“HEADS BOWED, EYES CLOSED”: ANALYZING THE DISCOURSE OF ONLINE EVANGELICAL ALTAR CALLS by Clint D. Bryan A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Middle Tennessee State University May 2016 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Mohammed Albakry, Chair Dr. Elyce Helford Dr. Patrick Richey I dedicate this dissertation to my wife Sally, without whose undying support this dream would never have been fulfilled. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My wife Sally is solely responsible for my return to graduate school. She serves as my inspiration and my best friend. I am grateful to Tyler and Abby for their faithful support through this arduous process. I also wish to thank my sister Cori and my son Philip for always being in my corner. I would like to thank Dr. Mohammed Albakry for helping to refine my writing as a scholar. Thank you, sir, for always treating me as a colleague. I appreciate the helpful insights of Dr. Elyce Helford and Dr. Patrick Richey, outstanding voices in their respective academic fields. My fellow graduate students and professors at Middle Tennessee State University each made valuable contributions to the academic I am today. I am profoundly blessed to work alongside remarkable faculty members and administrators at Northwest University, Kirkland, Washington. iii ABSTRACT This discourse analysis study examines the final moments of selected online sermons delivered by America’s leading evangelical pastors and speakers, paying particular attention to the language employed in the presentation of Christian gospel tenets, the public invitation for salvation, the altar call that identifies new followers, and the benedictory prayer meant to conclude each preacher’s remarks to the faithful. Machin and Mayr (2012) provide the theoretical framework of multimodal critical discourse analysis, a social semiotics approach, for interpreting the lexical elements, the nonverbal communicative movements, and the optics of each video (if taped) to uncover the embedded power relations of the sermonic discourse and the myriad ways in which the preachers carefully construct personas for accomplishing certain rhetorical aims. By uploading these audio and video tracks to the Internet, ostensibly for the purpose of proselytization, these evangelical ministers have blurred the lines between insider and outsider language by foregrounding the types of in-group discourse normally reserved for religious services held within the confines of brick-and-mortar church buildings. Moreover, archived sermon videos become linguistic artifacts that last well beyond the time of the sermons’ performance on Sunday mornings. Putting these sermons online and thereby obliterating the narrow boundaries of the traditional evangelical church audience, these preachers have opened a fairly ossified discursive form, the evangelical altar call, to linguistic scrutiny that provides valuable material for scholars interested in contemporary American religious discourse and practitioners (i.e., preachers interested in gearing their lexical choices to the understanding of potential parishioners unfamiliar with this iv language). Using Kenneth Burke’s (1970) seminal definition of religious conversion as persuasion effected toward initiates’ adopting a new language spoken by the faith community, this study asserts that this corporate indoctrination into new ways of speaking begins with the salvific prayer. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................... viii LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... ix CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................1 A level(ing?) platform ......................................................................................................5 Background of the discourse ............................................................................................7 Purpose of the study .........................................................................................................8 Research questions .........................................................................................................10 Significance of the study ................................................................................................12 Delimitations and limitations .........................................................................................13 Central thesis ..................................................................................................................14 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW / METHODOLOGY ..................................15 Literature review ............................................................................................................16 Methodology ..................................................................................................................26 Conceptual frameworks ..................................................................................................36 CHAPTER THREE: FAITH LANGUAGE: Talking the Talk, Walking the Walk ..........42 What is said (Content) ....................................................................................................41 Structural oppositions ............................................................................................44 Salvation formulae .................................................................................................47 In-group language ..................................................................................................55 Intertextuality .........................................................................................................62 What is unsaid (Context) ................................................................................................70 Salience ..................................................................................................................72 Speaking event contextualized ...............................................................................78 Spatial references ...................................................................................................82 Larger discursive choices .......................................................................................84 Implicature .............................................................................................................88 vi CHAPTER FOUR: THE PULPITEER: The Craft of Sermonizing ..................................90 How it is said ..................................................................................................................91 Verbs ......................................................................................................................93 Nominalization .......................................................................................................99 Transitivity/agency ..............................................................................................107 Overlexicalization ................................................................................................115 Pronoun usage ......................................................................................................124 CHAPTER FIVE: “CAN I GET AN AMEN?”: How Preachers Persuade .....................129 Figurative language employed .....................................................................................129 Metaphors for faith, conversion, and response ....................................................131 Recontextualization..............................................................................................143 Lexical fields constructed ....................................................................................147 Persuasive tactics enacted ............................................................................................150 Emotions ..............................................................................................................152 Urgency ................................................................................................................155 If-conditionals ......................................................................................................160 Playing the “God card” ........................................................................................165 CHAPTER SIX: “I KNOW HOW YOU FEEL”: Audience Connections .....................169 Speaker’s role performed .............................................................................................169 Speaker positioning ..............................................................................................171 Naming .................................................................................................................178 Self as example to follow/shun ............................................................................181 Audience response invoked ..........................................................................................184 Implied speech acts ..............................................................................................187 Response/physical actions ...................................................................................192 Audience interaction connected ...................................................................................194 Privacy/confidentiality .........................................................................................196 Speaking on others’ behalf...................................................................................200 CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION: Implications for Future Research .......................202 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................213 APPENDICES .................................................................................................................228 Appendix A: Definition of terms..................................................................................229 vii LIST OF TABLES Page Table 1: American Evangelical Megachurch Pastors Studied .......................................34 viii LIST OF FIGURES Page Fig. 1: Rambo’s (1995: 107) Matrix of Transformation ................................................18 ix 1 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION “The evangelist’s soapbox is obsolete. Accepting Christ and committing sin against Him are both done sitting at a computer screen today.” —L.D. Breen, “Newsmax’s Top 100 Christian Leaders in America,” 20 April 2015, Newsmax Chapter Abstract This introductory chapter situates this study in the middle of the contemporary phenomenon of American evangelical megachurches’ turning to new media for proselytizing the masses. After locating the scholarly gap this study attempts to fill, the chapter lists the guiding research questions, emphasizes the significance of this study to scholars and practitioners, acknowledges the inherent limitations of the study, and posits the central thesis of the dissertation. In December 2015, the streaming entertainment service Netflix, purveyor of movies and television programs (as well as original programming), sponsored new content in a genre that it had never tried previously: American evangelical church services. The video juggernaut that regularly categorizes film choices into subgroups such as “Films with a Strong Female Lead” and “Gay and Lesbian Movies,” announced a new label: “Special Interest.” Among those first programs include titles such as “Starting Over” by Andy Stanley, a pastor from Atlanta; “Fifty Shades of They,” a sermon series by Dallas-area minister Ed Young of Fellowship Church that alludes to E.L. James’s trilogy of novels Fifty Shades of Grey; “Winning Life’s Battles” with evangelist and best- selling author Joyce Meyer; and “#Death to Selfie” by Steven Furtick of Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina.