Building Alliances or Rallying the Base: Civil Religious Rhetoric and the Modern Presidency

Abstract The Internet Archive curated a 90-terabyte sub-collection of captures from the US government's public website domain (‘.gov’). Such archives provide largely untapped resources for measuring attributes, behaviors and outcomes relevant to political science research. This study leverages this archive to measure a novel dimension of federal legislators' religiosity: their proportional use of religious rhetoric on official congressional websites (2006–2012). This scalable, time-variant measure improves upon more costly, time-invariant conventional approaches to measuring legislator attributes. The authors demonstrate the validity of this method for measuring legislators' public-facing religiosity and discuss the contributions and limitations of using archived Internet data for scientific analysis. This research makes three applied methodological contributions: (1) it develops a new measure for legislator religiosity, (2) it models an improved, more comprehensive approach to analyzing congressional communications and (3) it demonstrates the unprecedented potential that archived Internet data offer to researchers seeking to develop meaningful, cost-effective approaches to analyzing political phenomena.

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Securitization as a Tool of Regime Survival: The Deployment of Religious Rhetoric in Bashar al-Asad's Speeches

The Middle East Journal ◽

10.3751/75.1.11 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 75 (1) ◽

pp. 9-32

Author(s):

Rahaf Aldoughli

Keyword(s):

Religious Rhetoric ◽

The Novel ◽

Security Measures ◽

National Unity ◽

State Security ◽

Sunni Islam ◽

Regime Survival

This article analyzes the role of Sunni Islam in speeches given to religious scholars by Syrian president Bashar al-Asad in 2014 and 2017. I discuss how religion was used in these speeches as a security tool to consolidate authority, legitimize the Ba'thist regime, and marginalize political dissidents. I specifically highlight the emphasis Asad placed on convincing government-recognized 'ulama to support state security measures and to the novel links he constructed between Islam and national unity.

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Recontextualizing Acts

The Christians Who Became Jews ◽

10.12987/yale/9780300247893.003.0002 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 17-40

Author(s):

Christopher Stroup

Keyword(s):

Jewish Identity ◽

Acts Of The Apostles ◽

Cultural Context ◽

Religious Rhetoric ◽

Christian Identity ◽

Recent Developments ◽

Ancient Christianity ◽

Previous Scholarship

This chapter situates Acts of the Apostles historically and examines previous scholarship on Jewish identity and Acts. It argues that Lukan ethnic reasoning—as mediated by the cultural context of Greek cities under Roman rule—sought to create an alternate construal of Jewish and Christian identity. This alternate identity integrated Christian non-Jews into the civic hierarchy. The chapter then surveys the scholarship on Jews and Judaism in Acts and looks at recent developments in interpretation that have emphasized the author's rhetoric rather than “attitude.” It also discusses four texts that highlight the value of ethnic reasoning and, scholar of ancient Christianity, Denise Kimber Buell's discussion of four uses of religious rhetoric in ethnic reasoning. Ultimately, Acts leverages the connection between gods, people, and places in its depiction of Jewish identity. It employs ethnic rhetoric in order to present all Christians as Jews and to privilege Christians as an ideal embodiment of Jewishness for the Roman-era polis.

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Washington Formulates a Buddhist Policy, 1954–1957

Cold War Monks ◽

10.12987/yale/9780300218565.003.0003 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Eugene Ford

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

Eisenhower Administration ◽

Southeast Asian ◽

Religious Rhetoric ◽

Comprehensive Strategy ◽

The Cold War

This chapter looks at how the comprehensive strategy for Southeast Asian Buddhism that would eventually emerge did not represent an entirely new direction for U.S. officials. Rather, it was an approach that found numerous, if fragmentary, precedents in earlier efforts to marshal faith, often through the use of religious rhetoric, against what was perceived as an atheistic Soviet menace. The Sixth Great Buddhist Synod that Burma's government held during 1954–56 coincided with intensified efforts within the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration to formulate a coherent policy toward religion. Religion's bearing on the Cold War had emerged as the main preoccupation of the president.

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Prejudices on Concerning Human Rights Vis-a-Vis Islam

Jurnal Ilmiah Peuradeun ◽

10.26811/peuradeun.v8i2.463 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

pp. 397

Author(s):

Müfit Selim Saruhan

Keyword(s):

Human Rights ◽

The Body ◽

Religious Rhetoric ◽

Human Being ◽

History Of Thought ◽

History Of ◽

Reasonable Answers

In the history of thought, defending human rights and freedom, positivist and materialist views are critical of religion in general and Islam in particular. Islam as a divine religion with its theoretical and practical dimensions has been the guarantor of human rights. Positivist and materialist views on every occasion ready to blame and identify the Islamic concept of servitude (to God) with slavery. But if we examine Islam in-depth with a philosophical mind, we can see that the Islamic concept of devotional servitude accommodates genuine freedom which intends to protect the health of both the body and the soul. Positivist and materialist minds consider the issue of human rights as their own, and religious sides approach this issue reluctantly due to the rhetoric of human rights devoid of religious rhetoric. Finding reasonable answers to the questions of what the source of human honor is and what makes human being meaningful will bring closer to each other the positivist/materialist views and religious views.

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