Embedding the pandemic in the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God’s rhetoric

Abstract

In this paper, our objective is to ascertain how the Covid-19 pandemic impacts the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God rhetoric. Our hypothesis is that the social impacts of the crisis rescales especially the pathos projection, that is, the speaker's reading of this church target audience's interests and values. Our theoretical framework settles on the sociocognitive studies of the text, in which the reference, that is, the way we make the world known through language, is the central notion and organizer of the epistemological field. Thus, and considering metaphor as an essential element of religious rhetoric, we pursue our objective by examining how this church's founding leader conceptualizes via metaphor references about the pandemic, embedding it to the rhetoric. In this path, we selected three audiovisual records, spaced approximately thirty days since the declaration of Covid-19 pandemic by the WHO, and raised thematically relevant metaphorical referential processes. In our analysis we have applied a dynamic notion of context to observe how relevant social, cultural and political events to the church's life are embedded in the emerging referential processes. In our conclusions, we point how the data confirms our hypothesis and, also, exploit the meanings of the Universal Church's reaction to the pandemic inside the neoliberal rationality spectrum.