Introduction. Persuasion in Religious Discourse

Persuasion is fundamental to contemporary religious discourse, particularly in Western cultures. Whereas religious beliefs and practices may have historically been a fixed category, often tied to one’s cultural, social, and national context, recent technological advancements and the ubiquity of mobile phones in daily life around the world have guaranteed that the religious beliefs and practices of others, often people from backgrounds completely dissimilar to one’s own are now regularly present in one's life. At the same time, as algorithms and machine-learning influence what content people engage with online, content can become tailored to one’s own preferences and interests, with little actual engagement with ideas, beliefs, and practices that fall outside of one’s personal preferences. Persuasion in religious discourse, therefore, exists in a complex space in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, where religious individuals have more reach and potential to spread their beliefs than ever before while at the same time, often speaking to people who already hold the same beliefs that they do. Thus, understanding persuasion in this context requires the wide-ranging toolkit linguistics offers to engage critically with language, identity, context, audience, and other factors in understanding what people are doing when they speak and write about religious beliefs and practice with some consideration of how their words might effect changes in others, either in shifting their beliefs or shoring up the beliefs of those within their religious community. This special issue, therefore, addresses a range of texts and contexts where in religious discourse and persuasion can be identified as a part of the interaction between people, either face-to-face or in texts. This introduction will start with a brief background on the notion of religious discourse in contrast to religious ‘language’ and the importance of context in discourse activity, before clarifying how persuasion can be defined and identified in discursive practices and, finally, providing an introduction to the empirical research in this special issue and how the different authors elaborate on these concepts to better understand what different religious leaders and figures are doing when they speak about their religion to people who may or may not share their own beliefs and practices.