Bethany Keeley

University of Georgia

Position Paper

RSA summer institute 2009

At first, I was tempted to answer the question “what is the sacred?” theologically. However, I found that delineating what qualified within my belief system was utterly unhelpful for rhetorical analysis of the role of the sacred in culture. If the sacred is constructed rhetorically, our real concern is not so much what the sacred is but what it does. What is the role of the sacred within a community? What does it mean to those who do not take the same things to be sacred? This, of course, moves me pretty swiftly to the third question that was posed to us.

I propose, then, a kind of bracketing of personal beliefs about what qualifies as holy or spiritual, in favor of instead considering what is described as such, and how that functions in relation to other elements of discourse. This (to my mind) broader understanding of “the sacred” allows scholars to consider texts, places and experiences that are sacred to others and their rhetorical function without challenging their own experience of the divine.

For something to function rhetorically as the sacred, I think it has to offer a report or a promise of an encounter with the divine. Importantly, I suggest that these reports and promises function rhetorically, but I am less certain that the actual experience of the sacred is a rhetorical phenomenon. I am tempted instead to say that these experiences, if they exist, are extra-discursive. I also want to distinguish my understanding of an encounter with the divine from the kinds of “unseen” sensing that James examines. While mystical experiences certainly qualify, I also include ritual experiences that are believed to have divine significance, regardless of sensory experience of the participants. For example, Christians believe that they encounter God through bible reading or sacraments, and I include these things as “sacred” even though they don’t generally include a mystical sensation of God’s presence.

Discursive items that have some relation to an encounter with the divine (real or alleged) qualify as sacred to me, but also as religious. I want to suggest also that the realm of “the religious” includes the sacred as well as things (forms, texts, traditions, people, places) that are associated with the community of faith, even if they have a loose relationship with the spiritual life of that community. The song “Onward Christian Soldiers,” for example, would be to me a piece of the religious but not of the sacred. However, as soon as I make this distinction, I want to undermine it. Are activities of service and discipline not also a way that communities believe they become closer to God? Is it dismissive to classify these things as less sacred than a holy text or ritual? As is often the case, I am inclined to believe that sacredness might come in degrees or different styles. Mystical experience and infant baptisms and short-term mission trips might all be stylizations of the sacred. Nonetheless, there are certainly elements of religious culture that are more or less associated with direct encounters with the divine, and it is this distinction that I would like to maintain. I am hoping that my fragment—the case of the British school girl who sued for the right to wear an abstinence ring as a right to religious expression—will help us to consider how we might navigate this distinction. I think that the religious also includes forms, genres and styles, whereas sacred is more singular. Hence analyses that find religious forms in American Baseball, patriotic ritual or evolution discourse are looking at forms that come from religion,[1] but that might not have a relationship to the sacred, at least not in that context.

As I mentioned before, at its most simple I think the sacred is found in discourse in symbols related to the report or promise of an encounter with the divine (both the reports themselves, perhaps, but also elements associated with that report). I add here that the religious is any discourse produced within or about an organized religious community.

When thinking of the role of the sacred in discourse, I hypothesize that the sacred, within discourse, must function in one of two ways: unless the experience is shared, it must be ruled out as evidence for argument, or it must be accepted unquestionably. The singular and personal nature of the sacred makes it difficult to dispute on its own terms. Can you tell a person they misinterpreted their own mystical experience, or that a text is not sacred to them? On the other hand, the meaning a shared sacred text or ritual, like the Christian Bible, can be debated more openly, though there are still underlying rules about respect for the sacredness of the object at hand.

Functions of the religious, as a more broad category, are also more varied. As I already mentioned, many scholars already do work that describes the functions of religious forms in discourse. The work on the role of biblical allusion and narrative in public address is rich. For example, James Darsey’s book on the Prophetic voice, and a good deal of the scholarship on orators such as Martin Luther King Jr. reference these forms in complex and interesting ways. In many of these cases, religious forms are used to add a sense of weight, importance and divine mission to the person speaking and those addressed. Indeed, the invocation of religious forms or symbols in the context of public culture or public argument often creates an emotionally heightened experience. Audience members’ commitment to the religion at hand may easily expand to include the issue the rhetor raises, or they may be offended at the suggestion. Either reaction, though, is certainly an emotional response.

Questions of the sacred and the religious are often taken personally, as those of us who tend to write or speak about such things have no doubt already experienced. This means that these elements have great rhetorical power, but power that is difficult to control. Clearly, the issues at hand are much more complex than even the few that I have mentioned here. I leave my thoughts underdeveloped, however, in the hope that a weekend of discussion will hone them further and in new and more exciting directions.