A theory of vernacular rhetoric: the case of the "Sinner's Prayer" online

Folklore, August, 2005 by Robert Glenn Howard

Abstract

This paper seeks to rigorously define and illustrate the analytic category of "vernacular rhetoric" through an examination of the "Sinner's Prayer" as it appears on an amateur web page. In the online environment, this invitation to a traditional prayer performance seems to be a strategy for converting non-Christians. Through the application of the concept of vernacular rhetoric, however, it becomes clear that the deployment of the prayer can also function as an invitation for the already-converted to "testify" to their faith. In this way, the apparently evangelic prayer form also functions as an invitation for the already-converted to perform previously held values. By applying the concept of vernacular rhetoric to this example of online discourse, its value as an analytic category becomes clear because it can address the performative nature of World Wide Web-based documents.

Introduction

This paper seeks to more rigorously define and illustrate the analytic category of "vernacular rhetoric" through an example of the "Sinner's Prayer" as it appears on an amateur web page. The invitation to this traditional prayer performance seems be a strategy for converting non-Christians. Through the application of the concept of "vernacular rhetoric," however, it becomes clear that the deployment of the prayer is also an invitation for the already-converted to "give testimony" to their faith. In this way, the perspective of vernacular rhetoric reveals that the explicitly evangelic prayer form also functions as an invitation for group insiders to perform previously shared values. Where this is the case, both the performance of the prayer and the invitation to its performance are examples of epideictic rhetoric. Persuasive language can be termed "epideictic" when a speaker articulates values already accepted by his/her audience in order to indicate group identity. The existence of epideictic discourse on the World Wide Web points to the performative nature of some online documents.

In research into network communication over the past few years, it has become popular to cite the remark of the symbolic anthropologist Clifford Geertz that "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun" (Geertz 1973, 5). For many researchers, Geertz's quote seems almost a prophetic vision of the "virtual" world of hypertext documents that would arise with the emergence of the public World Wide Web in 1992 (Castells 2001, 9ff). Envisioning all systems of meaning as a symbolic "web," Geertz gives credit for the idea to the early sociologist Max Weber's conception of verstehenden or "interpretive" cultural analysis (Keys 2002, 237ff). Geertz's work, however, was also heavily influenced by Kenneth Burke; one of the most outstanding and widely-read scholars of rhetoric of the twentieth century.

In 1966, several years before Geertz, Burke stated that:

   Our presence in a room is immediate, but the room's relation to
   our country as a nation, and beyond that, to international
   relations and cosmic relations, dissolves into a web of ideas and
   images that reach through our senses only in so far as the symbol
   systems that report on them are heard or seen (Burke 1966, 48).

For Geertz, Weber, and Burke, the vast proportion of human experience is mediated by symbol systems. For Geertz, there is a performance of communication in every symbol, and every performance is also an action, and behind every action lies an implicit motive.

Similar to J. L. Austin's location of a performative or "illocutionary force" in all communicative action (Austin 1975, 148ff), Geertz's "webs of significance" link human motives to the communications that, in aggregate, generate the life-worlds that those individuals inhabit (Geertz 1973, 5). We spin these webs through our own actions and, even as we do, we perform our understanding of the very world that those webs signify. In making reference to these webs, Geertz is, by implication, supporting Burke's resolute claim that all human communication (all such web spinning) is rhetorical because it is motivated (Burke, 1973, 9ff).

If we are to understand "rhetoric" not only as the skills of persuasion but also as the architectonic principle of language that links action to symbol systems, then the study of rhetoric goes far beyond styles of public speaking, political deliberation, or effective sermonising (Weaver 1970, 201ff; Lanham 1994, 155ff; Zulick 1997, 117ff). From this perspective, rhetoric is not only to be found in political texts or formal speeches; nor is it only learned from the institutionally authorised texts of college debate courses. It also occurs in the everyday and informal discourse through which we construct our daily lives. It is not just something taught from some abstract "top" down. Instead, it is also, and perhaps first, something learned and carried forward in everyday social interaction.

When rhetoric is conceived as "vernacular," it is seen as operating in everyday social discourse. This includes discourse that emerged as the "vernacular Web" in the last decades of the twentieth century (Howard 1997, 295ff; Beckerlegge 2001, 219ff). With new communication technologies, old forms emerged in a changed fashion--but still exhibiting their traditional content. One example of the emergence of a traditional form in a new communication medium is that of the Sinner's Prayer tradition on amateur web pages. In cases where a traditional form of appeal emerges as a performative online document, folklore studies is particularly equipped to locate, describe, and analyse these traditional performative documents.