Rhetoric, Religion, and Tragic Violence

Sacred words often provide succor, summoned to comfort individual victims and entire communities ravaged by acts of violence. History also demonstrates, however, that religious discourse, like rhetoric itself, functions as a pharmakon—both a remedy and a poison. Religious discourse evoked to incite or justify violence functions as a kind of rancor or intense partisan anger that distorts reality, exacerbates harm, and eschews the accountability of its perpetrators. Moreover, a third function of religious rhetoric synthesizes sacred succor and rancor to express the productive tension of righteous indignation employed by speakers to decry violence and demand social justice.

This compendium of both historic and contemporary speeches on the intersecting themes of religion, rhetoric, and violence endeavors to complicate the rhetoric/violence binary by interpolating religion (another foundational and cultural belief inextricably entangled with both rhetoric and violence) into the dialectic.

Christopher J. Oldenburg is Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies and Chair of the Communication Arts Department at Illinois College. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Pope Francis: Critical Mercy and Conversion for the Twenty-First Century (Lexington Books, 2018) Religious Communication Association Book of the Year Award 2019.

Adrienne E. Hacker Daniels is the A. Boyd Pixley Professor of Humanities and Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies, Illinois College. She is editor of the volume, Communication and the Global Landscape of Faith (2016). Her second edited volume, Casting the Art of Rhetoric with Theatre and Drama: Taking Center Stage is forthcoming 2024.