Distinguishing the Language of Destructive Cults from the Language of Mainstream Religion: Corpus Analyses of Sermons

Autor/inn/en	Palayon, Raymund T.; Todd, Richard Watson; Vungthong, Sompatu
Titel	Distinguishing the Language of Destructive Cults from the Language of Mainstream Religion: Corpus Analyses of Sermons
Quelle	In: rEFLections, 29 (2022) 1, S.20-37 (18 Seiten) PDF als Volltext kostenfreie Datei Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1513–5934
Schlagwörter	Language Usage; Religious Cultural Groups; Religious Factors; Computational Linguistics; Antisocial Behavior; Clergy; Contrastive Linguistics; Semantics; Information Retrieval; Persuasive Discourse; Discourse Analysis; Christianity; Word Lists + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Sprachgebrauch; Kirchliche Gruppe; Religionszugehörigkeit; Linguistics; Computerlinguistik; Klerus; Kontrastive Linguistik; Semantik; Persuasion; Persuasive Kommunikation; Diskursanalyse; Christentum; Wortliste
Abstract	The language of religious leaders expressed in their sermons characterizes the social characteristics of their groups. Over the past decades, most studies into cults specifically destructive cults and mainstream religion have mainly focused on their social-psychological characteristics with limited applicability to other religious groups. In this study, corpus-based methods were applied to the sermons of the leaders of two destructive cults (namely, Peoples Temple led by Jim Jones and Heaven's Gate led by Marshall Applewhite) and the sermons of mainstream religious groups represented by Baptist preachers to distinguish the language between dangerous and beneficial religious groups based on the patterns of key linguistic features. The methodological process includes keyness analyses (namely, keyword analysis, key semantic tag analysis, and key part-of-speech analysis) and multidimensional analysis. The results from a keyness perspective show that the destructive cult sermons promote non-religious concepts with the use of othering, intensification, and strong elaboration. For the mainstream sermons, they uphold religious concepts for life development with the use of personal involvement and moderate elaboration. The results from a text dimension perspective show that the language of destructive cults and the language of mainstream religion displayed in their sermons are both persuasive and elaborative. However, the language of destructive cults is more persuasive and elaborative than the language of mainstream religion. The findings may serve as a basis for how to recognize the potential detrimental and beneficial characteristics of religious groups based on their language. (As Provided).
Anmerkungen	King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi School of Liberal Arts. 126 Pracha Uthit Road, Bang Mod, Thung Khru, Bangkok, Thailand 10140. Tel: +66-2470-8756; Fax: +66-2428-3375; Web site: https://so05.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/reflections/index
Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01