Persuasive Strategies in a Chauvinistic Religious Discourse: The Case of Women’s Ordination

Currently one of the most divisive issues in some Christian communities centers on women’s ordination. This study critically analyzes a religious discourse which defends and justifies the Southern Baptist Convention’s opposition to women’s ordination by using a sociocognitive approach as an underlying theoretical framework. The analysis aims to illustrate how a religious text both assumes and tries to formulate unified mental models to control the beliefs of the audience and promulgate dominance by assigning sovereign values to certain interpretations so that readers will understand certain texts as they see them. In doing so, the current study also hopes to demonstrate usefulness of employing Critical Discourse Analysis in understanding the process of doctrinal formation and reproduction of dominance in religious discourse.