ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 provides a condensed account of several linguistic traces of cold-war-specific religious language. The “gap” thus discovered does not so much cut through party lines as through time as it isolates the Cold War rhetoric from other eras and shows how specific such rhetoric is in its exploitation—by both parties—of a religiously laden rhetorical arsenal against godless Communism. Although primarily time-specific, this Cold War religious rhetoric is further explored in Chapter 2 for potential traces of party- and/or candidate-specific features. Whilst a few traces of more idiosyncratic features are discovered and further discussed, the main conclusion of Chapter 2 is that of a religiously laden language used by both parties as an ecumenical call of sorts to fight against godless Communism. This Cold War religious rhetoric is further discussed for what it can bring to our understanding of more recent trends. More specifically, it helps call into question the way some media outlets interpreted the language that George W. Bush had used to sell the U.S.-led “war on terror”. Likewise, the analyses conducted on the religiously laden Cold War rhetoric serve to qualify the depiction by scholarly work of the term crusade as the product of a fairly modern electoral strategy and a term mostly representative of George W. Bush’s rhetoric.
