An Introduction to Religious Language

Exploring Theolinguistics in Contemporary Contexts

Valerie Hobbs

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350095762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Religious language is all around us, embedded in advertising, politics and news media. This book introduces readers to the field of theolinguistics, the study of religious language. Investigating the ways in which people talk to and about God, about the sacred and about religion itself, it considers why people make certain linguistic choices and what they accomplish.
Introducing the key methods required for examining religious language, Valerie Hobbs acquaints readers with the most common and important theolinguistic features and their functions. Using critical corpus-assisted discourse analysis with a focus on archaic and other lexical features, metaphor, agency and intertextuality, she examines religious language in context. Highlighting its use in both expected locations, such as modern-day prayer and politics, and unexpected locations including advertising, sport, healthcare and news media, Hobbs analyses the shifting and porous linguistic boundaries between the religious and the secular. With discussion questions and further readings for each chapter, as well as a companion website featuring suggested answers to the reflection tasks, this is the ideal introduction to the study of religious language.

1

Why religious language?

In the last ten years or so, numerous books and news articles have reported that religion is back. Writing about his recent book Living with the Gods, Neil MacGregor argues that while the advance of science caused religion to retreat over the last fifty years, the world is now putting its faith back in religion (MacGregor, 2018). Recent figures indicate that worldwide, 84 per cent of us identify with a religious group, some of the largest being Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Folk Religion and Judaism (Pew Research Center, 2017). ‘Religion is surging’, write John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, editor and Washington bureau chief of the Economist (Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 2010), pointing to phenomena like Californian megachurches, exorcism in Sao Paolo and mosques in Nigeria. Religion is even back in Sweden, according to a series run by highly respected morning paper, Svenska Dagbladet (‘Guds återkomst [The return of God]’, 2010).

Although numerous scholars have debated the rise and fall of religion as well as the complex question of what counts as religion, religious language more specifically has not attracted anything close to the same level of attention. Granted, religious language is only one of many methods by which we perform religion. Religion traditionally understood also involves places of worship and sacred landscapes, body language such as the sign of the cross and other gestures, sacred food, iconography and other artistic imagery, liturgical and otherwise special clothing and even keeping silent and still. Nevertheless, many religious activities require language. Prayer, religious songs, consecration, confession and preaching are just some of the examples we might think of straightaway. Although outside of the scope of this book, religious language is even in some non-Western religion closely intertwined with gesture, dance, chanting, music and other non-linguistic elements (see Beck, 1995; Bohlman, Blumhofer and Chow, 2006).

But beyond these explicit expressions, religious language is also embedded in unexpected places like advertising, politics, news media, popular culture and even healthcare, to name a few (see Figure 1.1). Politicians rely on it, pop singers tap into it, businesses benefit from it and sport fans invoke it. Yet most people are unaware of just how common religious language actually is. Professor of Bible, Society and Politics James Crossley writes, for instance, that many people are surprised at the amount of religious language that pervades political discourse in England (Crossley, 2018). And The New York Times recently reported Americans’ shock at Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s use of the Bible to justify President Trump’s policy of migrant family separation (Jacoby, 2018), despite the frequent use of language like this in politics. Religious language is all around us. But it is also something most of us use, perhaps even without realizing it. Religious language is a visible and significant means by which we construct and reconstruct our beliefs about the world and our place in it. By it we both bless and curse. By it we manipulate and are manipulated.

FIGURE 1.1 In Design We Trust.

In light of the pervasiveness of religious language in society and the need for skills to identify and critically examine it, the study of religious language has perhaps never been more important. In 1981, theologian F. W. Dillistone wrote, ‘Theolinguistics is one of the most urgent and yet most demanding disciplines of our time’ (Dillistone, 1981: 20). And yet, in his 2018 chapter ‘Whatever Happened to Theolinguistics?’ linguist David Crystal notes that the linguistic study of religious language, comparatively popular in the 1980s, has all but disappeared (Crystal, 2018). In fact, much of the scholarship on religious language has been done by philosophers, who consider what they call the ‘problem’ of religious language. Among the questions they’ve grappled with are: Is it possible to make truthful statements about invisible beings? Can religious language literally describe a deity? Does the use of metaphor mitigate the difficulty of describing the divine? Such questions are worth asking but don’t really get to the heart of why we use religious language and what it does for us.

Early interest in religious language by linguists in the 1970s was bolstered by a growing interest in linguistics more broadly, largely thanks to the work of American linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky. Some of this initial work on religious language focused on glossalia, or speaking in tongues, a type of pseudo-language, which has a particular socio-cultural function in some religious movements such as Pentecostalism. In his book Tongues of Men and Angels (Samarin, 1972), William Samarin analysed the more technical aspects of the phenomenon of tongues speaking. Around the same time, Felicitas Goodman completed her cross-cultural and largely anthropological work Speaking in Tongues (Goodman, 1972). Her definition of glossalia as a hyper-aroused, disassociative state was heavily criticized by Samarin and also Walt Wolfram as a distortion of this complex phenomenon (Wolfram, 1974). In short, early work on religious language was characterized by a focus on what made the talk of religious people different, weird even.

Work on religious language by linguists was boosted again in the early 1980s. During this period, Belgian linguist Jean-Pierre van Noppen introduced the term ‘theolinguistics’, based largely on his substantial work on spatial metaphors and, more specifically, spatial theography (van Noppen, 1980). Van Noppen’s ground-breaking work explored the question where is God? He also edited two volumes on religious language, the first including scholarship in the areas of semiotics, philosophy, theology, literary criticism, psychology and linguistics (van Noppen, 1981) and the second focusing on metaphor (van Noppen and Buscarlet, 1983).

Other scholars took up the mantle of theolinguistics, producing five volumes on metaphor and discourse analysis in a larger series published by Peter Lang in the 1990s. Noel Heather’s volume 5 in the series, entitled Religious Language and Critical Discourse Analysis, for example, focuses on the religious language some Christians use in order to manipulate and control (Heather, 2000). Another scholar, Webb Keane argued for the necessity of an ethnographic approach and attention to intentionality and agency in religious language (Keane, 1997). Then there are the collections edited by Tope Omoniyi, one with Joshua Fishman, of work by various scholars on the sociology of language and religion (Omoniyi, 2010; Omoniyi and Fishman, 2006). These include work on the language of Hinduism in the United States, holy hip-hop and language and religion in Bethlehem, Melbourne and Singapore.

In recent years, linguistic analysis of religious language has diversified even further, from work on Christian, Buddhist and Muslim sermons (Esimaje, 2014; Malmström, 2016) and prayer (Shoaps, 2002), to Christian hymns and other religious music (Ingold, 2014), to wedding invitations in Jordan and Iran (Al-Ali, 2006), to religious language in everyday talk. Stephen Pihlaja has expanded the field by considering religious language online, particularly between Muslims, Christians and atheists (see Pihlaja, 2014). Pihlaja has several other books in the works which will enrich our understanding of methods of analysing religious language (Pihlaja, 2021) as well as the links between religious language and cognition (Richardson, Mueller and Pihlaja, n.d.).

Then there is the work by a wide range of scholars that explores religious language in contexts such as politics and advertising but without the theory and tools of linguistics. Richard Mocarski and Andrew Billings, for example, consider how Nike and the basketball star LeBron James co-constructed the legend of King James, tapping into a Messiah narrative (Mocarski and Billings, 2014). Scholarly work explicitly focused on religious language has been steady but nevertheless somewhat scattered and at times difficult to locate.

Aims and summary of the book

We have seen important advances in the study of religious language, and there is further work on the horizon. But when it comes to our knowledge about how such language is put together, we have such a long way to go. What counts as religious language? Who uses it? Where can it be found? What are its distinctive features? What purposes does it serve? These are all questions we have only begun to answer. Truly, the topic of religious language is gargantuan. This book aims to contribute to the study of religious language by exploring why people use religious language and what it accomplishes. It aims to present and study some of the common features of the language people use to talk to about what they hold sacred. It considers the use of religious language both in religious and in seemingly non-religious contemporary contexts. Over the next nine chapters, this book aims to raise questions that bring together and in some ways challenge the limited work on religious language, ultimately considering the question: Is it possible to be human without being religious?

This book does not claim to provide an exhaustive model of the ways religious language works. But then, the approach I use to study religious language would be inconsistent with such an attempt. Like all language, religious language is versatile and changeable. If I were attempting in this book to formulate rules that govern religious language, I’d trip over before I even began. Instead, my main aim in this book is to uncover at least some of what religious language does for us and what that tells us about ourselves as human beings. Only after considering why and for what purposes we use religious language will I begin to identify some of the common features we rely on to accomplish these purposes. In short, this book is an introduction to the topic of religious language. It focuses on some of the macro and micro features of religious language: religious vocabulary, archaic language, parallelism, metaphor and intertextuality, all operating within a set of contextual clues, text types and larger discursive strategies that often mark a text as religious.

My own research has focused on religious language in English within parts of the world where Christianity is prominent. So this book will substantially lean on what religious language looks like and accomplishes in this set of contexts. However, throughout the book, I will draw attention to scholarship on and examples of religious language in other contexts, wherever possible. I will consider the extent to which the ways people use religious language around the world support or undermine my overall theory, which is this: everyone, regardless of religious affiliation or lack thereof, participates in sacred-making through language.

I hope that this book will be useful for a wide range of readers, whether you have a passing interest in the subject, are undertaking academic study of religious language or are teaching in this area or a related one. Ultimately, what I want for every reader is that by the end of this book, you will be equipped with a few tools to identify and critically examine the religious language you encounter and perhaps even use and, ultimately, to reflect on what you hold sacred.

Chapter 2 will explore definitions of and debates around the concept of religion and what these mean for definitions of religious language. I’ll first consider closed definitions of religion and their limitations, moving on to the open horizon that more inclusive definitions offer. I will put forward a functional approach to religion, which considers what religion does for us and why. Central to all of this are ideology and its relationship to language. I’ll discuss this briefly, then end by explaining why I choose the term ‘religious language’ over other possibilities.

Chapter 3 begins with an overview of a functional theory of language and explains concepts like discourse and context. I’ll then explore three functions of religion and religious language in greater detail, ending with an example of religious language at a funeral, where the functions of religious language meet.

Chapter 4 is the first of three chapters that comprise a toolkit for studying religious language. In each chapter, I discuss tools for identifying and analysing common features of religious language. This chapter will start by dividing religious language into two categories: explicit and implicit. This will take us to the exploration of contexts where religious language is likely to appear, both overtly religious and less so. I’ll then concentrate on the ways a text’s structure can com...