Publication Date
Spring 2016
Advisor(s) - Committee Chair
Angela M. Jerome (Director), Holly J. Payne, and Helen Sterk
Degree Program
Department of Communication
Degree Type
Master of Arts
Abstract
Ideology is a powerful means of persuasion in contemporary audience appeals. Through the means of ideographic and fragmentary analyses provided by Michael Calvin McGee (1980, 1990) and Saindon (2008), I examine the rhetorical appeals made by the Liberty Counsel, an evangelical Christian organization, which provides legal counsel for cases regarding “religious liberty.” Through an ideographic and fragmentary analysis, I conclude that the Counsel utilizes the ideograph as a superseding means of denoting its ideology. Further, I argue that is the ideograph that represents the ontological nature of the organization’s philosophy and serves as the guiding principle for many of the other ideographs that the organization employs. Further, the ideograph displays relative influence for the Liberty Counsel with and from other organizations, as illustrated when is compared to competing ideologies, such as that from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The importance of the ideograph is incumbent upon its utility in understanding a “snapshot” of the rhetorical situation. Rather than attempting to draft ideological archetypes, as the initial ideographic form attempted, this new ideographic form accepts the relativistic cultural influences and accounts for them synchronically.
Disciplines
Communication | Critical and Cultural Studies | Organizational Communication | Speech and Rhetorical Studies
Recommended Citation
Chick, Daniel M., "The Liberty Counsel's : An Ideographic Analysis" (2016). Masters Theses & Specialist Projects. Paper 1591.
https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1591
Included in
Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Organizational Communication Commons, Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons