Hate Speeches and Social Actors' Representations in Selected Nigerian Pentecostal Sermons

The motivation for this study was borne out of the researchers' desire to investigate how Pentecostal clerics use language to describe other citizens – pastors, government agents or politicians in a bid to defame, discredit or de-market them. It is an attempt to linguistically assess the menace of hate speeches and how these divisive and inflammatory rhetoric have heated the Nigerian Pentecostal space in recent times. The data sampled randomly for this work are expressions that contain hate speeches. The triangulated theoretical models of Wodak, van Dijk and Fairclough are synthesised for the discussion of the sampled hate remarks. To conclude on the hate speeches from Nigerian Pentecostal pastors using the perspectives of Norman Fairclough, Teun A. van Dijk, and Ruth Wodak, findings based on their frameworks are that language is both socially shaped and socially shaping. Textual analyses show the use of metaphors, binaries (e.g., "us vs them"), and dehumanising language in pastors' remarks to delegitimise other groups (e.g., traditionalists, muslims, LGBTQ + individuals). At the discursive practice level, hate speeches are shaped by and reproduce existing religious ideologies and power structures within the Pentecostal community. At the social practice level, such speeches reinforce broader patterns of exclusion, intolerance, and moral panic in Nigerian society.