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A metaphoric analysis of the Christian identity rhetoric of Pastor Pete Peters

Pastor Pete Peters is a minister in La Porte, Colorado. He operates a small church, an Internet website, a newsletter, and a worldwide cassette tape ministry. He teaches Christian Identity, the belief that the white race is Israel of the Bible. His rhetoric contains open derision of Jews, homosexuals, and racial minorities, although he never openly advocates violence toward any group. After tracing the roots of the Christian Identity movement and reviewing the literature on the movement, this thesis examines Peters' rhetoric at the metaphoric level, analyzing the metaphors in four of Peters' key works for their underlying meaning. Metaphoric criticism as a method of rhetorical analysis is introduced and then applied to the metaphors extracted from America the Conquered, Baal Worship, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, and Whores Galore. These books, all by Peters, employ his metaphor of Jews corrupting the United States government and attempting to destroy white Christians through media, courts, and banking, of which Peters asserts they control. Through extracting and analyzing the metaphors in the four books, it was found that Peters does more than warn against corrupt systems: through metaphor and Biblical parallels, he subversively condones and nearly commands violence against Jews, homosexuals, and the government.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:pacific.edu/oai:scholarlycommons.pacific.edu:uop_etds-3622
Date01 January 1999
CreatorsChampagne, Brian Alan
PublisherScholarly Commons
Source SetsUniversity of the Pacific
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceUniversity of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations

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