Persuasive Strategies in Religious Discourse

This paper studies communicative strategies in religious discourse to investigate persuasive strategies that are employed and are more useful to preachers in preaching and sermons. The study takes into account the value of persuasive strategies, such as topical control, topic shifting, pace and pause, repetition, repair delayed tactics and termination as well as refutation, cause and effect and motivated-sequence and analyzes how they are used in the sermons. The study further examines stylistic devices such as metaphors, simile, analogy, personification, and allusion that are used by the preachers for persuading the audience based on texts, videos and audio from the Catholic, Protestant and the Muslim preachers. The data collected demonstrates that Pace and pause, repetition, cause and effect, refutation and topic control are used by preachers more than other persuasive strategies in the sermons. The data further reveals that speech acts such as commanding, entreating, asking, commissioning, performing and directing are useful in the preaching but commanding is more useful than the rest. The results also showed that Metaphors are used more than other stylistic devices.