The discourse of divorce in conservative Christian sermons

ABSTRACT

Work on religious discourse is still limited and linguistic research on preaching scarce. The present study makes explicit the ways that pastors in the conservative Protestant Christian church preach about divorce. Relying on a corpus of sermons on divorce from SermonAudio, this study employs theoretical and methodological principles derived from corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. In so doing, it explores in what terms pastors frame and approach the topic of divorce and what their language reveals about how they want their listeners to perceive divorce. Findings point to two dominant Discourses of divorce in popular conservative Christian sermons: Divorce as a Highly Restricted Space and Divorce as Male. These Discourses frame divorce in terms antithetical to the reality of divorce and likely bolster statistics on divorce in the Christian church. This study challenges existing linguistic work on sermons which often concludes that contemporary preaching has largely departed from presenting absolutes.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse of marriage
• Christian divorce
• religious discourse
• theolinguistics
• corpus linguistics

Acknowledgements

I’m grateful to the peer reviewers for their constructive and graciously worded feedback on earlier drafts and to those who organized, presented at and attended the thought-provoking, challenging, and inspiring Discourses of Marriage conference.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Valerie Hobbs is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of Sheffield. Her research and teaching focus on religious language and discourse, and she is currently writing a book for Bloomsbury on the nature and functions of religious language in contemporary contexts.

ORCID

Valerie Hobbs http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8892-2779

Notes

1 Some of the results for divorce + BE were due to erroneous syntactic parsing in Sketch Engine. In these cases, I examined whether or not the context indicated that the pastor was making a statement about the nature of divorce. For example, I excluded cases such as ‘Now, what's important about divorce is what God thinks about it,’ and included cases such as ‘The third reason why you shouldn't get a divorce is, is breaking your word.’ In the latter, the pastor went on to clarify that divorce itself constitutes a breaking of one’s word.

2 No fault divorce legislation allowed ‘couples to end their marriages without the need to prove to courts that fault grounds for divorce existed’ (Leeson & Pierson, 2017, p. 423).