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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 957

Part of Session 116: God in the City (Other abstracts in this session)

Addressing a city of unbelievers: Discursive practices of Christian preachers in the constitution of “us” and “them”

Authors: Havlík, Martin
Submitted by: Havlík, Martin (Czech Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech republic, a public research institution, Czech Republic)

The paper is concerned with the way in which Christian preachers serving in the capital of the Czech Republic, Prague, discursively handle the categories of “us” and “them” in their sermons. I point out that there are two different groups of “them” in the sermons: (1) sectarians, and (2) unbelievers. Significantly for the situation of Christian churches in the Czech Republic, ethnicity does not play any role whatsoever. According to self-categorization theory, members of “them”, which comprise the so-called “out-group”, are often presented negatively, in sharp contrast to the positive self-presentation of members of the “in-group”. And since sectarians comprise the genuine “out-group”, there is no problem for Christian preachers to talk about them. However, with respect to the latter group, the situation is somewhat different. The problem for the preachers consists in the fact that their aim is not to defeat the unbelievers, but rather, to convert them into believers. In a city such as Prague, in which most inhabitants are declared atheists, this is not an easy task. By using Membership Categorization Analysis (Sacks 1992), I show how they discursively solve the problem of differentiating unbelievers and believers in such a way that no strict border splitting into “us” and “them” is created. Such a distinction might not be desirable for the preachers aiming to coax the unbelievers to believe in God and the believers to help unbelievers find the proper life course, since a definite border between “us” and “them” breeds the negatively presented “out-group” and positively self-presented “in-group”.

References:

Sacks, H. (1992) Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.