Rhetoric, Religion, and Tragic Violence

Foreword

Speaking of Religion: A Book Series advances the important principle that religious words and ideas continue to hold authority and power in an increasingly secular public sphere. Claiming that religious beliefs, symbols, and themes lack efficacy in public efforts to move listeners’ beliefs, attitudes, or actions a significant plurality of intellectuals argue that we live in a post-Christian society. This historic turn echoes Nietzsche’s “God is Dead” statement. The statement implicates not only historic Christianity, but suggests the rise of post-theism, apatheism, and even the understanding of human life is at a risk in society.

The segregation of private religious talk from public policy debates whether political or social is the presumed norm in scholarly quarters. The Speaking of Religion series, on the contrary, offers evidence that religion wields an outsized influence in the public sphere. Indeed, scholars of religion, sociology, communication, and rhetoric understand that religion broadly defined has either resurged or persisted as a controlling narrative in the public sphere. The public speaking of prominent influencers substantiates this claim. The present volume is, at the minimum, an argument that public communicators believe this is true and act as if it is true when they message their audience members.

The current volume, edited by Illinois College’s Adrienne Hacker Daniels and Christopher Oldenburg, supported as they are by emerging rhetorical scholar (and Illinois College alumnus), Sergio Peña, provides an exploration of the rhetoric of tragedy. Tragedy originates in spoken words as surely as peace emerges from words spoken. Both lived experience and historical events demonstrate that rhetoric in the midst of tragic circumstances evokes both peace and violence. At a minimum the power to create peace or to provoke violence is embedded in rhetoric.

Nonetheless, the questions remain: “How do words accomplish their purpose? How are ideas crafted linguistically to create peace and to elevate violence?”

These are fundamentally religious questions. The origin narratives that support the three Abrahamic faiths, for example, are instructive here. Adam and Eve spoke the cataclysmic “No” to the Creator in Genesis creation narrative. Their “No” symbolizes all practices that reject goodness, righteousness, and justice. In this instance, their words perpetrate violence on the created, “good” order. The religious heritage of the Jewish tradition provides a corrective to violence which is, interestingly enough, also spoken. That word? Shalom. Shalom knits together the reality of God, humanity, and creation; it signals a hoped-for state of harmony, unity, justice, and righteousness. It is used both to refer to healthy relationships between groups or individuals as well as to a sense of wellness or safety of an individual or group.

Hacker Daniels and Oldenburg, the volume’s editors, originally planned to develop a book that examined the American civil rights movement. Other speech texts continued coming to their attention and initially seemed to be peripheral to their project. Ultimately, the volume editors chose—and wisely so I believe—to expand their effort and include texts well-beyond the civil rights movement.

Furthermore, by placing in juxtaposition the carefully chosen speech texts noted in their proposal, Hacker Daniels & Oldenburg open the door to new understandings of religion, rhetoric, and tragic violence. (Not all violence is tragic; not all tragedy is violent. The book’s focus is unique in curating these texts, placing them side-by-side.)

The notion that religious rhetoric (speech) in times of tragic violence generates pharmakon, both a remedy and a poison, during times of tragic violence is exclusive to this work as far as I know. There may be works that focus on religious rhetoric as a balm (i.e., a remedy), and other works that focus on such rhetoric as a weapon (i.e., a poison). To my knowledge, however, the proposed volume is exclusive in placing such texts in conversation with each other. Thus, the work has a dual emphasis on succor and rancor.

The late scholar of rhetoric and public affairs Martin J. Medhurst challenged “individual discourse communities to form their own canons through the process of rhetorical archaeology—the recovery of texts and discourses central to the self-understanding and public expression of specific groups and movements.”¹ Medhurst’s challenge is the continuing basis for the Speaking of Religion book series. In the case of this ongoing project, the discourse community is that of religious communication scholars. Specifically, scholars of religious communication, functioning as a broad discourse community, have banned together by means of the book series to generate a sequence of thematic volumes that address the roles and functions of religion within social movements and public policy debates.

This book you hold in your hands is a labor of love and persistence on behalf of the editors; it is a tribute to Professor Medhurst’s vision. May contemporary readers listen carefully to the voices of the past as we chart our voyage into the future.

Daniel S. Brown, Jr.

Noblesville, Indiana

Twentieth century literary critic Kenneth Burke avers that the art of rhetoric “is produced for the purposes of comfort, as part of the consolatio philosphiae. It is undertaken as equipment for living, as a ritualistic way of arming us to confront the perplexities and risks. It would protect us.”¹ Burke, true to the idiom of his theoretical system, explicated in the most Promethean of diction, always reveals contradiction. The idea that an individual or a culture wounded by violence would be consoled by violence through the piety of “arming” and “confronting” threats speaks to a homeopathic dialectic implicit in Burke’s cycle of terms. René Girard, whom from Burke appropriated much, notes the mimetic scapegoat function is predicated on the “paradox of archaic religion… that, in order to prevent violence, it resorted to substitute violence.”² Succor implies an oppositional rancor from which to protect against.

A monistic understanding of Burke’s palliative theory has conventionally been augmented by religion, long evoked in the forms of eulogies, panegyrics, funeral orations, and memorials, to offer solace for sorrowful events, violence, and death. Such forms are magnanimous and are often exemplary instances of religiously inspired, epideictic oratory. In The Rhetoric of Religion, Burke concedes that “the history of religions has also been the history of great discord.”³ Burke’s words ring true when one observes the religious rhetoric, currently manifested in Christian Nationalist discourse enveloping much of the nation, has degenerated into a violent theological dystopia. Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry note, a volatile interface between “nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with divine action for authoritarian control and militarism,” has gripped out nation. “It is as ethnic and political as it is religious.”⁴ Decades earlier, political theorist Carl Schmitt concluded that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby for example the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver, but also because of their systematic structure.”⁵ Schmitt’s observation, expressed as the will of a nation-God, is succinctly emblazoned on MAGA endorsed T-Shirts: “Jesus is My Savior, Trump is My President.” Moreover, Benedict Anderson in his seminal work Imagined Communities explains that the roots of nationalism are embedded in antecedent cultural systems, those of the religious community.⁶

A cursory viewing of the January 6^th insurrection footage displays a multitude of sacred symbols emblematizing Jesus’s will to empower insurrectionists’ victory. Political rhetoric and religion have made for sometimes strange and violent bedfellows, where political violence (violence predicated on political ideologies) is committed predominantly in the name of religion—with religion providing the claims and the supporting evidence. G.O.P. Congressman Adam Kinzinger serving on the January 6 Committee, has opined on what he believes to be an outrageous equivalency: “And you have people today that, literally, I think in their heart—they may not say it—but they equate Donald Trump with the person of Jesus Christ. And to them, if you even come out against this ‘amazing man Donald Trump,’ which obviously quite flawed, you are coming out against Jesus, against their Christian values.”⁷ And in a Time article, Franklin Graham repudiated Republican congresspersons who voted to impeach Trump after the January 6 insurrection, calling them a collective “Judas.”⁸

Adam Kinzinger released a compilation of hate-filled profane and threatening voicemails that were sent to his congressional office. As reported by Yahoo News, the callers’ wrath was leveled at Kinzinger for “not buying into former President Trump’s baseless election fraud lies.”⁹ A graphic instance introducing the vile and disgusting calls, states, “Keep in mind all voicemails and phone calls are received by my interns, high school or college level, attempting to learn about the legislative process.”¹⁰ One particular voicemail sent by a woman, employing the most religiously rancorous rhetoric in the most subdued tone stands out: “Wrath of the Lord God Almighty come upon you, your health, your family, your home your livelihood and I’ll pray if it be God’s will that you suffer.”¹¹ The other messages are threats strung together with a veritable Carlinesque influence, but far removed from Carlin’s witty and brilliant disquisition on language. The woman’s threat is particularly chilling, intoning the threat to sound almost like a prayer.

Hent de Vries, employing a chiastic copula, states a profound verity, “No violence without (some) religion; no religion without (some) violence.”¹² Sacredness and violence are inseparable and sine qua non to most major religious traditions. As Girard proclaimed in his celebrated book Violence and the Sacred, violence is the “heart and secret soul of the sacred.”¹³ In the current American milieu, Girard’s premise is hardly clandestine. Socially mediated and contemporary instances of de Vries’s chiasmus abound. Recently, Atlantic writer Daniel Panneton inquired, “Why are sacramental beads suddenly showing up next to AR-15s online?”¹⁴ Panneton’s article, like the title suggests, explains “How Extremists Gun Culture is Trying to Co-opt the Rosary.” Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas, the diocese that includes Uvalde, bemoans the way some Americans have “sacralized death instruments.”¹⁵ Panneton argues sacred artifacts like rosaries are becoming weaponized. “The battle beads culture of spiritual warfare permits radical traditional Catholics to literally demonize their political opponents and regard the use of armed force against them as sanctified.”¹⁶ No where do we see this troubling linkage between religion and violence more than the increasingly visible and vocal forms of Christian Nationalism espoused by publicly elected members of the United States Congress and the Senate.

In June 2022, at the Family Camp Meeting’s “All Things Are Possible” conference in Colorado Springs, Representative Lauren Boebert addressed an audience on the significance of speaking up for conversative beliefs as a means of combating cancel culture. She quipped that Jesus didn’t have enough AR-15 rifles to “keep his government from killing him.”¹⁷ A bit later in referencing cancel culture specifically, Boebert remarked, “Cain canceled Abel.” “And guess what, it wasn’t with a big, scary AR-15, it was with a rock, so I don’t think it’s a firearm issue. I think it’s a heart, a sin issue.”¹⁸ Anachronism, hypocrisy, and blasphemy notwithstanding, what is perhaps most disquieting about Boebert’s rhetoric is how the so-called cancel culture phenomenon has been appropriated by the Christian Right to define their victimhood as well as demarcate cancel culture as a major battlefront in the latest culture war campaign.¹⁹ Secondly, in the wake of repeated mass shootings where AR-15s— high capacity weapons engineered to kill people as efficiently as possible—the Christian Right invokes rancor and violence so readily as a response to any deliberative arguments about gun reform and assault rifle bans. The fallacious perversion of biblical references imbued with the incongruous glorification of violence alone attests to the lethal mélange of religion, violence, and political rhetoric being promulgated by elected officials.

Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene publicized a trip that she made in June to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., affording her the opportunity to express contrition for the faulty analogy heard around the world. In an appearance on David Brody’s podcast in May, bemoaning the mask mandate put in place on the floor of the House of Representatives, Greene said, “You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star and they were definitely treated like second-class citizen, so much so, that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany.”²⁰ Days after the podcast, Greene doubled down on Covid protocols implemented in private retail outlets and grocery stores, where they allowed employees to be mask free if they were vaccinated, communicating that status by wearing a badge to that effect. Greene then opined, “Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi[’]s forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.” But even after she apologized in June (following the Holocaust Museum visit), she still claimed that the forced wearing of masks and getting vaccinations amounts to “a type of discrimination and I’m very much against that type of discrimination.”²¹ In response to her original comments in May, the American Jewish Congress (AJC) said, “You can never compare health-related restrictions with yellow starts, gas chambers and other Nazi atrocities. Such comparisons demean the Holocaust and contaminate American political speech.”²² And Joel Rubin, the AJC Executive Director, characterized Greene’s comments as hate speech and a trivialization of the Holocaust.²³

This volume is a compendium comprising both historic and contemporary speeches on the thematic imbrication of Religion, Rhetoric, and Violence. We endeavor to complicate the rhetoric/violence binary by interpolating religion, another foundational and cultural construct inextricably entangled with both rhetoric and violence, into the dialectic. Sacred words often provide succor, rhetorical emollient, summoned to comfort individual victims, and entire communities ravaged by acts of violence. However, history also demonstrates that religious discourse, like rhetoric itself, functions as a pharmakon—both as remedy and a poison. The Latin etymology for the word sacred, or sacer, originally meant something that is both simultaneously blessed and cursed.²⁴