Exploring political content in religious communication: A linguistic approach

Abstract

Although some studies - such as those by Shaw (1952), Powell (1967; 1975); Ro'I (1984), Craig and Litzenberger (1993), Omenka (2010), and Ahyar (2019) - have established the use of propaganda in religious communication, propaganda is usually not associated with the domain of religious communication and is not generally thought of in relation to sermons. Rather, propaganda is associated with political communication such as speeches. For example, propaganda has been used prominently in political communication in Nigeria since the pre-colonial period (Okolie, Enyiazu, and Nnamani. 2021). However, religion and politics are interwoven in the Nigerian context. Since propaganda thrives in Nigerian politics, it is not unreasonable to expect that propaganda could also find its way into religious communication in Nigeria.

Religious communications are commonly associated with persuasion, whereas the nature of persuasion and political communication are closely related. Thus, recipients of these religious communications in an environment like Nigeria, need to be aware and well informed on how propaganda works in order to identify it, even in religious places

This study investigates the linguistic characteristics of sermons by four notable clergies from Nigeria. These pastors may have political influence, but it is expected that they should mainly focus on their pastoral calling. My aim is to foreground the extent to which their sermons are characterised by political communications rather than persuasion. To achieve this, I employed a mixed-methods design, incorporating both qualitative and quantitative techniques. Specifically, I used Critical Discourse Analysis to explore the textual data at macro-level by means of a close reading and corpus analytic methods to look at micro-level features. The former, since it partly entails non-linguistic approach, includes a framework similar to that proposed by Maritz in 2019, designed to investigate propaganda in addition to traditional corpus-based, which I then used to confirm the qualitative results. investigation of keywords. As such, quantitative corpus methods serve to confirm and enrich the qualitative discourse analysis.

Propaganda is mostly achieved through the use of certain subtle strategies. This is because propaganda is most successful when the recipients do not recognise it (as being intended to influence them). Based on an extensive literature review, I identified 25 propaganda strategies, including non-grammatical and grammatical strategies, which have been shown as characteristic of propaganda to help establish if propaganda is employed in the selected texts as opposed to persuasion. Based on my analysis of the selected text, I formulated five new strategies that emerged as peculiar patterns of meaning noticeable in the data. With reference to these strategies and drawing on the framework of Martiz (2019), the four pastors were grouped as political and nonpolitical.

The findings of this study show that although all the pastors employed a number of propaganda strategies as shown by Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Corpus Linguistics Analysis (CLA), the extent and orientation of their uses differ along the sermons of the political and non-political pastors. The political pastors engaged far more strategies associated with political propaganda than