Leveraging Political Messaging with Religious Resonance: A Transitivity Analysis Of the Easter Address of a Ghanaian President
Frederick Asante 
, Osei Yaw Akoto & James Gyimah Manu
Issue: Vol.6 No.5 Issue Article 13 pp. 536 – 549
DOI: https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.20256513 | Published online 17th April, 2025
© 2025 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Religion and politics are inextricably connected through shared values, institutional influence, and historical relationships, culminating in what can be described as politics in religion and religion in politics. During key religious festivities, political actors deliver messages to the members of the religious community. Thus, the present study employed a Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) approach to examine the transitivity choices in the 2021 Easter speech by former President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo (PNADAA) to reveal the interplay between political messaging and religious resonance. By employing the transitivity pattern of process and participants, the study showed how PNADAA revealed his political and religious ideologies. Material clauses were used to address pressing concerns while at the same time resonating with shared religious beliefs around the themes of hope and the principle of compassion, commitment, and communal welfare. Verbal and relational clauses were used to engender rapport and credibility with the Christian community while echoing religiously inspired motifs of renewal and redemption. With echoes from the religious concepts of faith, perseverance, and endurance, the mental clauses were employed to acknowledge the challenging times while the existential clauses simultaneously blended the religious themes of health and life preservation with the government’s commitment to safeguarding public safety during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The study has implications for theorizing the interconnection among discourse, politics, and religion.
Keywords: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), political discourse, religious discourse, Easter speech, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
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Frederick Asante is a PhD student at the Department of English, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana. He holds MPhil and BA in English. His research interests cover topics ESP, Political Discourse, Critical Discourse Analysis.
Osei Yaw Akoto (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana. He teaches courses in English for Academic Purposes, Sociolinguistics, Discourse Studies, and Pragmatics. His research interests include Linguistic Landscape, Onomastics, Corpus Linguistics and Academic Discourse. He is the Founding President of Ghana Name Society. He has published articles in high-ranking journals such as Onoma, International Journal of Multilingualism, Corpus Pragmatics and Linguistic Landscape.
James Gyimah Manu is a Lecturer at the Department of English, Faculty of Social Sciences, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana. He holds MPhil and BA in English from KNUST and currently on a PhD programme in Language and Literacy Education at the Department of Teacher Education, KNUST. He teaches courses such as Language and Communication, History of the English Language, and Communication Skills. His research interests cover topics in the areas of Language Policy and Planning, Stylistics, Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics. He has had some research papers published in reputable journals across the globe. Currently, his research is focused on issues in language policy and planning in Ghana.
Asante, Frederick, Osei Yaw Akoto and James Gyimah Manu. “Leveraging Political Messaging with Religious Resonance: A Transitivity Analysis of the Easter Address of a Ghanaian President,” E-Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences 6, no.5 (2025): 536 – 549. https://doi.org/10.38159/ehass.20256517
© 2025 The Author(s). Published and Maintained by Noyam Journals. This is an open access article under the CCBY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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