Deific Figures and Human Bodies: Creating Hierarchies of Difference through the Incarnation of Moral Authority

Religious communities have long affirmed the agency of their sacred texts and their God/gods, providing a unique site of study for research on ventriloquizing authority (Jahn, J. L. S. (2016). Adapting safety rules in a high reliability context: How wildland firefighting workgroups ventriloquize safety rules to understand hazards. Management Communication Quarterly, 30(3), 362–389. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318915623638), textual agency (Cooren, F. (2004). Textual agency: How texts do things in organizational settings. Organization, 11(3), 373–393. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508404041998), and the power of incorporeal figures like values or principles (Cooren, F. (2012). Communication theory at the center: Ventriloquism and the communicative constitution of reality. Journal of Communication, 62(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01622.x). This paper uses PraiseMoves, an Evangelical  organization selling a “Christian alternative to yoga,” as a case study to develop the concept of deific agency. Deific agency is the agential power of incorporeal projections of moral authority. These projections mediate text-human relationships both in and beyond particular organizational contexts by imbuing visibly-privileged human bodies with moral authority. Deific figures can thus overwhelm textual agency by bonding with visibly-privileged bodies and thereafter organizing perceptions of moral authority in and beyond organizations in ways that disproportionately benefit physically-privileged human beings. This paper concludes by articulating the value of believing bodies for research and suggesting future avenues of inquiry.