Talking About Religion in Public

Abstract

This paper addresses the perennial issue of the role of religious argument in public political debates by proposing “critical distance,” defined as an act of rhetorical imagination that creates a space where both speaker and audience may critique and interrogate the comprehensive worldview of the speaker, as a rhetorical construct useful for both communication and criticism. A careful reading of selected examples of religious rhetoric in public political forums reveals the nature of critical distance. This article isolates three examples from American public address that reveal particular forms of critical distance. In these instances, critical distance presents itself as conditional language, as descriptive language, and finally, in the form of humor. Furthermore, critical distance commends itself to religious communicators, not merely as a liberal pragmatic value, but as a rhetorical norm that can be found in religious discourse itself.