full display in the media and so were calls for forgiveness. In this essay, we examine the rhetoric of forgiveness and how forgiveness, as a trope, performs in public when expressed through black pain. Further, we maintain that the wider public not only expects a rhetoric of forgiveness when racial ghosts of the past (and present) manifest in ways that cause black pain but also those grief-stricken black families must offer the forgiveness in non-threatening and expeditiously ways that ease public consciences. This leads us to examine the rhetoric of (un)forgiveness and how it functions through black pain as well.

In 2012, Chris Stedman, then the Humanist chaplain at Harvard University, published the memoir Faitheist. Stedman (2012) argues that nonreligious people ought to join with people of faith in working toward social justice in the world rather than taking antagonistic positions on religion in the vein of so-called New Atheism. To build his argument, Stedman reflects on his own upbringing in a passively nonreligious family, his teenage conversion to evangelical Christianity, his discovery of his own queer identity, his subsequent acrimonious rejection of religion, and his eventual shift to a less militant atheism that sought commonality with persons of faith. Drawing on scholarship about the role of civility in public discourse and the study of narrative genres, this essay builds the case that Stedman’s narrative includes a number of conversion stories, as well as a coming out story (which shares many features of the conversion narrative genre). The generic (that is, related to genre) patterns that emerge in these various stories cohere to help Stedman make a case for the radical potential of (non)religious civility—amid differences—by finding common ground in shared values.

The Babylon Bee, a Christian parody and satire website launched in March 2016, has quickly gained attention and a large following amongst Evangelical Christians and communities online. This paper argues that the site promotes a specific strain of Evangelicalism that may be understood through the concept of countersymbols developed by Jonathan J. Edwards. Using Edwards’s notions of countersymbols as an organizing concept to analyze the use of parodic and satirical rhetoric, this article argues that The Babylon Bee portrays a vision of the church in contemporary society that may be described as exemplifying the countersymbol of “Sincerity.”

This article contributes to the ongoing scholarly conversation on religious rhetoric in American politics by focusing on the role of Anglicanism in promoting political compromise. Using the rhetoric of former U.S. Senator and U.N. Ambassador John Danforth, this article suggests that the dominant theories of religion and politics have failed to consider the significant influence of mainline Protestantism in shaping public discourse in the United States. In doing so, the extant literature has established a false dichotomy between political compromise and sincere religious belief. By turning to questions of underlying virtue, scholars can better understand the significant role of various religious traditions in American politics and political compromise.

There are unique rhetorical employments of myths such as mythopoeia that are often overlooked in rhetorical scholarship. In this paper, I argue that C.S. Lewis employed mythopoiesis as he spoke one of the greatest sermonic works of the twentieth century entitled The Weight of Glory. Kilby (1964) contends that mythopoeia through a Lewisonian lens encourages a greater understanding of existence through “picture-making” but, more significantly, issues a “deep call from that Reality” (p. 81). In other words, the employment of mythopoeia by a rhetor is, in a sense, a summons to enter into and experience the myth-world being constructed or, in the case of Lewis, the myth-world of Christianity. Although, collectively, the world experienced one of its greatest travesties during the Second World War, it was at this very exigence that Lewis’s rhetoric provided a summons to experience the world anew through religious communication. Therefore, this essay will examine C. S. Lewis’s sermon The Weight of Glory at Oxford University in 1941 and his employment of mythopoiesis to persuade students to believe in the Christian mythos and thus long for a “far-off country,” thereby giving hope at a desperate moment during the war.

One of the most important shifts occurring in the religious landscape is a significant increase in the number of churches that are ordaining and calling women to the ministry. While a tremendous amount of work in communication has studied the differences in speech by male and female speakers, that analysis has not turned to the level of the sermon. Using nearly 900 sermon transcripts collected from pastors of both genders, this paper uses a number of text analysis techniques including natural language processing and sentiment analysis to understand the differences in sermon delivery between the genders. Our findings note that while sermons delivered by males are significantly longer, female speakers are more likely to use first person pronouns and tentative speech than their male counterparts. Overall, our sentiment analysis finds that women are more likely to use positive words; however, sentiment varies dramatically across the entire arc of the sermon.

This paper analyzes African American abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth in the context of two rhetorical paradigms—womanist theology and Black feminist standpoint epistemology—in order to highlight the ways that she used the podium and the pulpit to validate the black woman’s experience and her particular embodied ways of knowing. Significantly, Truth asserted her authority in public spaces as a black woman whose life was rooted in Afro-centric thought and tradition. The paper enhances scholarship in the field of theological-based rhetoric and extends the work of rhetorical scholars who have focused on her famous speech, “Aren’t I a Woman.” The paper highlights Truth as a maverick feminist theologian who was instrumental in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements.

Racist ideologies have dominated the discursive landscape of American Evangelism for centuries. Charland’s (1987) theory of constitutive rhetoric explores the relationship between rhetoric and ideological interpellation. Subsequent scholarship examined the outcomes of constitutive rhetorics in a wide variety of rhetorical situations. However, scholars have not exhausted theoretical extensions of the theory nor potential areas for its usage. In particular, scholars have regrettably overlooked potential insights from religious discourses. To compensate for this oversight, I analyze how a rhetor used constitutive rhetoric to resituate Christian identity into a more inclusive ideological framework, by dislocating connections between race and biology. My analysis advances three arguments on the nature of constitutive rhetoric, encourages sustained engagement by scholars with religious discourses, and draws attention to the complexities of (re)articulating a Christian voice on perceived racial differences. First, I argue that constitutive rhetoric’s suitability to a particular rhetorical situation depends on its ability to address multiple layers of social identity simultaneously as a means of negotiating and navigating tensions and conflicts between existing and emerging subject positions. Second, I highlight the potential for a rhetor to embody a constitutive rhetoric as a means of grounding ideology in lived experiences. Third, I demonstrate the power of constitutive rhetoric, especially religious discourses, to inscribe moral frameworks onto subjects. From this study, scholars will gain a better understanding of the interdiscursive relationship between subject positions, recognize the potential for a rhetor to embody a constitutive discourse, and gain a better grasp of the action-imperative of constitutive rhetoric. Finally, I conclude by charting future directions for the development of Charland’s theory.

Religious organizations have increasingly used the Internet to recruit and socialize new members, with the number of congregational websites in America quadrupling since 1998. Despite such exponential growth, few communication scholars have focused on congregational websites and the often ambiguous messages they convey. In this study we explored the use of shell nouns (Schmid, 2000) on more than 100 congregational websites in the major metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Tampa Bay. Results not only revealed the prevalent use of “family” and “community,” but also the way these ambiguous terms stipulated a specific set of actions in order for new attendees to become official members: (a) communal learning, (b) sustained attendance, and (c) public service. Thus, the ostensibly inclusive vernacular of “family” and “community” was actually shown to constitute an exclusionary organizational structure that marginalized anyone unable to fulfill its specific requirements.

The people of the United States and elsewhere who consistently continue to suffer systematic economic, social, and political injustices are often overlooked and unacknowledged in the field of Communication Studies. It is this kind of degrading, humiliating, and marginalizing existence of the “suffering other” that urgently exhorts us to cultivate and practice compassion in our discipline. In this essay, I argue that it is simply not enough to have a social justice focus in Communication Studies. By using Tibetan Buddhist teachings, especially the Dalai Lama’s on compassion, I argue that there is also an important need to augment social justice with attention to the role compassion plays in addressing social injustices from a spiritual perspective in the field of Communication Studies. I also explore some ways compassion can be cultivated in our students.