The capitalist Christ of the Word of Life Church's unlimited women's magazine: an intertextual and interdiscursive analysis

Abstract

"Unlimited” is a quarterly publication of the Word of Life Church women's ministry that was examined from a perspective of intertextuality and interdiscursivity. The paper focuses on the magazine's editorial article in order to characterise its discourse and its persuasive value. It concludes that the editorial was dominated by a capitalist voice. This probably reflects the church's concept of prosperity, a key theme of Modern African Pentecostal teaching. The paper further concludes that Christian discourse (Biblical teaching) was used as a vessel to persuasively convey capitalist principles to the audience. The magazine's text is thus characterised by the hybridity in which the central agenda of fostering a capitalist mindset was couched in Biblical text. This hybridity was clearly discernible in terms of explicit intertextuality and interdiscursivity. The former introduced Biblical text into the article while the latter developed capitalist principles. It is a case of stuffing Christ's mouth with capitalist discourse.