Date

12-16-2025

Department

School of Communication and the Arts

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in Communication (PhD)

Chair

Allison Brake

Keywords

Christianese, terministic screens, evangelical jargon, Kenneth Burke, religious rhetoric, lexicography, qualitative content analysis, religiolect, American Evangelicalism, digital religion

Disciplines

Communication

Abstract

This qualitative study investigates Christianese as a powerful yet understudied rhetorical system. This insider jargon of American Evangelicalism exhibits a significant dichotomy: the very words that build community also build walls, a challenge amplified in the open forum of digital communication. This research employs Burke’s (1966) theory of terministic screens as its primary lens to examine how Christianese selects, reflects, and deflects aspects of reality. The methodology is a qualitative, corpus-based design. A curated corpus of 142 varied artifacts—including journals, sermons, blogs, podcasts, and popular media—was analyzed using content analysis and rhetorical cluster analysis. This process, guided by a structured inclusion/exclusion rubric, yielded a foundational lexicon of 566 headwords, each categorized using a seven-vector rhetorical taxonomy. The findings reveal that Christianese is more a product of church culture than direct biblical quotation, constructed primarily through metaphor and semantic narrowing. A central pragmatic paradox was identified: the dialect is overwhelmingly earnest in tone yet functionally ambiguous, with 80% of its phrases carrying a medium-to-high interpretive risk. This paradox wields Christianese as a double-edged sword: one edge deftly carves out a space of belonging for insiders, while the other inflicts a wound of alienation on outsiders. This study contributes to communication scholarship

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Available for download on Wednesday, December 16, 2026

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