REPLACING THE SCAPEGOAT

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to discover a rhetoric that allows and makes necessary an environment for peace. Hopefully, humans can discover creative ways to avert war with words rather than weapons; peace then can grow out of the knowledge and understanding of humans' use of symbols, thus creating a language of peace. Rhetorical analysis, offered by Kenneth Burke, has the potential to address the study of the language of nonviolence because of his understanding of language as “symbolic act.” One of the methods Burke has used to analyze language is the rhetoric of rebirth that includes three elements: guilt, purgation, and redemption. This article examines a language of nonviolence by applying Burke's rhetoric of rebirth to the speeches of William Sloane Coffin from the years 1978–91. These were the years that Coffin was pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City and later, President of the SANE/FREEZE Peace Organization, in Washington, D.C. In Coffin's speeches, there is a language of identification that acknowledges mutual guilt, a language of shame and confession that activates mutual purgation, that then leads to a redemptive process by which the bloody sacrifice is averted and the cycle of war potentially broken.