TO WIN OVER PEOPLE OR WIN PEOPLE OVER?: A DISCURSIVE ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD

Abstract

Christian apologetics, the defence of the faith, finds itself presently situated in a context in three distinct ways: a post-truth world where affect has a greater hold than logic, a schism resultant of the Protestant Reformation, and expansion into digitally mediated communication channels such as YouTube. With its unique affordances, a new genre of online Christian apologetics has surfaced in the form of debates in online response videos between Catholics and Protestants, as opposed to the lengthy treatises of the past written for non-Christians. This thesis conducts a discursive study of this emerging genre, which specifically seeks to analyse how speakers balance between the rhetorical strategies of polemics and parrhesia to frame their discourse. Polemics, while relevant in its function of defining groups by way of demarcating boundaries, conflicts with the Christian ethic in its deprecatory stance towards its opponent. To mitigate compromising the speaker’s credibility, parrhesia, a verbal activity that presents truth-telling as a form of self-aesthetic, thus finds its relevance. The tension between the two arises from the former’s objective in challenging the opponent’s performance role, and the latter’s objective in presenting the speaker as a moral sufferer of the truth, especially as the opponent’s victim. Given that both rhetoric strategies primarily consist of different ways of establishing alignment with the opponent, self, audience, and truth, this analysis will be conducted through Goffman’s footing and figures. This essay reveals that parrhesia serves to mitigate the contradictions that polemics poses with the speakers’ Christian identity, because while winning over opponents through polemics does not necessarily attain the evangelical goal of apologetics, parrhesia serves to at least win viewers over. Furthermore, the confluence of both rhetoric strategies discursively contributes to a speech register characterised by a state of precarity, which finds its rhetorical strength in affect.