Thou Shall Not Take the Name of Thy God in Vain: Washington Offices' Use of Religious Language to Shape Public and Political Agendas

Abstract

Advocacy groups' use of religious language can shape the public's political attitudes and can influence politicians' legislative behaviors, thereby potentially influencing both public and political agendas. However, most existing research on agendas does not examine advocacy groups' use of religious language, and the political scholarship that does consider religious language fails to examine its use across a variety of audiences. The current study fills these gaps by analyzing a myriad of written documents and the Web sites of 15 Washington offices, the advocacy arms of national religious bodies, to examine how they attempt to influence political and public agendas by using religious language to present their political positions to four different audiences. Results indicate that both institutional and theological religious themes are used by liberal and moderate, but not conservative offices to affect the political agenda, and all Washington offices primarily use theological religious themes to influence the public agenda.The media, government, general public, and advocacy groups have their own separate agendas, and they use carefully chosen language to communicate their understanding of the world while attempting to influence one another. This makes language a critical means to power. The public gets its knowledge about officials, issues, and policies from communication. Thus, language shapes how people view politics and social matters (Corcoran, 1990;Edelman, 1988;Turow, 1992) and can shape and influence political policy and public agendas. As a result, officials are elected or defeated and laws are passed or blocked based on language (Corcoran

Christian Interest Groups in A Religiously Changing United Kingdom: Issues, Strategies, Influence

“…This may be connected to the insider/outsider distinction, since organizations excluded from policy forums may seek to present their demands in ways that appeal to popular audiences (Baumgartner and Jones 1993). US religious interest groups have been found to present their policy demands in relatively secular terms in order to appeal to non-religious audiences (e.g., Hertzke 1988, 88), although more explicitly theological language may be used when communicating with supporters (Kettell 2013b; Kraus 2009). Yet there may also be specific factors associated with the UK's complex socio-religious context.…”