Analysis of He Gets Us

Contents: About the Collection | Background

About the Collection

This project emerged out of conversations I had with Dr. Jeff Ringer regarding the theoretical application of Vernacular religious creativity to a social movement analysis. The He Gets Us campaign was chosen as it is both the subject of debate and contention and an iteresting intersection of conservative Evangelicalism and the creative translations that happen in individual articulations of faith. Collection builder, in this case, has been used to organize the artifacts and to make searchable the codes identified in analysis. The site itself serves as a final project for Dr. Hilary Havens’ digital humanities class, Engl 595, at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Below you can find same of the Communalytic data which I am still in the process of downloading and analyzing. The communalytic data will serve as the other side of the individual articulation issue present in theories of vernacular creativity. That is, sentiment analysis will serve as the broad data that informs my analysis of the effectiveness of VRC strategies in social movements, and the effectiveness of the HGU campaign to its multiple audiences. For more info, I will also include a rough transcript of my presentations explaining this project in the background section.

Background

Research Statement This project was motivated by the extreme reactions I saw to the He Gets Us Super Bowl ads (HGU) that were shown during the 2023 and 2024 games. The ads use various appeals and structure, but they tend to all have the same artistic style juxtaposing images of social strife with calls for unity through Jesus. While the ads faced harsh criticism from both sides of the political spectrum, it seemed to me that the majority of the criticism was focused on the hypocrisy of Christians spending money on evangelism rather than charity or the hateful right-wing donors to the campaign (Willingham) (Featherstone). Being in Jeff Ringer’s class at the time, I felt like there was a need to address these ads with a rhetorical eye (and potentially more nuance).

In doing some basic research on the topic, I realized that there wasn’t much literature on the topic of religious marketing or media from a rhetorical perspective. That is, there were marketing data, books analyzing religious campaigns from a business perspective (Einstein Brands), academic analysis of religious art (Malraux) (Cobb), and the aforementioned criticism of hypocrisy, but very little in the way of analysis of religious rhetorical strategies specifically. Ringer’s work was instrumental in beginning this project, as I frequently confronted him about the applicability of individual vernacular articulations of faith on broader social movement analysis, but he challenged me to find the connections on my own. To that end, both of these experiences helped me to develop my tentative research questions: What kinds of appeals do we see in HGU and what are their effects? How does the Jesus of HGU relate to the articulations of faith Ringer identified in Vernacular Christian Rhetoric and Civil Discourse? And what can we find from the interaction of individual vernacular religious creativity (VRC), social movements, and religious marketing?

To briefly address my positionality here, I will have to consult with people who are more familiar with the Evangelical tradition going forward. I did not grow up in a highly religious family, occasionally attended Episcopal services, and was taught to understand faith from my grandparents who were religious scholars. To the extent I understand any religious tradition, it is purely intellectual. Part of the reason that I am interested in this field is exactly because it is difficult for me, but my intention here is not to attack religion, tradition, or beliefs of the Evangelical community.

The goals of my research going forward are to understand the shifts, rhetorical, theological, and material, within American Evangelicalism, and I want to argue for a nuanced view of religion within the academy. As Ringer explains in his intro to Vernacular Christian Rhetoric and Civil Discourse, many scholars accept a basic dichotomy between liberalism and Christian fundamentalism, like Sharon Crowley argues in Toward a Civil Discourse. I believe that this is a narrow construction that does not leave room for interesting, or deliberative, conversation, and I hope my research can help to find some space for these conversations.  

Literature Review

I suppose before I explain my specific understanding of religious rhetoric or the research I’ve done so far, I should explain in more detail what He Gets Us (HGU) is. The He Gets Us advertising campaign is a large, well-funded, attempt to evangelize to the American public. They came to prominence following a Super Bowl ad in 2023, and they have allegedly spent over $100 million on advertising to date. Their ads follow the same general format of juxtaposed photographs, usually of civil strife or other emotional scenes, and emotionally charged music. These scenes often are framed by a yellow box and sometimes bible verses are shown at the end before the words “He Gets Us” show up. The “us” in the image is yellow while the other words are white, and eventually the white fades and is replaced by letters completing the word “Jesus.” (Many of these ads can be found on YouTube, hegetsus.com, or my Collection Builder Page.)

The yellow frame around the ads is a remnant of their original marketing strategy of presenting Jesus as a historical, human teacher. So as to appease their base, they put this frame around the videos to argue that they’re telling the story of Jesus “within the human frame.” This basic strategy developed out of large-scale marketing research originally done through the Servant Foundation, and now run by Barna Group and Gloo (Einstein and Timke). All three of these groups have ties to big money Evangelicals like the Greene family and Hobby Lobby. Further, if one digs deep enough on their website, HGU does suggest Alpha courses for those who aren’t getting enough from their weekly bible readings. Alpha courses also have ties to conservative, anti-LGBTQ beliefs. Regardless, there is very little academic literature looking into the specific rhetorical strategies of this campaign or the effects of the movement of different audiences. Given my own positionality on this issue, by review of the literature necessarily begins with basic theoretical understanding of religious rhetoric. Further, this project is ongoing, so many of my sources have not been reviewed by experts with more relative understanding of the community I’m interested in.

The two works that form the foundation of this analysis are Jeff Ringer’s Vernacular Christian Rhetoric and Civil Discourse and Jimmie Killingsworth’s Appeals in Modern Rhetoric. Ringer’s work, which I pull directly from for the substance of my understanding of vernacular religious creativity (VRC), explains that VRC “emphasizes tolerance and inclusion, both of which are central to democratic practice” (Ringer 35). More specifically though, he defines VRC as “an active, ongoing process whereby religious believers adapt or adjust their beliefs in relation to their sociocultural contexts” (24). The main strategies that he identified in the work were casuistic stretching, translation, and value articulation. The relevant strategies for the purposes of my work so far are casuistic stretching, the way in which “individuals are able to reconcile or ‘unite’ opposing values by appealing to a third value, which Burke calls a ‘higher abstraction’” (44 qtd. Burke 231), and translation, the realization that “the need to speak in a manner that would communicate their [Evangelical students’] beliefs to an audience who does not share them” (49). These strategies emerged in my analysis of HGU ads and responses. I expect that value articulation will emerge in closer readings and interviews.

While Ringer uses his argument to advocate for civil and deliberative discourse, I chose to focus on the role that VRC plays in relation to appeals. In this shift from individual beliefs to rhetorical choice, I hope to bridge the gap between the vernacular and social movements. Killingsworth explains in his book, Appeals in Modern Rhetoric, that a simple definition of “appeal” doesn’t quite fit modern understandings of rhetoric, but a general model of appeals based on direction and indirection, metaphor and medium, and author and audience can be an effective matrix for analysis. I’m choosing to use a somewhat simplistic model of appeals-based rhetoric in an effort to deal with the basic issue of a ground up vernacular rhetoric versus a top-down marketing model of social movement branding. HGU has very clear messaging, style, and strategy, which doesn’t fit neatly onto the creativity and malleability of a vernacular articulation.

To that end, Ringer also pointed me towards the work of Andre Johnson on social movements. Speaking to criticism of Black Lives Matter from within the black community of Memphis, Johnson identifies leaders “rejecting the ‘proven methods’ and the ‘history’ of the Civil Rights movement” in an effort to avoid the overt ties to institutions like the church (Johnson 99). While the connection to my work here isn’t direct, Johnson’s work still informs my understanding of what seems to be a resistance to the church as an institution even as a latent spirituality “functioned as a conduit between BLM and the histories of racial justice and oppression” (108). Further, in my limited analysis of response videos, one from a YouTuber called Lecrae speaking to Black Evangelicalism was much more open to HGU, even so far as understanding that they’re “taking what is best from that history and implementing that in their place and time” (Johnson 99).

While Johnson has helped inform my understanding of social movement rhetorics and given me some direction on analyzing strategies of leaderless movements, Ringer pointed me in the direction of Charles Taylor for an understanding of contemporary secularity theory. As opposed to a secular state or a secular population, Taylor describes a third secularity which is characterized by “a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace” (Taylor 3). Similar to Johnson’s backgrounding of religion in BLM, Taylor’s secularity allows religion to be relegated to a choice rather than an axiomatic social conviction. This relationship to belief is fundamental to understanding the role of religion and secularity in HGU. Since the campaign was informed by polling data that showed people were open to a historical Jesus, they seem to be trying to navigate this articulation of “you can choose to listen to the story of Jesus” rather than the typical witnessing and spiritual arguments (Citation).

That being said, I struggled with Taylor both because of the length of the work, and some strange orientation he has against any degree of martialism. I only mention this because I borrowed my grandfather’s copy of Secular Age, and he described it as “kind of dull,” and suggested John Cobb’s Christ in a Pluralistic Age when I complained about Taylor. Cobb’s work, though, isn’t a response to Taylor by any stretch, but it is more of a Christian insider look on the movements of secularity and pluralism. Cobb’s basic theory emerged out of Andre Malraux’s history tracing the disappearance of Jesus from Western art in The Voices of Silence (I haven’t read this yet). Cobb argues that “as Christ disappeared from the content of Western art he became, under other names, its acknowledged inner principle,” namely creative transformation (31). Ignoring the issues with Malraux’s centering the West as the pinnacle of pluralism, and his history as an art thief, and the ease of falling into a sort of “colorblind” pluralism, the idea of separating Jesus the man from Christ as creative transformation seems to be a central strategy of HGU. Hopefully, it can also give me some insight into how to analyze the visual elements, but that’s down the road.

Aside from these works that largely frame the theoretical foundation for my work, I have consulted the relatively few sources that I could find that speak to HGU specifically, or religious marketing broadly. Namely, Mara Einstein, who recently did an interview with Edward Timke about HGU, wrote a book in 2003 called Brands of Faith that mostly traced the history of religious advertising leading up to the New Age phenomenon of the 90s and early 2000s. While much of her book is an explanation of how material economic forces have affected religion in the West, like the mass production of vulgar biblical translations, she also speaks to contemporary trends that she sees. That is, branding is a big part of religion now, and, as HGU realized with their polling data, Christianity has a branding issue. In some sense, Einstein predicted this shift in Evangelical strategy, from the printing press, to televangelists, to YouTube.

Another thread of research I’m still working on has to do with specific religious rhetorical strategy. Admittedly, I haven’t expanded this search very broadly, but the most recent work that I found relevant was David Shore’s “WWJD? The Genealogy of a Syntactic Form” which traces the use of the subjunctive mood in imitatio Christi, imitating Christ. Interestingly, the early cases of the subjunctive being used in reference to Jesus came in in 17th century, but Shore explains further, “By the late nineteenth century subjunctive imitation had become especially popular among American evangelicals” (11). Considering how situated HGU is in the American context (Super Bowl and all that), it is interesting that it lacks this subjunctive mood. There aren’t any examples of HGU, to my knowledge, that use it. There are a number of normative indicative claims about doing what Jesus did, but nothing in the way of subjunctive. I don’t know what to do with that yet, but I’m moving in this direction.

As I referenced earlier, and will explain in more detail in the Research Plan, much of this work so far has been in the form of developing a digital archive to help with data visualization and collection. This was possible because I took a class on Digital Humanities, which helped me learn about the possibilities. To that end, I knew I would need to collect a large quantity of social media data, but until DH, I didn’t know how I was going to do this. I initially wanted this project to simply be collecting and analyzing the data, but I decided to pivot creating a website for coding the videos on the He Gets Us YouTube page. Eventually, I want to include longer form analysis of each video, but I decided that it would be better to use collection builder as a data visualization resource. So, I uploaded all of the videos over 45 seconds onto the Collection Builder metadata template, and I used the “subject” field of the sheet to include the emergent codes. Those included appeals like “positionality,” “translation,” and eventually “WWJD.” As I do specific close readings of the videos, I plan to include terms like “redemption” and “false equivalence,” which tend to be more prevalent in the images themselves. I’m having an issue with the sheer volume of information, literature, and codes, so as I read, I have to go back and re-label old artifacts, but this will be covered in more detail below.

Research Plan

So Far:

In order to explain my research plan going forward, I should probably explain what I’ve done so far. Originally, this project was going to simply focus on social media analysis done through a program called Communalytic. Communalytic allows users to upload YouTube videos, Reddit communities, or discourses from Twitter or BlueSky, and it uses algorithms to analyze the networks being formed, toxicity present, and general sentiments. While these algorithms have issues with particular sentiments or what constitutes “toxic,” given enough data, they can provide a meaningful overview of the community. However, I encountered several issues with this plan. Mainly, I don’t think the data itself is sufficient evidence for any claims I’m developing, and it certainly won’t answer my research questions. Also, like with the computer identifying “toxicity,” there remains a general issue with deracinating the data. A fully decontextualized analysis of sentiment in the absence of a rhetorical close reading, is simply meaningless.

So, I first decided to comb through the Communalytic spreadsheets to eliminate outliers. In doing this, I realized that the program sorted important, nontoxic identifiers like “atheist” as highly toxic. While I still plan to sort through the data, the volume of data makes this prohibitive for the time being. For example, the spreadsheet for the most recent Super Bowl ad, “Foot Washing,” has 1166 inputs and spans 134 pages as a PDF. While this is one of the more viewed videos on their channel, most of the longer ads have hundreds of thousands of views, and similar sentiments in the comments section. Because of the sheer volume of data on YouTube (and the fact that Twitter charges users to access their API), I tried to pivot to Reddit for more interesting networks and sentiments, but u/hegetsus does not allow comments on their page, nor is there a subreddit dedicated to HGU outside of r/stophegetsus and the meme page r/hegetsus. While these pages certainly have a contribution to make to this conversation, they aren’t offering much in the way of meaningful sentiment, and I abandoned this aspect of the analysis. Several years ago, I was able to screenshot some responses to HGU ads on reddit before they disabled comments, and those will likely end up in the research at some point.

Because of the difficulties with the volume of data, I’ve pivoted my work to downloading, archiving, and coding the YouTube videos on a program called Collection Builder, hosted through Github. Similar to my screenshotting of the reddit threads that have now been deleted, I’m using Collection Builder to archive the YouTube videos in case they’re deleted. At this time, they’re posted as YouTube links, but the videos will also be downloaded and put onto Collection Builder as files not viewable to the public. At this point, I’m using Collection Builder as a data visualization site, where I can view emergent codes in a word cloud, see the development of rhetorical strategies in a timeline, and connect response videos to the ads themselves. Similarly, I am in the process of uploading the Communalytic spreadsheets as PDFs onto the site. While I don’t see an immediate use for this data, as it still needs refining and processing, I think it is helpful to include it in one space. To that end, this paper will likely end up on the site in some form as well.

As I have become familiar with the capabilities of the platform, I realized that this visualization actually made some interesting trends clearer. For example, the campaign pivoted in 2022 from a positionality argument (Jesus was a…) to arguments of redemption, salvation, and civility. The reason for the change and the effects of this are unclear right now, but I’m glad to have used Collection Builder because I wouldn’t have noticed this trend. While some elements of Collection Builder were helpful, I did struggle with the initial set up, and the confusing organization of the folders in the template. I still don’t really understand how the themes work, but since this is essentially a data visualization project, I don’t feel overly compelled to make it pretty.

On top of the positionality of Jesus argument, I have been able to identify a few emergent codes through this process. Along the lines of Ringer’s work, there is a significant amount of translation, both literal and figurative. The translation that was discussed in the literature review, what Ringer is referring to, is present as a strategy of creative articulation, but there is also some interesting crossover with interviews from literal L2 English speaker. While I’m tempted to speculate as to the marketing SEO decisions being made here, as these videos are likely to show up if one searches “hardest thing to say in English,” I’m not willing to make a claim as to the specific marketing strategy at play. That being said, there are interesting conversations to be had about the intersection of literal translation and the rhetorical trend that Ringer describes.

Furthermore, many of the videos include casuistic stretching, another one of Ringer’s identified strategies of VRC. However, unlike the individual articulations that he observed in interviews, the overarching value that HGU appeals to seems to be either Jesus or civility. This is sort of getting at a trend I’ve been noticing as well. HGU is ostensibly evangelizing in an attempt to move non-Christians to the church, but their strategies aren’t designed with audience in mind. Rather than appeal to a higher value like “democracy” or “kindness,” HGU presupposes that the audience values Christ. From preliminary observations of the sentiments under the videos, this strategy is very effective at dividing and moving already Christian people to a more liberal outlook, rather than moving liberals to Christ. This mirrors the results of Ringer’s work; these strategies allow Evangelicals to open themselves up to more deliberative discourse and world views.

Beyond the emergent codes that follow Ringer’s analysis, I’ve also identified several strategies that fit squarely within the Christian tradition, namely redemption, salvation, and (tentatively) WWJD. Interestingly, the redemption and salvation appeals are not being made as normative claims. I’m yet to see a video that says, “you should be saved,” or even “you can be redeemed.” Rather, the ads, particularly in the “Second Language” series, imply these narratives of forgiveness, redemption, and salvation through pure story telling. In one example, a gay Italian man reckons with the loss of a father who would never accept him. The ad never calls the man a sinner, never says that he should forgive his father, and never pushes a particular approach to this situation. Rather, it says “He Gets Us.” There is an implied message here, but I haven’t figured out what it is yet (Learning to say “I forgive you.”).

I’m also struggling with the WWJD code, because I don’t really know what to call it. Building off the work of Daniel Shore and the genealogy of the subjunctive mood in imitatio Christi, I think there are some interesting rhetorical decisions being made in HGU. I’m yet to see HGU use the subjunctive, but again there is a sort of implicit move towards that. In the narrative described above, for example, there is never a normative or subjunctive claim, but an implied “Jesus would forgive your father.” Furthermore, the positionality appeal is indicative, but there is something more going on beyond, “You wouldn’t turn your back on Jesus.” I’m still figuring out how to characterize this. It should also be noted, before I go on, that many of these codes, videos, and metadata can all be found on the Collection Builder site linked in the Intro, Works Cited, and here.

Going Forward: The first aspect of my plan going forward is to continue my analysis of the videos, and potentially conduct a close reading of each. This will obviously entail expanding the Collection Builder site to contain more videos, and I’ll have to develop codes and familiarity with rhetorically analyzing the artistic elements of the ads. Many have speculated as to the use of AI in HGU to produce the images, but HGU and other sources have claimed that the images are real and AI art simply copies their style (Growcoot). As much of my theoretical foundation comes from Cobb’s extension of Malraux’s theory of religion fading from Western art, I think I’ll need to develop more familiarity with what exactly that means, and how to discuss it.

I’d like to include some of the articles HGU publishes on their website. I’ve already started collecting some response videos from conservative YouTube channels like Matt Walsh, Glenn Beck, and the Daily Wire, and some more complex responses like Lecrae’s defense of the campaign. This process will also require me to identify more appeals and circle back to older videos looking for these emergent codes. Furthermore, I plan for the site to include the Communalytic data, spreadsheets, sentiment analysis, and topic clusters. I expect to run into an issue with the amount that can be hosted on Github, but I’m not too concerned at this time. Building out this infrastructure will be a lot of labor, but I expect that this project will become my thesis, so I’m not too worried about it.

Once I have more of a grasp on what each video is doing, and the rhetorical appeals that HGU uses, I plan to align specific appeals in each video to the sentiments present in the comments section. So far, without the necessary removal of outliers, all of the HGU videos I’ve run through Communalytic have had positive sentiment. The interesting connection here, though, is in the much higher positivity on the less viewed videos. My running theory is that people who search out Christian media, i.e. people who are already Christian, have a positive response to the videos. I want to do more specific analysis of this trend to see if it is true, what strategies are most correlated to positive sentiment and try to quantify who these videos are reaching. That would necessarily entail combing through the comments to label those who identify themselves. Again, more laborious work, but it could produce interesting results.

I think the final element of this analysis will be in long form interviews with people within and without the community of Evangelical Christians. I’m concerned about this part,as I am not a member of this community, and much has been made of the issues of identification of Evangelicals (Cope and Ringer). Given my positionality relative to the community, I am concerned both with my access, and my ability to build and maintain the connections necessary to do this work ethically. It may be easier to simply interview Christians and non-Christians from multiple denominations and ask about their perception of HGU. Because of the socio-cultural associations with the term Evangelical, asking for a self-identified population of Evangelical Christians would limit the pool of available participants, but it seems wrong to apply the label to them post hoc.

This issue is what Cope and Ringer discuss in their chapter “Coming to Troubled Terms.” They decided to use a layered definition of Evangelical that “prioritizes conversionism , the understanding of conversion as a personal experience that that significantly transforms each Christian’s life; biblicism , the premise that the Bible is the ultimate authority for Christian living; activism , the impulse to spread and enact faith through relief/social work; and crucicentrism, a focus on the substitutionary death of Christ.” This definition follows typically accepted uses of Evangelical, but Cope and Ringer went different directions in their application of it. Where Ringer used his insider positionality to contact congregations that followed these Evangelical practices, and then used the participant affiliation to apply the label, Cope sent an email to a population of students. While she initially wanted to follow a self-identification model, and in some sense did, she initially used the term “faith” and then, when appropriate, asked the participants to identify their beliefs.

I think this model would be best for the research I’m interested in. Like Cope, using more open terms like “faith” would expand my population to a wider audience, avoid hang ups with labels, and allow me to more comfortably maintain my outsider status. Her model of discussing labels, after a genuine connection has been made with the participants, helps maintain their agency in their identity, and actually led to more fruitful analysis. That is, by empowering the participants to identify themselves, Cope made the participants feel like contributors, leading to deeper introspection and contributions. For example, one participant appreciated Cope’s hesitance to apply the label:

Ultimately, Ember identified as an evangelical because she shared Emily’s desire to revise scholarly constructions of evangelicals; she was willing to participate as an insider because she wanted her voice to be heard. Recruiting ambivalent evangelicals takes time, sensitivity, and the willingness to let participants go rather than pressuring them to self-identify. However, because Ember pushes the limits of received definitions of evangelical, the rewards of recruiting participants like her are rich. When participants willingly negotiate the labels they resist, they contribute to our understanding of the diversity within identity categories (117).

I think this is the best model for my research. Considering additional issues of identification and association between Evangelical and MAGA since the 2016 election (Smith)(Burge), I am concerned with self-identification, but I think maintaining the agency of participants is a priority in this case. Personally, in this model of identification, I would feel more comfortable listening and coming to terms with a population of potentially hateful people if I maintain a respect to their labels, beliefs, and positionality, even as I don’t condone or adopt those beliefs.

All that being said, I’m not comfortable drafting the interview protocols or any of that for several reasons. Mainly, I’m at such an early stage of this research, I don’t really know what trends, codes, or audiences will emerge as relevant. The vast majority of my work so far has been in the data collection sphere, that I don’t really know if there is anything interesting that will come out of it. Also, as an outsider to the main community that I’m interested in working with, I feel that I at least need to build some connection to the community and develop some framework for reciprocity. I don’t think I’m approaching this work with some kind of critical eye but considering the growing anti-intellectualism among the conservative right, I think I should first develop protocols to make my participants feel comfortable. Mainly though, I just don’t know what I’m looking for, and I’m out of time to figure that out.

 

Works Cited

Burge, Ryan. “Why ‘evangelical’ Is Becoming Another Word for ‘Republican.’” The New York Times, The New York Times, 26 Oct. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/opinion/evangelical-republican.html?searchResultPosition=1.

Cobb, John B. Christ in a Pluralistic Age. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1999.

Cooper, Michael T., and Matthew S. Harbour. “The Jesus of” He Gets Us”: Sorting out our Christology.” Journal of the Evangelical Missiological Society 3.1 (2023): 1-19.

Crick, Nathan, and Andre Johnson. “CONFRONTATIONAL AND INTERSECTIONAL RHETORIC Black Lives Matter and the Shutdown of the Hernando De Soto (I-40) Bridge.” The Rhetoric of Social Movements: Networks, Power, and New Media, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, New York, 2021.

Einstein, Mara and Edward Timke. “He Gets Us: How Marketers and Religion Evangelize.” Advertising & Society Quarterly, vol. 24 no. 1, 2023. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/asr.2023.a898061.

Einstein, Mara and Edward Timke. “He Gets Us: How Marketers and Religion Evangelize.” Advertising & Society Quarterly, vol. 24 no. 1, 2023. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/asr.2023.a898061.

Einstein, Mara. Brands of Faith: Marketing Religion in a Commercial Age. Routledge, 2008.

Featherstone, Liza. “The Jesus of Tonight’s Super Bowl Ads Can’t Be Found in Right-Wing Churches.” Jacobin, 2 Dec. 2023, jacobin.com/2023/02/super-bowl-jesus-far-right-politics-christian-ads.

hegetsus.com and on YouTube–all articles and videos can be found on Collection Builder site: https://michaelmoran14.github.io/HGU/

Johnson, Andre. The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition. Lexington, 2012.

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Appeals in Modern Rhetoric: An Ordinary-Language Approach. Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.

Mapping Christian Rhetorics : Connecting Conversations, Charting New Territories, edited by Michael-John DePalma, and Jeffrey M. Ringer, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utk/detail.action?docID=1813168.

Ringer, J. M. (2016). Creating deliberate conversation: The rhetorical possibilities of vernacular religious creativity. Vernacular Christian Discourse: The Religious Creativity of Evangelical Student Writers, p. 36-53. Routledge

Shore, Daniel. “WWJD? The Genealogy of a Syntactic Form.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 37, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1–25. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1086/656466. Accessed 12 Dec. 2024.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Belknap Press, 2007