TOWARD A RHETORICAL VIEW OF THE SACRED

James G. Gilmore

I would like to problematize this question a bit. To ask what the religious is, or what the sacred is, is to presume (I think) that the religious or the sacred exist in some sort of prediscursive essential quality. Several of our readings make this presumption, that there is somehow something essential or ideal about religion or sanctity; this Platonic assumption, I think, is appropriate for philosophers or theologians but not necessarily for rhetoricians. Whether or not there is something essential or ideal about religion or the sacred, in my opinion, does not matter to the rhetorician; if it does indeed exist, its only manifestation is through discourse or the symbolic.

Rather than ask what the sacred or religious is—as if there is some essential quality of sanctity or religion inherent in certain objects, places, ideas, or people—let us ask what the concepts of sanctity and religion do. As a rhetorical construction, what does declaring something to be sacred accomplish? What does calling a framework of thoughts and rituals a religion do? What work do these concepts do for the rhetor who effectively wields such discourse? What narratives, what roles, what personae do the rhetoric of the sacred and the religious call into being? In short—let us view the religious and sacred not as ideals kept between the fire and us in Plato’s cave, visible only to us in shadows and hints, but as entirely constructed, understood, defined, and shaped by the people who use the concepts. Let us view them as what Kenneth Burke would call “equipment for living”—ways of navigating the material world around us and adding meaning to the realities of our lives.

I will argue that the rhetoric of the sacred or religious calls into being dialectical tensions—tensions that engage rhetor and audience in negotiating the subject in question and their own attitudes toward it. Engaging the sacred in light of these tensions do work for rhetors, enabling them to constitute communities and motivate them to action, emphasizing some argumentative claims and obscuring others. Finally, I will argue that there is an ethical dimension to the rhetorician’s approach to the sacred.

[Sacred or Religious]—Secular

The first dialectical tension in play is the tension between the sacred or religious and the secular. Generally, when this tension is in play, the secular is presented as a broader concern than the sacred, which is usually seen as particular to one religion or sect. Several features of this tension are notable.

First, creating a divide between the sacred or religious and the secular is useful for rhetors from both “sides” of the divide. For the irreligious, declaring a concern to be sacred rather than secular compartmentalizes it; it makes it a concern for the religious community in question rather than one for the society as a whole. There are echoes here of a common argumentative thread used to keep women’s discourse out of the canon or the public eye; by declaring the “private” sphere the province of women, and “public” that of men, women were effectively silenced from public life. Feminist movements have long resisted this notion, proclaiming that the personal is political, and that women not only have a place in the public realm but also that the seemingly private sphere is also a place of political, social, and ideological contestation. A deleterious effect of the secular/sacred tension, I think, is that the purely religious can be similarly presented as apolitical and without ideology. This leads to a situation where discriminatory or hateful choices within religions—racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc.—are excused as the province of the religious sphere alone as long as they do not impact the “secular” realm.

Creating a division between religious and secular is also useful for religious rhetors, particularly those from more exclusive traditions. For example, as George Marsden points out in his history of American fundamentalist Christianity, the fundamentalist movement put a great deal of rhetorical stock—particularly after the Scopes trial—in their separation from “the world.” This was presented not as a situation of mere separation but opposition—in the mind of the fundamentalists, the world would persecute true Christians practicing the true faith, and thus the duty of the Christian was to win sinners’ souls out of the world and into the church. This notion of radical separation also led to numerous schisms, as fundamentalist sects decided that differences on the most minor points of doctrine were sufficient to separate from other, more “worldly,” churches or individuals.

Another notable feature of the sacred-secular tension is its continuing contestation in American culture. The categories that had held in the American political imaginary and conventional wisdom since the rise of the Christian Right in the late 1970s are breaking down. In the old conventional wisdom, it was the Right who wanted to break down the dividing line between sacred and secular values and impose their values on the nation, while those on the Left wanted to retain the “wall of separation” between the public and the religious. Among liberals’ complaints against Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush was the extent to which their policy decisions were steered by their religious sensibilities—or, at the very least, how much they circulated the image of their being guided by religion. This image was accepted happily by right-wing evangelicals, who continually put pressure on the Republican leadership to push American law in the direction of their religion’s beliefs—particularly in the ways in which the government dealt with sexuality. In the old formulation, the tension between sacred and secular did work for both left and right. The left emphasized separation between sacred and secular, using the rhetoric of the sacred to define a realm that should not encroach on political decisions; the right tied this tension into the notion of mission, suggesting that their efforts were an attempt to win over the secular realm of government for the sacred.

But this conventional wisdom is breaking down. Some prominent religious conservatives have advocated that the Christian Right get out of electoral politics, citing a widespread feeling that the Republican Party is not interested in actually fulfilling their agenda (for example, George W. Bush’s tepid support for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, and his nonexistent support for a constitutional amendment banning abortion). They think that while conservative religious voices should continue their struggle in the court system and in culture, electoral politics involves too much compromise, and neither major political party seems interested in taking real electoral risks to fulfill their agenda. The sacred-secular tension does work here in presenting politics as an essentially secular realm, in which compromise and weakness are valued, as opposed to an uncompromising and strident sacred realm. At the same time, the obliteration of the tension between secular and sacred is also a major feature of the growing Christian Left movement—of which one of the most notable voices is Jim Wallis, who proclaims that budgets are moral documents. The idea that sacred values should hold sway for the religious even in their public lives had been somewhat nascent in the progressive movement for a long time; the resurgence of the idea that all of the government’s decisions have moral ramifications, and that there should not be so thick a dividing line between sacred values and secular ideas in government, is a noteworthy development in the rhetoric of the sacred.

Sacred—Contingent

The other dynamic tension brought into operation by the rhetoric of the sacred is that between sacred and contingent. This is a more explicitly hierarchical tension than that between the sacred and secular; in the sacred-contingent tension, the sacred is clearly set higher than the contingent. Thus, to declare something sacred in setting it apart from the contingent serves several important argumentative functions.

The first function of this tension is to remove the object declared to be sacred from the realm of argument; the sacred is an incontestable notion. This is true because claims of the sacred are not really argued in the traditional way; though arguments for something being sacred can be found, they generally operate in such a way as to rest on other notions of the sacred. For example, the anti-abortion movement uses Bible verses to argue for the claim that life is sacred; however, for those verses to have any argumentative strength, one has to first accept that the Bible itself is sacred and authoritative. An argument based on a sacred text is unlikely to convince someone who does not believe in that text. This can function constitutively as well as argumentatively, particularly when a text or act is declared sacred; for example, a major source of dispute between denominations in Western Christianity is the degree to which the Eucharist is understood as sacred. Communities of faith are formed around a shared belief in the sacred.

The second rhetorical function of the sacred-contingent tension is to elevate the sacred over the contingent, motivating further action in defense of the sacred. Perhaps the best example of this is the anti-abortion movement; the belief that the lives of fetuses are sacred can be, for many members of the movement, the sole reason for supporting or opposing a political figure or party. Even if they disagree on every other issue, many anti-abortion voters will support only politicians who oppose abortion rights. The notion of the sacred does work here in motivating action above and beyond that given to other issues of policy.

Conclusion: Recognizing the Sacred

In this formulation, the question of recognizing the sacred becomes a much simpler one. Instead of looking for the shapes of the sacred in the shadows on the cave wall, we see the sacred plainly; if it is hidden or obscured, it will not perform its functions in culture. The sacred is recognizable only insofar as it serves its rhetorical functions; whether or not the rhetoric of the sacred corresponds to something that actually is sacred is outside the realm of inquiry for the rhetorician. In other words, with a functional view of the sacred, we will know the sacred by its fruits.

More important than the question of recognizing the sacred, I think, is the question of what the rhetorician should do with it. I hold with the many critics who have pointed out that there is an inescapable ethical dimension to rhetorical criticism; the question for me as a critic who studies the intersections of religion, politics, and culture is whether or not a particular rhetorical act invoking the sacred is a positive or negative force in culture. For example, as I point out above, the functional tension between sacred and secular has served to depoliticize the sacred, shielding sexism, racism, heterosexism, and other pernicious forms of discrimination and hate from criticism or critique by the larger society. This has led to material hurt for those who find themselves on the wrong end of these forms of hatred. For me as a critic, recognizing the work done by the rhetoric of the sacred in perpetuating and defending these practices of inequality is an essential part of engaging in a larger critique of these practices. A larger critical recognition of the role of notions of the sacred in the rhetoric of religion is, in my opinion, a crucial part of the continuing project to expose, name, and begin dismantling the inequalities and hatreds that continue to play a role in American religious life.