Rhetorical agency and the retransmission of presidential rhetoric : Southern Baptist elites and the Global War on Terror

Abstract

The primary function of this dissertation is to examine the process in which political elites that represent constituencies engage with political narratives created in presidential rhetoric and practice rhetorical agency that either reflects or affects the rhetorical culture of their community. More specifically this dissertation will examine the process by which narratives related to the Global War on Terror (GWOT) are produced by President Bush and his team and then assimilated and sometimes retransmitted by religious leaders from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) through an analysis of speeches, interviews, and rhetoric produced for dissemination through Christian media affiliated with the SBC within the United States. The dissertation seeks to answer the primary research question: Do elites within the SBC practice rhetorical agency on Bush's GWOT narrative during the retransmission process and if so how do they do so? To clarify the answer, it also asks if SBC elites do practice agency on the GWOT narrative are the changes designed to change the narrative to reflect the rhetorical culture of the community, or to change the rhetorical culture of the community to conform the product of their discussion of the GWOT to the parameters set by the narrative. Additionally, are the changes significant enough to change the basic presentation of the GWOT within the SBC? To find the answers to these questions this dissertation makes use of a new critical consisting of a synthesis of Neo-Aristotelian Critical Methodology and Weberian interpretive theories related to social action and meaning applied to actions by communities.