The discourse of divorce in conservative Christian sermons

Work on religious discourse is still limited and linguistic research on preaching scarce. The present study makes explicit the ways that pastors in the conservative Protestant Christian church preach about divorce. Relying on a corpus of sermons on divorce from SermonAudio, this study employs theoretical and methodological principles derived from corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. In so doing, it explores in what terms pastors frame and approach the topic of divorce and what their language reveals about how they want their listeners to perceive divorce. Findings point to two dominant Discourses of divorce in popular conservative Christian sermons: Divorce as a Highly Restricted Space and Divorce as Male. These Discourses frame divorce in terms antithetical to the reality of divorce and likely bolster statistics on divorce in the Christian church. This study challenges existing linguistic work on sermons which often concludes that contemporary preaching has largely departed from presenting absolutes.