Search Results
Abstract
This chapter analyze the religious rhetoric that has informed the theoconservative ideology in the United States since the late 1970s. Initially developed by Richard John Neuhaus and Michael Novak, theoconservatism has progressively claimed the country’s political system, economics, law, and government. Its ascent to political prominence under the G. W. Bush administration was to a great extent due to the systematic nature of its underlying corporeal model, its assiduously crafted subversive rhetorical construct, and its strategic reliance on the performative force of its divinely backed claim to truth – the very features that once had made Pauline discourse into a law-giving form of practice. The theoconservative body-of-Christ seems, moreover, to fulfill the same function of identitarian resistance to the tendency of discursive dissemination enhanced by digital networks, while fully exploiting the advantages of the new media system.